the web app directory

Great web apps are hard to come by.

It takes either a small, dedicated team or a very focused company to do all the work into making something that feels as good as a native app, while working withing the constraints of the web.

And then, to make something that respects the user.

are.na

Are.na self-describes as:

  • online software for saving and organizing the content that is important to you
  • a toolkit for assembling new worlds from the scraps of the old

People describe Are.na as "playlists, but for ideas" or an "Internet memory palace."

Originally built and run by one guy, it's managed to retain the quality of it's user's and curations over time, making it the best mainstream-ish curation site on the internet. While being paid for by enough users to be sustainable.

Craft

Started out as a personal notes app, doubled down on that goal while maintaining a really high bar for careful design and excellent frontend engineering. (perfectly-choreographed animations, fairly performant, custom sync, and works surprisingly well across device sizes).

Readwise

Read-it-later app for...power users of read-it-later apps, I suppose. They did the hard work to make aggregation "just work" across websites, PDFs, Youtube, etc. and added every other feature you could think of on top. They're very proud of their annotation feature, which works across all those media formats.

The local-first web app ( uses RxDB) shows that they take performance seriously. And the experience across the whole app is noticeably good (keyboard shortcuts, full-text search, multi-pane reading, etc).

tldraw

This is one of those "you need to use it to understand it" apps because it doesn't look like much. And the details make so much of a difference it's hard to convey the quality from the list of features alone. But I'll try anyway:

The arrows stick to the shape you attach them to, there's a wonderful minimap, realtime sync (just send an edit link to anyone), the subtle hand-drawn style (each shape is a different outline stroke!), the list of shapes is perfect for whiteboarding, the smoothness of the pen tool, etc. etc.

Linear

"Issue tracking you’ll enjoy using" is a very apt description. I once called it a "todo app built by adults" and an employee agreed with me. There is an unreasonable (bordering on parody) amount of effort put into this software by some very talented people.

And it shows.

Their custom sync engine is their most famous feature, and it is rather good — one of the only ones to allow truly offline usage. But the keyboard-first design is also excellent, each feature seems carefully considered, and their zero bugs policy actually feels like a real commitment.

Figma

Enough has been said about the technology that makes up this app: the WebGL renderer, world-class SVG editor, custom binary file format, multiplayer sync engine, and great interaction design across the app as a whole.

You can read about almost everything on Evan Wallace's site, who seems to be responsible for all of it.

Spline

Another impressive entry in the category of "stuffing a custom rendering engine into the browser", Spline is a visual editor for making 3D modes and and adding interaction to them. And of course, it has realtime collaboration.

That's it, I think that sounds impressive enough.

Kinopio

Built by one guy, who worked on everything from the idiosyncratic (charming, honestly) design, the custom sync engine, the canvas and all it's interactions, and continues to chip away at it years later.

A labour of love, really.