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Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

david.dev

191–200 of 441 posts

Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#191
post #8

The lesson here is write native apps using the preferred native tools of the platform, and avoid shortcut solutions.

The lesson here is apple will screw up their ecosystem enough that developers will start to leave. Was looking at building pretty involved app and evaluated SwiftUI vs Electron with React. The effort on SwiftUI side about 10x vs Electron/React Apple needs to invest in their tools.

Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#192

As a user I am glad. As is custom for all Electron discussions, someone must point out its flaws. Why the dislike, you ask? A picture is worth a thousand 64-bit words: https://imgur.com/a/XnCOHUD And mind you, GitHub Desktop is taking that much just for showing a mostly empty window! while Fork and Tower are displaying a lot more UI, more controls, trees, custom drawing, more text, and have overall more features (bes…

On Windows, Slack.exe would sometimes eat up so much memory that I'd run out entirely. I upgraded to 64GB of RAM so I could keep it open for work.

Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly do you miss a dependency?! If it's not your code, then it's a dependency that you need to look at.

Dependencies of your dependencies! Imagine installing a library that depends on a couple dozen libraries in its own right. You may not have time to inspect every single node in the dependency graph.

> Dependencies of your dependencies! Imagine installing a library that depends on a couple dozen libraries in its own right. You may not have time to inspect every single node in the dependency graph.

Excuse me, are you, the developer, telling me, a user, that you don't know what you're giving me to run on my computer?

Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Electron developers might say "we fixed it" and the app developer might resubmit based on that and now they're banned due to a mistake made by an upstream dependency. It's not like this app developer is intentionally using private APIs. "Resubmitting the same thing and hoping that it doesn't get caught" seems to be a strawman.

Hence why you should audit your third-party dependencies in cases like these.

I suspect that most devs don't do that. I can't imagine finding the time fir that.

Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#195

As a user I am glad. As is custom for all Electron discussions, someone must point out its flaws. Why the dislike, you ask? A picture is worth a thousand 64-bit words: https://imgur.com/a/XnCOHUD And mind you, GitHub Desktop is taking that much just for showing a mostly empty window! while Fork and Tower are displaying a lot more UI, more controls, trees, custom drawing, more text, and have overall more features (bes…

>Why the dislike, you ask? Nobody is asking that, there's a crowd in here that restates the same three points about memory, performance and native UI about once a week. I dislike waste, I have written assembly code for tiny processors. And yet, I run several Electron apps on my 8gb 2013 Macbook Air and it runs fine, especially VSCode. I am picking that over my previous choice which was native (vim), because I think i…

> there's a crowd in here that restates the same three points about memory, performance and native UI about once a week.

Where else would users complain about undesirable developer trends if not on a developers' community?

Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must be chugging the koolaid to believe developers LOVE Apple's policies, or enjoy getting their hard-work rejected by a bot, or getting shamed by an overzealous Apple employee on HN. Developers are homogeneously unappreciative of Apple's treatment of them. They just don't have any leverage, or opportunity to negotiate

Who are you going to blame when applications start breaking because Apple removes or changes the functionality of a private function? [1] without warning? When you are writing any software that has a public API you should feel no obligation to change the functionality or completely remove a private method without warning. [1] I refuse to call it a private API. An API is public documentation of the inputs and expected…

Blame the developer? Which is why, when an app breaks on the Mac store or app store, users pound the app with 1-star reviews. Even if the breakage happened from a platform (iOS or MacOs or Android) bug.

This is not Apple "watching out" for the developers, no matter how much you spin it

Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#198
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because in the past, developers have obfuscated their use of private APIs rather than removing them. They are threatening to ban people who abuse the platform. They aren't going to ban anyone making an honest effort to eliminate their use of private APIs.

Where as on Windows there is no such issue.

There's no issue here for a Mac either (this was for a submission for a macOS program). The problem was when submitting it to the Mac App Store.

Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly do you miss a dependency?! If it's not your code, then it's a dependency that you need to look at.

Have you never run maven, sbt, gradle on a Java project, or PHP compose or .. anything in node? There are so. Many. Dependencies in some of the frameworks people commonly use. It can get pretty insane. We all remember left-pad, right?

Lack of knowledge of your dependency tree isn't really an excuse here. If you're submitting your application to an App Store -- where one of the express purposes is that customers know the application is safe -- then having an unknown dependency is not really a good argument.

Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#200
post #21

Putting it together: This is about submitting an app to the Mac App Store. Apple has had a requirement that apps not use private APIs for a while. It sounds like Chromium, and hence Electron have had references to some private APIs for a while, but Apple has only recently started enforcing their requirement. (Or perhaps only recently started scanning for these particular APIs.) It’s a little painful for the developer…

> This is about submitting an app to the Mac App Store.

Indeed, and the article's title is confusingly wrong, as "Apple Store" refers to Apple's retail and online store that sells hardware.

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