I get the feeling if someone says "I want a cross platform app that does X", my stock response is often going to be "webapp, dude". I also suspect many people may find that annoying, and only consider desktop software to be real software.
Should we encourage users to always state clearly if a webapp is ok, or whether they require something installable?
I strongly expect it'll be just about a standard comment on any unclear question...
Encourage? Absolutely. That can only lead to more clear, answerable questions.
Require? No. That would excessive, especially considering that some people really don't care.
It might be a good idea to create tags to clarify this, eg desktop-software or webapp, but as with all tags (excepting the meta-tags of course) they should remain optional.
It has been my experience that the more experienced members of the site will always tend to indicate the type of software they're comfortable using (webapp etc) but that new users will always tend towards not having a clue what they want.
Therefore, it is my suggestion/guidance that this clarification is best left where all clarification goes, in the comments.
Invite people to ask questions, build a community that fosters helping them get good answers. Don't impose "thou shalt only ask questions of a given nature in a certain way, or risk my lightning and wrath".
Guide people.
That's what we're here for.
Keep in mind that these questions are designed to help the original author, and anyone else with the same question. As long as:
.. then I think someone might just find and appreciate your answer. I don't think we should be getting that deep into what does or doesn't qualify as software when the difference in practice is marginal, we have more interesting challenges ahead of us.
I don't think so this should be a requirement.
Sometimes a web app is solves the question while a native app does not. Sometimes the user is looking for a native app but a web app is much more powerful and has all the requirements of what the user wants.
I don't see why native/webapp would matter in itself.
However offline can be important. If an application only works with an Internet connection, this is a stopper for some scenarios. This needs to be clearly indicated in requirements.
As already mentioned in some other answer if you need to work offline even the best webapp is complete nogo. If you a working on a PC without the rights to install any app but acces to internet then webapp is posibly the only solution and native is useles. So there are reasons to limit the question to one or an other thing, but making it a requrenment make not much sence. On a PC with both internet acces and rights necesary for instalation native or webapp can be a good solution. So defining if it should be native or webapp can be helpful, but not necesary.
