By Victor Uzochukwu
Until now, Web, mobile, and desktop applications have been believed to operate on completely different planes, each having its own technology stack, development process, performance, and method of deployment. This implied redundant work, disjointed experiences, and scaling engineering resources to keep up with each new platform.
With experience on developing large applications on web, mobile, and desktop platforms for the last five years, I can say that this kind of segmentation has hindered innovations more than technology.
The technology sector is currently witnessing a paradigm shift because there is a blending of these platforms into one layer applications because of frameworks that view portability from a design perspective. This is being spurred not only by the availability of cross-platform toolkits that merely “bridge” these platforms but also by a paradigm shift on how applications are conceptualized and interacted with.
Cross-platform development generally involved shallow abstractions. Cordova, Xamarin, and similar platforms were supposed to provide similar development experiences but ended up offering something limited by the lowest common denominator.
The technology involved working with slow runtime bridges, poor UI rendering, and limited native app APIs. These technologies eliminated duplicated work but imposed technical debt. A company could be proud to successfully launch on the web and on mobile simultaneously but struggled with extending such shared code bases.
These are experiences that I have personally faced during my early days as an engineer. Dealing with four repos to handle one product requires dealing with four sets of bugs, four CIs, and four streams to release. Since they handled similar functionality, it did not feel like one experience to me. The largest shift during this last decade is to shift to unified platforms rather than cross-platform. This includes having one rendering engine, one set of components, one exe logic, and one source to compile.
The modern toolkits such as Flutter, .NET MAUI, and other comprehensive stacks such as React+Tauri, UI built with Rust, and more innovative approaches to WASM-native technology have led to this paradigm shift. These toolkits are more than mere wrappers but rather complete app runtime engines that can provide native app experiences on multiple platforms with a single choice of design. This is not about sidestepping native app development but rather advancing native app development to a level where innovations occur faster and experiences are consistent.
An example of such paradigm-shifting technology is WebAssembly, which is abbreviated WASM. The WASM technology has allowed space to browsers to function like universal runtime environments, which enables running Rust, C#, Dart, and Go applications at native speeds within a paradigm originally developed to execute applications like JavaScript.
This indicates that applications running on desktop computers, calculation-intense tooling apps, finance applications, and virtualization applications can also execute within browsers without any plugins and desktop installers.
The project that I undertook recently involved setting up features that work on a desktop app utilizing Electron, a mobile PWA, and a responsive web dashboard, which were fuelled by one executable logical layer compiled into WASM. This reduced bugs and ensured that there was a faster time-to-market due to each enhancement being deployed on each environment at once.
The mobile sector has significantly raised the bar concerning UX. The smoothness of animations, GPU-based transitions, and small app sizes have challenged framework developers to build rendering engines capable enough to rival native applications on both Android and iOS. To put this into perspective, Flutter uses Skia to paint each pixel on screen, which gives developers complete control over this layer, including access to platform widgets.
This results in one source code being capable of running on both iOS, Android, web, and desktop platforms. These trends have also influenced other ecosystems, to the point that web-born technologies themselves have moved on to compiled UIs and unified rendering. The result is a merging of performance optimizations, which were originally developed on mobile but are currently being ported to other platforms.
Desktop applications have also seen a similar rise to prominence within the applications with a unified-code base. Though applications developed via Electron led this pack, Tauri and MAUI are relatively newer options that are lightweight, secure, and faster.
On several business applications, I developed desktop applications which share more than 90% similarities with both mobile and web applications. As opposed to native toolkits on operating systems like macOS, Windows, and Linux, we focused on experience, security aspects, and offline access because our architecture is already unified. Desktop applications have not disappeared.
They actually developed into multi-platform engines.The integration of platforms is also shaping the engineers’ culture, besides technological developments. The development teams collaborate on shared development cycles such as One CI/CD pipeline, and One blueprint/model design.
A Single Budget For Shared Performances
This source of truth helps to avoid consistency problems and any kind of fragmentation which could happen within other approaches to cross-platform development. As a leader, I emphasize design tokens which are agnostic to any platform, state management independent, and contracts on backend. The engineers no longer think about “web vs. mobile vs. desktop,” they think about “experience surfaces.” This helps to build applications that can dynamically adapt to any device rather than building multiple versions for a single product.
The paradigm of unified platforms will define the next decade of software development because of these reasons: First, they will cut down on engineering costs. They can focus on innovation and speed to features because they no longer have to put emphasis on dealing with three platform teams.
Second, there is a shift in the nature of user expectations on matters pertaining to continuity. A business activity can commence on a smartphone, continue on a laptop, and conclude on a browser available on an Internet-ready PC. This can happen only when there is a converged app architecture.
Finally, the global community of developers is moving towards a paradigm shift called portability. WASM, UI ecosystems on Rust, desktop functionality on Flutter, and integration on React native to desktop indicate that there is no looking back to what there was previously. The old divisions no longer exist. There is one code base to be executed on multiple surfaces.
