The most interesting question in GIS software right now is not "which desktop package?" but "why a desktop at all?" No company embodies that thesis more completely than Felt, whose 2025 was a case study in how fast browser-first GIS is maturing.
Felt's 2025, in three releases
In July, the company shipped Felt AI, which turns a natural-language prompt into a complete interactive spatial application — auto-generating the SQL "JOIN statements, spatial functions, and filtering logic" along the way — and claims it "cuts deployment times by 75%" [1]. The same month, Felt raised $15 million specifically "to transform enterprise GIS with AI" [4].
A month earlier, Felt had landed in the AWS Marketplace with one-click deployment that connects directly to PostgreSQL, RDS, Redshift, and S3 — "from storage to maps, apps or interactive spatial dashboards without provisioning tile servers" [2]. And in November came the missing piece for field crews: a Field App for iOS and Android with custom surveys, GPS tracing, geotagged photos, and real-time sync [3], with offline mode following in August 2026 [4].
The pattern behind the product news
Strip away the branding and the browser-first pitch is consistent: no installs to manage, no per-seat desktop licenses, collaboration as a default rather than an export, and the cloud data warehouse as the system of record. The momentum has continued into 2026 — Felt's blog archive lists an MCP server for AI agents (April) and AI raster analysis (September) [4] — pointing at a future where spatial tools are as much for AI agents as for humans.
Where we stand
Full disclosure: we are believers. GeoidLife's own free tools — coordinate transformation, georeferencing, spatial analysis — run entirely in the browser, with your data never leaving your device. The desktop GIS isn't dying; for heavy cartography and enterprise editing it remains unmatched. But the set of tasks that require it shrinks every quarter, and 2025–2026 is when the browser stopped being the compromise option.