In this specific case, web apps may be very suited as I guess a major usecase is sharing images with other people, and just sharing a link is much easier than having them (say a grandparent with limited technical skills or a one off share with a friend of a friend) installing an application which may not even exist for their device
A link can also be a link to a mountable fuse fs share, like webdav/sshfs/9P etc and the other side can simply browse content not with a specific UI but with it's own favorite UI.
If we rediscover the classic Plan 9 idea of anything is a stream on a network we can create our OWN web on our desktop, choosing what to cache locally, what to sync etc, in a far more powerful, simple, resilient and flexible way.
A small example: we have since decades OFX feeds for financial operations. Why instead of spending gazillion of resources to build and keep up web-banking porcals (portals are another kind of beasts) when we can just give customers credentials and relevant links and the customer operate on a simple XML stream with his/shes favorite tool, with anything in a single place, it's style, automation, ... Perhaps because of surveillance capitalism?
