Why don't sites like Facebook offer desktop clients?

Question

Random thought: It seems like with modern browsers, ad blocking, tracking blocking, etc, Facebook and similar are losing lots of ad revenue.Wouldn't it make sense then to also make desktop clients and to push traffic from the browser to the desktop client. Sort of similar to Reddit's annoying push to drive mobile traffic to their app.(Some people get all their internet from Facebook, it sort of goes back to the AOL internet portal days.)

smt88 · Accepted Answer

Desktop apps wouldn't solve ad-blocking unless the companies simultaneously crippled their web experience (like reddit has done). Someone savvy enough to block ads would know the desktop app stops them from doing it, so they wouldn't switch over.Also, Google already did this. It's called Chrome. They cleverly started it out as a better browser that allowed all extensions, and they've transitioned it into a browser that favors Google ads and makes it harder to block ads in general (compared to Firefox anyway).

Nextgrid · Answer

Their target market uses mobile clients for the most part; I assume it isn't worth the time & effort of developing a desktop client to be used by a very minor portion of their userbase.

jetti · Answer

Supporting desktop can get tricky if something goes wrong. You need to be able to support multiple operating systems as well as multiple versions of those operating systems.

nradov · Answer

Facebook used to offer a free Windows client through the Microsoft store. But it was essentially just a web browser locked to one site. They removed it a few months ago.

duxup · Answer

Most of their traffic I suspect is mobile, I don't think that will change even if another desktop option is available.So the amount of effort to maintain a desktop client(s) now becomes a big hassle if nobody is using it.