This is a great point, but also orthogonal to the tech/platform choice. One can still develop a front-end using web tech which connects to a localhost server (see for example Google Refine -- which runs a localhost web server). It may make packaging and distribution it tad more annoying, but there are tools that can do this, and then you get the benefit of cross-platform adoption -- as well as the option to make it a hosted service, if desired.
> a front-end using web tech which connects to a localhost server
But what advantage does that offer over a native application? You’d then need a ‘native’ web server and would still rely on the local browser in a way that opens you up to more incompatibilities than just using the native interface framework?
Assuming you are really a one-man team, you’d still have to set up the web server, database etc., which I imagine to be somewhat cumbersome on an ‘unknown’ platform.
An interesting usecase would be a LAN-local server, which would (with server-side data processing) avoid the slow uploading of data over the internet and could still utilise native computation speeds on the server.
