Apple has made it difficult to use web-based technology on its platforms

Just my two cents...<p>The banning of Electron apps for using a non-public API just means it&#x27;s consistent with any other application submitted to the app store... they cain&#x27;t use them sweet private APIs neither. Users can totally still go and download a notarized application though and have no problems. It&#x27;s something that&#x27;ll very likely be remedied by the Electron team in its entirety if it hasn&#x27;t already been...<p>As far as not giving a shit about Safari&#x27;s ability to do WebRTC and PWAs properly; I don&#x27;t really see that as Apple trying to kill web technology as much as them just not profiting off it. Apple doesn&#x27;t make any money from the &quot;web,&quot; they make it from their platforms which aren&#x27;t HTML&#x2F;JS&#x2F;CSS. As a developer, that lack of focus does piss me off sometimes, but... as an end user I don&#x27;t really notice. Safari is still the best mobile browser available, even if it is lagging behind the rest in terms of standards adoption.<p>...<p>And tangentially, in my opinion, the Electron apps being booted is a good thing, if even only temporary, as I really hate downloading an app from the Mac App Store only to find its a full blow fucking Chrome instance for something that would be literally be two NSViewControllers and a handful of &quot;slightly&quot; customized views. Like &quot;Yo, player, your system tray app to show this red or green icon is using 400mb of ram and occasionally locks my CPU. WHY!?!&quot;

I don&#x27;t understand these articles that are coming out recently, and I don&#x27;t want to seem like I&#x27;m attacking the people who use these tools...<p>But, its starting to feel like the people who want to use tools that allow them to build apps and programs that are cross-platform (NodeJS, Electronc, etc) are trying to use their weight as &quot;the most popular programming language&quot; to get platforms to conform to whatever they want.<p>Why should Chromium be allowed to use private APIs that native developers already knew &quot;should NOT be allowed&quot; especially those coming from iOS where its known using those would simply have your app rejected.<p>I don&#x27;t have as much of an issue with Electron apps as most people do, but at some point you have to realize the short comings of cross-platform dev tools and work around them instead of trying to force everyone to just accept them.

Alternative title “Developers wanting to ship an entire browser engine with their shovelware apps are salty about Mac App Store rules”.<p>1. The rules are the same for all apps.<p>2. Not Apple’s fault that Electron does not use the perfectly good browser engine shipping with macOS, but instead includes a separate browser with each app.<p>3. No one is forcing you to use the Mac App Store.<p>The private APIs rule is not new, Apple is just enforcing it harsher. Chromium has been breaking it at leisure, because Chrom(e|ium) itself does not ship via the MAS.<p>Yes, the people shipping Electron apps via the MAS have put themselves in a tough spot by skirting the rules. I can sympathise, but pretending that this is just Apple being mean and they couldn’t have seen this coming is downright disingenuous.<p>As for Safari, it would certainly be nice if they adopted new browser standards quicker, but being slow on the uptake is not the same as actively making things difficult.

Regardless of the reason, if Electron was using private APIs, and Apple doesn&#x27;t allow Apps that use private APIs in the Mac App Store, I&#x27;m glad Electron isn&#x27;t being given a free pass just because it&#x27;s popular.<p>If this was iOS, where sideloading is basically impossible, I&#x27;d be much more sympathetic to the author&#x27;s view. But we&#x27;re talking about the Mac. Apple&#x27;s quality control is <i>the</i> reason for users to choose the Mac App Store. Any users who don&#x27;t want that control can easily go elsewhere.

This is all a bunch of BS. Apple didn’t ban the apps because they were using “web technologies” or even because they wanted “everything to be in the Mac App Store” but because they use private APIs. He even admitted that.<p>Seeing that “thousands” of developers are depending on a framework that uses private APIs that will take a long time to fix, kind of proves Apple’s point. If Apple releases an update that changes the behavior of the private APIs in unexpected ways - which they have every technical right to do since it is not a vendor’s responsibility not to change the behavior of non published APIs without warning, all of those apps will break.

