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Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

david.dev

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Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#241

Post by ajxs »

kristiandupont wrote: post #184
Razengan wrote: post #18

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…

Not every developer runs a Macbook. Like many others for my laptop I use Linux running on a cheap ThinkPad with a quarter of the specs of the one you mentioned. ( I could afford to buy an overpriced Macbook, but I like my rugged $100 ThinkPad. ) As I stated elsewhere in this thread, vscode absolutely chews up my battery power. That's a practical concern. If I run several Electron apps on my laptop I'd be lucky to get an entire commute's worth of battery life out of it.

Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#242

Post by lostmyoldone »

greggman2 wrote: post #202

It seems mostly reasonable to me for Apple to reject apps that use those features assuming their own apps have to obey the same rules. Unfortunately if you're popular they seem to let you bend the rules. AFAICT Slack has not been rejected and I believe Slack is electron based. The issue is in Chromium. I have no idea if removing the API usage will be easy or hard but it's been https://github.com/electron/electron/iss…

Their own apps certainly isn't following the same rules, newer have, and probably never will unless forced by law. There probably are, and have been quite a feq things on any iPhone/Pad that only Apple apps can do. Although I don't have my ear that close to the ground, they seem to get more and more aggressive about protecting their turf in any way they can.

Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#243

Post by andykx »

belltaco wrote: post #227
cageface wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting out of iOS development and back into web dev was the best career decision I ever made. I feel like I escaped an abusive relationship. So much of what's wrong with computing and tech right now stems directly or indirectly from the culture at Apple.

It's funny how the general consensus on here is against Microsoft's abuse of private APIs in Windows to help Word and DOS against WordPerfect and DrDOS, 20+ years ago. But Apple doing it right now in a much worse way is considered acceptable and defendable.

This is a straw man argument. Who is making that point?

In general, I find the opinions on these things to be pretty consistent: the “free market” types tend to support Apple/MS - usually with some form of “its their platform” as an argument - and the FOSS types holding the opposite position.

Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#244

Post by ivan_gammel »

root_axis wrote: post #224
Scapeghost wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Is that a joke? Surely you aren't suggesting that developers should have full knowledge of all transitive dependencies that compose their application stack.

as CTO I know all the dependencies in the application stack of our company and I require developers to have sufficient understanding of their purpose, licensing model etc. There are tools to simplify this task. It’s much harder to do for TypeScript than for Java, mostly because NPM ecosystem is a huge pile of junk, but it’s still important part of developer's job.

Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#245

Post by [deleted] »

belltaco wrote: post #227
cageface wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting out of iOS development and back into web dev was the best career decision I ever made. I feel like I escaped an abusive relationship. So much of what's wrong with computing and tech right now stems directly or indirectly from the culture at Apple.

It's funny how the general consensus on here is against Microsoft's abuse of private APIs in Windows to help Word and DOS against WordPerfect and DrDOS, 20+ years ago. But Apple doing it right now in a much worse way is considered acceptable and defendable.

[deleted]

Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#246

Post by saagarjha »

throwGuardian wrote: post #201
saagarjha wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can choose to distribute outside of the Mac App Store on macOS.

What about on iOS? And what about the fact that on MacOs notarization is more expensive than publishing to the store? I don't believe that to be a coincidence

Notarization is free.

Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#247

Post by lostmyoldone »

fortran77 wrote: post #135
bdcravens wrote: post #134

There's no drama here. The oldest copy of the current app store guidelines I could find goes back to 2014: http://web.archive.org/web/20140903022336/https://developer.... "2.5 Apps that use non-public APIs will be rejected" However this has been known dating back to 2010, so I'm sure someone can dig up an older version of the agreement that says as much. The fact that Electron is a much easier way to build apps than…

Why does Electron need to use non-public APIs?

According to a previous poster, the public API cause excessive power drain and is a fair bit slower. Since Apple usually use the argument of how the OS and API's are built to draw less power, it's quite peculiar that they can't find a more constructive solution than threatening to ban people and companies from the app store.

Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#248

Post by erichocean »

ptlu wrote: post #226
matheusmoreira wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple wants to own the user's machine. They want to make it so their computers run only the software they approve. This is already true for iOS and it's only a matter of time before it also becomes true for macOS. It's the opposite of a free system. Giving up software freedom for "ease of use" seemed like a fine deal at first but then Apple started making decisions that don't quite align with what neither users not d…

As a user of macOS, I want developers who makes apps to use public APIs that will be supported so I don't get breakages on system upgrades or migrations.

> so I don't get breakages on system upgrades or migrations

This is hilarious, Apple breaks apps that only use public APIs on virtually every release they do, minor releases, security patches, you name it. Apple CONSTANTLY BREAKS THINGS.

Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#249

Post by saagarjha »

jonny_eh wrote: post #228
saagarjha wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How exactly?

I would assume that a quick grep through your project for the symbols mentioned would tell you where the issue is.

Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#250

Post by ken »

bdcravens wrote: post #134

There's no drama here. The oldest copy of the current app store guidelines I could find goes back to 2014: http://web.archive.org/web/20140903022336/https://developer.... "2.5 Apps that use non-public APIs will be rejected" However this has been known dating back to 2010, so I'm sure someone can dig up an older version of the agreement that says as much. The fact that Electron is a much easier way to build apps than…

I think half the drama is that there are Electron apps in Apple's app stores already, e.g., a quick grep of Slack.app shows it contains all of these symbols in "Electron Framework.framework", yet it was apparently approved.

Is this another case where you can break the rules but only if you're rich enough?

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