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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

#251

Post by lostmyoldone »

FpUser wrote: post #94

On one hand I am not fond of Apple in general at all. On the other hand when I see developers using Electron as a GUI layer I think it is pure insanity. It is an absolute resource and performance hog that in my opinion has no place outside of browsers context.

I'm an old dinosaur who used to do GUI development way back, and while I completely agree that Electron is a beast, I also haven't seen almost reasonably cross platform app toolkit that isn't either ugly, or worse than Electron. So what are the options I am missing?

Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#253

Post by root_axis »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #244
root_axis wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> as CTO I know all the dependencies in the application stack of our company

You know all of the transitive dependencies in the application stack of your company? Out of curiosity, what is the ballpark figure on the total number of transitive dependencies in your application?

Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#254

Post by erichocean »

scarface74 wrote: post #143
vunie wrote: post #138

Banning private APIs is absurd. Permanently banning developers for using private APIs is shear lunacy. As someone else pointed out, not using private APIs would put some applications at a disadvantage against first party software: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21437673 Firefox is often criticized for it's power consumption on the mac because it is not on par with safari. Chrome/electron uses private APIs to re…

Banning private APIs is absurd. Permanently banning developers for using private APIs is shear lunacy An API by definition is the public interface that a platform promises developers will not change without notice. The vendor has every right to change a private API. Once you start letting third party developers use private APIs either you are stuck with them forever or when you change it, users will blame you not the…

> users will blame you not the developer when applications break

Apple breaks apps CONSTANTLY that use only public APIs, and the users DO NOT BLAME APPLE.

Do you even work in the iOS ecosystem? Because everyone who does knows this. Users don't blame Apple when things break, they blame 3rd party developers.

Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#255

Post by rmgraham »

tracker1 wrote: post #217
geofft wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an end user, can I just say how uncomfortable I am at the idea that some app on the App Store includes some node.js dependency where the app developer has no idea what's in it? What if it's event-stream? If you're sending me code to run on my computer— especially if I'm paying for it—you either need to have glanced at the code yourself or have some reason to trust what's in there (it's from a company you have a bu…

So never run Linux?

Or only run Linux? *

* (any source available OS)

Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#256

Post by jolux »

heavyset_go wrote: post #159
kjksf wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"use or conceal" "use" If this was "don't conceal or we'll ban you for life", it would be somewhat understandable. But it's "use or we'll ban you for life" which is just insane. Apple is at the height of their arrogance towards developers.

> Apple is at the height of their arrogance towards developers. Yep. I've migrated away from macOS after using it for a decade over to Linux, and the developer experience is first class.

is it possible to write a GUI app that looks native in all common desktop environments yet?

Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#257

Post by philwelch »

BoorishBears wrote: post #47
philwelch wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. An application developer chooses his dependencies and has to take responsibility for them. Even if the app store is going to let you pass the buck, it's going to make your customers unhappy.

How is it going to make customers unhappy if your app isn't using the features? Apple is within their rights here, but please, let's not pretend this is about user experience. It's about the Apple machine doing what it wants, and rolling over who it wants, because it can. That would explain why Apple developer relations (read: humans) had previously backpedalled after the same rejection in the past: https://github.co…

It’s more of a general point that if your application is buggy, the customer isn’t going to give a damn whether the bug is in your code or in somebody else’s code.

Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#258

Post by lostmyoldone »

bdcravens wrote: post #126
thothamon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel Apple is moving into somewhat dangerous territory. If the intent, as documented by internal messages and emails, is purely to protect the consumer by forcing people to use only public APIs, that's one thing. But, if Apple is trying to apply anticompetitive behavior against certain technologies, if this rule is selectively enforced, if there is any bad smell or anything dirty about this process, then Apple is i…

Apple has banned the use of private APIs for years. It's only anticompetitive if they selectively apply those rules.

They have selectively applied them to themselves for ages as far as I know. Which must be regarded as anti competitive to some extent.

It's also pretty much a straw man kind of argument around the public/private API distinction as important to prevent applications from breaking, as it seems to be the rule rather than the exception that lots of apps break on iOS updates anyway.

They don't seem to care that much, but it could be a good way to make sure it's harder for eg Chrome to compete with Safari. Simply make the API they have to use a bit slow and inefficient.

Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#259

Post by drewbug »

saagarjha wrote: post #249
jonny_eh wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly?

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

what if the function calls are generated with macros or something?

Re: Electron apps cannot be submitted to the Apple store

#260

Post by erik_seaberg »

johnny22 wrote: post #235
diminoten wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

57 MB. The horror. How will you survive. Is there a software engineering equivalent to "ok boomer"? Seems appropriate here. I can't wait until people who think MBs of memory usage matter to retire/stop hanging out on the Internet...

We used to joke about EMACS being Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping

We still do, but now it has more of a Dr. Evil vibe. “Eight million bytes.”
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