A big piece of the WebKit 2020 conference was dedicated to web platform standards catchup in WebKit: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trac.webkit.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;WebKitGoalsfor2020" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trac.webkit.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;WebKitGoalsfor2020</a><p>That&#x27;s pretty much the opposite of &quot;trying to kill web tech&quot;.

The author makes some good points and IMO exaggerates the importance of others.<p>One nit to pick: Firefox 70&#x27;s performance improvements didn&#x27;t come from using private APIs. They used IOSurface and CALayer, both public API: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;iosurface" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;iosurface</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;quartzcore&#x2F;calayer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;quartzcore&#x2F;calayer</a>

I think it&#x27;s great that Apple chose not to pick favourites and treat the Electron the same as any other application platform. While the release of the latest version of macOS was rushed for many developers and came with some bugs, private APIs should not be used regardless. Ask the Electron people to fix this problem instead of complaining about how Apple is trying to bully web developers.<p>Or, if you want to build a decent application, make a native one, or make a website. Don&#x27;t do this weird half-desktop, half-native just because it&#x27;s easy for you; think about your customers instead.

If you want to use web based technology, embed WebKit instead of Chromium. I&#x27;d think there would be huge memory savings, since the OS only has to load one dynamic library for N web-wrapper apps, as opposed to one Chromium instance per app.<p>The most likely reason developers don&#x27;t do this is that it isn&#x27;t really about targeting web-based technology. It&#x27;s about targeting Chrome.

Kinda weird how many people seem to think that it is good when Apple boycotts modern web technologies.<p>I mean, we all know that electron has its downsides (large downloads, old versions, etc.). But PWAs are the technology to overcome those problems and instead of supporting PWAs, Apple doesn&#x27;t seem to care to bring crucial features like web push notifications to PWAs on iOS (it is not about pushing ads message, but about being able to efficiently send a message to a phone while the app is in the background, e.g. for chats).<p>So I can definitely follow the argument of the author.

The author&#x27;s main points are that:<p>1. Apple has started rejecting Electron apps from their app store.<p>2. Apple&#x27;s &quot;Hotel Cupertino&quot; - you can bring any browser you want, but you can never leave Safari. (That is, the iOS versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox are merely glorified Safari skins; Apple doesn&#x27;t allow independent browsers on their platform.)<p>3. Apple ignores, or is slowest to implement, open web standards like RTC, progressive web apps, push, and more.<p>As someone involved in the progressive web app (PWA) standards space, I unfortunately must concur with the author&#x27;s observations: Apple is soft-suppressing web standards, especially in the PWA space.

Electron was simply caught doing something it was not supposed to be doing.<p>As someone who has spent a lot of time on web and Apple.. this article reads a bit like a conspiracy theory. Apple has allowed a lot of web features on to their platforms and App Store&#x27;s, like hot code push, PWA, etc.

Uhhh Apple is not banning electron. It is banning the use of private APIs.<p>The only reason Electron is in the news is because it uses some of those APIs.<p>Now you could argue that private APIs are a stupid idea. But turning this into a conspiracy theory that Apple is on a mission to kill non native apps is a bit far fetched in my opinion.

What&#x27;s shocking about this post is there is no mention of what private API(s) are being used by Electron. The link to the Mozilla blog post has nothing to do with Electron.<p>Edit: Google to the rescue:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mjtsai.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;04&#x2F;electron-apps-rejected-from-the-mac-app-store&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mjtsai.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;04&#x2F;electron-apps-rejected-fr...</a>

This notion that PWAs are a real kind of thing that the open web is excited about and not a hamfisted attempt by Google to force us into certain web development practices is, in my opinion, farcical.

“Technology” is such an optimistic statement... You mean slow memory hungry crap?

