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I used to love Omni Graffle. But after spending a bit of time reading about their current product lineup, I can’t stop wondering why they didn’t transition to web apps years ago.

Notion, Figma and Whimsical are eating their lunch. They have a far less robust feature base, but they’re fast, built for teams, simple to use and the pricing scales well.

On the other hand, Omni is almost entirely native apps, bloated feature sets and pricing that spent make sense in a team environment.

I’d love to see them rethink a few core apps with a fresh coat of paint and a better pricing scheme, developing web first. It’s definitely not too late.

12 comments

I don't know if I'm an outlier here, but to me the Omni Group is/was almost like an extension of Apple themselves. Like with Panic's or CultureCode's applications, they just work in the way a seasoned Mac user would expect. They fit into both the look and feel of the Apple ecosystem and support all integrations you would expect.

Of course the market for high-quality Apple only software is small. But I think they would be even less competitive and successful if they pivoted to the Web.

It would be almost like suggesting Microsoft drop their desktop Office applications and just focus on Office365.

“ almost like suggesting Microsoft drop their desktop Office applications and just focus on Office365”

Not sure if you’re experience is different, but this seems to be exactly what they’re doing. Outlook windows app is buggy and terrible. Outlook 365 is great.

Excel is the only app better on native then web.

And OneNote 2016, I hate the web/app version. Outlook has always been a bizarre mess, it is the only application I have seen with a 'cancel server request' because it has stopped responding. 17 years later (I think since office 2003), it is now needed on every Office desktop app because of horrible lag interacting with OneDrive/SharePoint. I've actually installed LibreOffice because I can't stand the shitty performance. In 1997, MS Word opened in about 3 seconds on a fast PC, and now it is an ordeal.

I have spent a lot of time using GTD and trying to find the right software for me. Omnifocus is always at the top of GTD software lists but I'm stuck on Windows and would love to have a windows option.

I saw lots of discussions of this back in the day, when the GTD cult (I kid) was really in ascendance. All the really good implementations I saw, though, were Mac tools.

There ARE some options that are text-based, I think. And if you really want and are nerdy enough, you can do it in OrgMode. But I dunno what nice polished native apps exist for Windows.

That's what they were, when Apple cultivated "insanely great" products.

> I can’t stop wondering why they didn’t transition to web apps years ago.

As someone who depends very heavily on OmniFocus, this would be an absolute wreck for me. I depend on my todo lists being available to me offline, and the idea of having to deal with the clunkiness of even a modern, high quality web app for something I use so fast and so regularly is horrid. And, yes, I find VSCode clunky compared to a real native app.

I won't use web apps unless there is no other choice.

I don't want my data in the cloud, I don't want perpetual subscriptions even if my usage dwindles. I don't want big price increases when the provider is bought out and I'm locked in. I want a rich interface which matches the platform. I want decent performance. I want to work offline. I don't want third parties to have access to and sell my data.

Web apps have always been inferior to mobile or desktop apps. Sluggish, less featured and dependent on the network at least part of the time.

Moving to the web would be a downgrade for most of their products. Maybe OmniPlan could be some on premise SaaS, but otherwise it doesn't make sense.

And Omni truly crafts native apps. Really sad to see them struggle, I used their software for about 5 years, but had to go back to Windows. Outanding quality, maybe Apple ahould have them consult on MacOS...

My take is that their core expertise is in the Apple ecosystem (from the earliest days), and a pivot to web would require major hiring efforts (effectively fire most of the people and hire a bunch of web devs). That's not really the company culture as I knew it, and I think that most folks are probably happy to ride this one into the sunset than try to rebuild the entire business.

I've used omnigraffle on and off for 15 years. I can't quite put my finger on it, but something about the UI seems to shout "Mac OS" (or maybe more accurately Cocoa).

Cross platform support is important to me.

Sure maybe Web is clunky. But I find that being able to access applications from anywhere just trumps that concern.

I moved from Bear to Notion and Sketch to Figma for that reason.

Re "Notion, Figma and Whimsical", are any of these companies profitable?

UPDATE: Whimsical mentions being profitable as of May last year https://whimsical.com/blog/on-the-path-to-sustainability I’m definitely still curious about the other two.

Notion has been profitable since at least early 2019 (the company's statements have been a little unclear about when they reached profitability; it might have been late 2018).

The whole value proposition of the company is that their stuff is better than web apps because it uses NextStep/Mac UI components.

A web app would be clunky and use 2GB RAM

I like the fact that they make and sell things. They don't insinuate themselves into your life and force everything into the cloud and their website.

It would be really really hard to get omnifocus to be as performant in web app form as a native app

Agreed. The future of productivity apps is on the web. Pretty soon the only category of apps that will have to be native is heavy multi media apps like video editors and digital auto workstations.

That was supposed to happen any moment now for the past 10+ years. The reason it didn't is because web apps are clunky and less dependable.

It's happening right now as the original article shows. Web apps are eating native's lunch with a few exceptions and that list of exceptions just keeps getting shorter. The web is good enough now to build most of these apps and getting cross platform support more or less for free along with making it much easier to build in collaboration features turns out to more important than the advantages of any particular native toolkit might be for most cases.

The only native app I use anymore is a digital audio workstation. Deny it all you like but the trend is unmistakable. Even Sketch has been sidelined by Figma where I work now.

The original article shows that one company let some people go and a couple more developers have been affected by the current crisis.

For some apps collaboration or centralized control are important and those lend themselves well to web technologies. For others (like the Omni apps), said collaboration and getting mediocre cross platform for free are not as important.