Comment by willtemperley

Web is much better when the data should be public. Apps are much better when any kind of data privacy is required.

The trouble is, market forces always try and push things the other way.

The Reddit App for example is totally unnecessary. It's just public web content and should be a website.

SaaS on the other hand shouldn't really be a thing at all. I have no idea why anyone thinks it's a good idea for their private data and app state to be on a cloud somewhere they don't control.

Note that this does not preclude the use of cloud services that users can control e.g. by specifiying trusted endpoints. I'm trying to build the idea of "data locality first" software. I.e. you know where your data are and where they aren't.