You can find more details on the issue of Electron using private macOS APIs in the following discussions:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;electron&#x2F;electron&#x2F;issues&#x2F;20027" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;electron&#x2F;electron&#x2F;issues&#x2F;20027</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;electron&#x2F;electron&#x2F;pull&#x2F;20965" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;electron&#x2F;electron&#x2F;pull&#x2F;20965</a>

&gt; But Apple has a reason not to like this recycling of web technology.<p>Yeah: native apps consume fewer resources and generally provide a better user experience. This is like, Apple&#x27;s whole schtick with iphones. The hardware is historically low spec compared to contemporaneous android, but the device performs better, and old devices perform better on new ios releases.<p>&gt; It wants its Mac App Store to be filled with apps that you can’t find anywhere else, not apps that are available on every platform.<p>Sure, that&#x27;s a take.

Thank god. An Electron app is essentially a kiosk-mode web browser, and offers (almost) no advantages over just running the application in your real browser... except you lose browser extensions and customizability and everything else that makes browsing the web bearable.<p>If you&#x27;re going to publish an &quot;app&quot;, do it properly (natively) or not at all.

Good. Web UI is terrible.

Looking back at the number of stupid mistakes, missteps, and general clumsiness which have come out of Apple&#x27;s App Store review process, it&#x27;s far more likely this is just another boneheaded gaff somewhere on Apple&#x27;s review team.<p>This is quite clearly one of those cases where people are attributing malice where incompetence of one sort or another is almost certainly the cause.<p>Most likely either: —This should have been nipped in the bud years ago when they added the private APIs to electron. —They are taking a ham-fisted approach to cleaning up some App Store abuses. —They&#x27;ve updated the tools they use to review App Store submissions.<p>Or maybe a little of all of the above. The big problem is Apple is again stumbling around with little or no communications to the developer community, fucking up a lot of developer&#x27;s lives. This isn&#x27;t some conscious malicious scheme... just frustrating corporate blindness.

Just learn Swift and Apple frameworks if you are building an App or use a template if your actual product is content and your app is just a delivery medium.<p>Just because it&#x27;s JS, it doesn&#x27;t mean that it is web technology. It&#x27;s simply a way to build apps using technologies that are traditionally used for the web, making it approachable for people who know JS so that they can build bloated apps.<p>Apple&#x27;s toolchain is so much superior to anything JS-Frankenstein and the Swift itself is a pleasure to work with, probably easier to learn and manage than to try to adopt your JS skills to a mutant JS. Almost always results in better UX and I think it&#x27;s O.K. to care for the users, something that apparently never crossed the minds of the WebTech people(through the years, all the frameworks were about making developers life’s easier, rarely anything was about the user ).

The comments here are missing the real issue - its the inconsistent application of the private API rule by the app store teams that is arguably the worst part of this. Apple have a terrible track record in consistent application of App Store rules. I&#x27;d argue there&#x27;s enough evidence now to support a theory that some apps are considered just too important to reject.<p>When will they pull big Electron apps like Slack et al? I&#x27;m guessing never. It&#x27;s often the little guys whose business gets stomped on by the unfair application of these rules.

Objective C is magic and you and get around the static checker with using Ducks and NSClassFromString. This is how all mac and iOS devs have done this is the past and will continue doing this forever. Apple will never close the Duck hole, because it doesn&#x27;t want to, but it will always slap devs on the wrist for using private APIs in a non-duck compliant manner.

Quote: &quot;Apple’s control over its app ecosystem is a new type of monopoly...&quot;<p>Very poor choice of words, it&#x27;s their walled garden, nobody&#x27;s holding a gun to your head to go there, especially since Android&#x27;s walled garden is growing bigger by the day while Apple&#x27;s one is shrinking.<p>Here is a better choice of words: &quot;-Let it shrink, I couldn&#x27;t care less&quot;.<p>As a freelancer I always say to my clients they have a choice of whatever they like between big 4&#x27;s (Win&#x2F;Droid&#x2F;iOS &amp; MacOS&#x2F;Linux) but in reality I do it quietly on Win and Droid 1st, then during the final stages I kinda forget about the other 2. If any of them is asking, I have other means to stop them going there. I don&#x27;t like Apple and I don&#x27;t like Linux. Apple for reasons including those in the article as well plus more, and Linux for their snobbish. Until both of them will act pro-customer and non-anti-developer I will be against them as well, and I am not the only one. There is a reason why Win is king in desktop (backward compatibility &amp; pro-developer) and Droid is king in mobile (non-anti-developer, though lately Google is kinda of following in Apple&#x27;s footsteps here). And I know I am not the only one with this mindset.

Apple definitely doesn&#x27;t have monopoly over anything. They are popular, but their market share doesn&#x27;t put them in a monopoly category. And of course Apple doesn&#x27;t like cross-platform Apps, especially PWAs. Because how else would they make money off of them. It is all about business.

Let&#x27;s be real. Apple doesn&#x27;t like low quality apps on its platform. Does that mean it rejects low budget open source apps that use shoddy frameworks like Electron? Yes.<p>Apple charges an arm and a leg for its hardware ($25 per GB of RAM, with vendor lock-in via solder, 400% markup over every retail price, and similar for SSD), so they don&#x27;t want any software wasting that precious power and capacity.<p>Yes, it is bad for non-wealthy power users, but that&#x27;s never been Apple&#x27;s market.<p>Fortunately for us, on the hardware side, Apple has been making shoddier hardware (soldered components, broken keyboards, missing Esc key), while Dell and LG and others have been improving their premium lines.<p>On the OS side, Apple and Microsoft have been working hard to close the quality and power gap, with Microsoft shipping Linux on Windows and investing in Open Source, and Apple trying to turn their machines into iPads and Adobe boxes.<p>It&#x27;s hard to dig through the clutter in the PC side, but if you are willing to research and to pay close to Apple prices, you can get great Windows+Linux machines from Syatem76, Dell XPS&#x2F;Precision, LG Gram, Lenovo, and others.

I wonder why apple expects that if I you have to write separate apps for iOS and android, people will choose to write an app only for iOS and not only for android, given that android&#x27;s market share is so much higher. Maybe developers are more likely to own iOS devices?

The anti-Safari sentiment comes from a pro-Chrome world. But I honestly think you should stop using chrome as your main browser, and stop developing for chrome primarily also. Use Firefox or Safari, develop for Firefox &amp; Safari, and then fix for Chrome afterwards.

I&#x27;m always amused by people who use those clickbait titles originating from Daily Mail, just to make shit storm and for few minutes of fame. Something like this should be banned from HN and many other mediums, but sadly this will never happen... :(

As a native Apple Swift app developer, this doesn&#x27;t bother me too much. I tend to like Apple for the same reasons that many people hate them.<p>That said, I spent a significant part of my career writing cross-platform SDKs, and am quite aware of the business case for hybrid apps. I think there are many places where they make a great deal of sense.<p>In fact, just a couple of days ago, I suggested that a developer replace a set of apps that I wrote in Swift, along with a powerful SDK, with apps written in Ionic, because I thought that the use case made sense for that.<p>I just like writing fairly restricted-domain, local apps that are optimized for the end-user, and that often interact with devices, so using hybrid apps doesn&#x27;t really make sense for me (they are optimized for the developer; not the end-user).

Ehm, so...<p>How about a progressive web app? That&#x27;s what I do for Apple apps.<p>Sure, it&#x27;s just a web app but most apps need an internet connection anyway.<p>I know there are some drawbacks, but you can work around it.

What I would like to know is why I have to go through an f&#x27;ing CAPTCHA every bleeding time to read an f&#x27;ing medium article.

Oh, the irony of publishing this on Medium.

would a less misleading title read differently?<p>It seems apps have to honor the (battery preserving, e.g.) appstore rules, plain and simple.<p>That said, the fact that _some_ web-based technology apps don&#x27;t does NOT imply the title of this post.

I wish this was more feasible with less collateral damage over a shorter time. The web is a trash fire of absolutely historic proportions, from the frameworks&#x2F;APIs to the languages to the UI&#x2F;UX. The world deserves better.

Apple keeps making it harder and harder for developers on mac. The amount of effort my teams have to put into the apple side of our cross platform apps is silly.

Alternative headline: “Apple makes the web safer by enforcing safety standards”

I can speak to this problem as I develop an Electron app that targets MacOS, Windows, and Linux (as well as the web).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getpolarized.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getpolarized.io</a><p>I&#x27;m just a humble independent software developer so I can&#x27;t really target every platform 100% so having cross-platform code is really nice.<p>Unfortunately, every platform seems to want to screw you over somehow. I&#x27;ve written about this on our blog before:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getpolarized.io&#x2F;2019&#x2F;02&#x2F;28&#x2F;dear-app-stores-dont-block-apps-lead-with-the-carrot.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getpolarized.io&#x2F;2019&#x2F;02&#x2F;28&#x2F;dear-app-stores-dont-bloc...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getpolarized.io&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;05&#x2F;Google-Will-Kill-Chrome-Extension-Innovation.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getpolarized.io&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;05&#x2F;Google-Will-Kill-Chrome-E...</a><p>Even CREATING the MacOS build for MAS is such a pain that I gave up. I tried going to the Microsoft Store but that also was a nightmare.<p>Every platform has hurdles and roadblocks designed to screw over developers and bring more money to Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.<p>With Microsoft, for example, you HAVE to use their monetization platform. You can&#x27;t use stripe.<p>With Google, they seem mostly just incompetent and not directly malicious.<p>The discussions on &#x2F;r&#x2F;androiddev are enough to scare you to NEVER build an Android app.<p>Have a business making 7 figures on the app store for the last 5 years? 10k revies? 5 stars? Not anymore. They just killed it and they won&#x27;t tell you why.<p>Or someone files a trademark in a 3rd party jurisdiction and you lose your app entirely.<p>Then there are the big boys like Uber that just flat out ignore the rules because they know Apple won&#x27;t remove them.<p>OR.. I could just bypass the app stores entirely right? Just distribute my app on my own site. Don&#x27;t play these games.<p>However, now I&#x27;ve basically abandoned a massive source of users.<p>If you&#x27;ve never built an app and experienced how hard it is do to customer acquisition you&#x27;re NOT going to appreciate how much of a challenge this issue is for ISVs.<p>Some apps simply would not exist without the app store distribution.<p>Getting featured by Apple could make or break a company. Just getting featured ONCE could mean the difference between your startup succeeding or failing.<p>... but they won&#x27;t feature you if you&#x27;re not in the app store. They also won&#x27;t feature you unless you really do EVERYTHING they say including completely tailoring the app for their platform.

No updates for WhatsApp??

How should I see this as anything but whining about producing lazy, resource intensive, non-UI-guideline adhering Electron apps?<p>Looking at you - Slack, Todoist, Monday.com. Your apps are very bad (and your native apps are Electron lies!)

&gt; But Apple has a reason not to like this recycling of web technology. It wants its Mac App Store to be filled with apps that you can’t find anywhere else, not apps that are available on every platform.<p>And that&#x27;s where I stopped reading. Apple doesn&#x27;t give a toss if your app is cross platform. Frameworks that started back in the day like phonegap have matured into things like Electron, and the core problems are the same:<p>They run like crap. Animations are jerky, oftentimes the app simply &quot;refreshes&quot; when things go too far off the rails. This is a poor UX.<p>The apps are not able to adapt to newer devices without additional work. For <i>MONTHS</i> after the release of the X, looking at the Spotify app on it, the controls at the base of the screen were below the multitasking gesture indicator. If this app was built with AutoLayout as Apple encourages, this would&#x27;ve never been an issue.<p>I know, instantly, when an app I&#x27;ve downloaded is using web based cruft, I can catch it at a glance with the first tap, and the first slow interaction begrudgingly kicks off. Yep, it&#x27;s a web-based one, and no, I will not be keeping it unless I have no choice to. Unless it&#x27;s critical in some way, it&#x27;s gone.<p>Apple outright banning Electron-powered crap is the best reason I&#x27;ve heard yet for buying my new iPhone.

Alternative theory: electron apps are universally shitty.

One could argue “Electron developers” have abandoned open technologies (vanilla web browsers), for heavily customized to taste versions.<p>And expect us all to gift them the CPU, memory, storage overhead of their preferred distribution model.

TL;DR Title is misleading hyperbole, it&#x27;s talking about Apple not allowing Electron-based apps that access undocumented APIs into their App Store.

This has &quot;fragile&quot; written all over it.

Honest question: who actually uses the macOS App Store?

You still can&#x27;t use service workers in WKWebViews, right?

iOS is pretty bad. For a modern device that can do anything, it&#x27;s awfully pegged to how Apple wants you to do things. It does not feel very liberating to use an iphone. It&#x27;s too much of a commercial experience, not the World Wide Web.

I&#x27;d like to point out that Apple does not natively support MPEG DASH on iOS Safari, and I have always considered Apple to be the problem child of the Internet.

Please don&#x27;t spam the app store with redundant Electron-hosted web applications. Just tell me the URL so I can load it in my (non-Google-compromised) web browser, or use the OS&#x27; native web frameworks so I don&#x27;t have to waste hundreds of megabytes of disk space.

This is hyperbole based on the recent issues with Electron and little else. I&#x27;m not a fan-boy, but the fact is Apple has, in its own apple-ish way, been at the forefront of web technology for a decade and is continuing to do so. Safari is continually updated with the latest specs and JavaScriptCore continues to compete with V8. Yes, they make random security&#x2F;business&#x2F;tech decisions which can be frustrating, but even Apple knows they can&#x27;t dismiss web tech, and they&#x27;re not.<p>A great example is the beta of Apple Music - it pushes the state of the web forward by embracing Web Components, ES6, modules and more. It&#x27;s probably one of the most modern websites out there at the moment. And Apple Music is serious business to Apple&#x27;s whole ecosystem. If they were trying to kill the web, they would have just remade the old iTunes client.

That&#x27;s interesting. I&#x27;m pretty much done developing for the Apple platform. If I need to create an app, it will be a web app. I&#x27;m sick of xcode, sick of swift, and sick of &quot;professional&quot; grade mac hardware. All this technology to make pretty UIs on top of API calls.

&gt;<i>But Apple has a reason not to like this recycling of web technology. It wants its Mac App Store to be filled with apps that you can’t find anywhere else, not apps that are available on every platform. With a recent policy change,</i><p>It&#x27;s not a &quot;recent policy change&quot;, it existed since the App Store was created.<p>&gt;<i>The Mac App Store has quietly started rejecting apps made with a popular tool called Electron that allows developers to base all of their apps on the web-based code. Some of the most popular apps in the App Store, like Slack, Spotify, Discord, and WhatsApp, fall into this category.</i><p>We can only hope they are remade with proper native technologies, to save out batteries and performance...

It&#x27;s orders of magnitude more expensive for a company to have swift specialists, kotlin specialists, and js specialists for a user experience that is meant to be fluid (or at least consistent) across platforms. Design consistency ends up being manually maintained, which is extremely faulty.<p>My company uses react-native for iOS and Android, and it works pretty well. We sell a web product, but for certain use cases our users need to be able to use a phone or tablet without internet connection.<p>I&#x27;m really surprised Apple&#x27;s not cracking down on react-native yet. I wonder if it&#x27;s because they don&#x27;t want to get in a fight with Facebook?