Catching Native Apps

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/01/12/catching-native-apps/

196 214 5 years ago

valleyer• 5 years ago

three competing app frameworks won’t create it
Apple splitting their resources to support AppKit, SwiftUI, and Catalyst probably doesn't help.

Yup. After years trying to coalesce development around AppKit (transitioning away from the original Toolbox API), Apple decided to ship the org chart and simultaneously maintain three different UI frameworks, none of them fully consistent with the others. Engineering labor was divided between them, and extra work was created due to interoperability requirements. All three were left worse off as a result.

The_rationalist5• 5 years ago

lol let's not pretend that Apple has limited resources though. Apple has a very limited amount of core developpers (e.g webkit being abandonware) and they are probably mediocre on average but obviously this is artificial scarcity.

favorited3• 5 years ago

WebKit has had 32 commits to trunk in the last 24 hours (35 if you include 3 reverts).

[edit] source: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/commits/main

password1• 5 years ago

Why would apple self sabotage itself by not hiring and allocating good developers to their frameworks?

frou_dh• 5 years ago

It struck me as a very mature move by Apple to do the two-pronged approach and launch both SwiftUI and Catalyst around the same time (they are for different purposes... greenfield projects vs. ports).

I mean it's the most obvious surface-level minimalist/designer/programmer impulse to want there to be only 1 way rather than 2, because it just overall feels more neat/tidy that way. That's the kind of impulse I heed a lot of the time. But in the real world and especially trillion dollar market situations like this, what's actually best to do is not necessarily that simple.

favorited3• 5 years ago

It's fitting with their historical approach to OS X development. The transition strategy to OS X was "If you're starting from scratch, use Cocoa (SwiftUI). If you're porting an existing Mac app, use Carbon (Catalyst)."

Apocryphon• 5 years ago

It's truly Google-like in its inconsistency and confusion for developers.

aaaaaaaaaaab3• 5 years ago

Google? Nah, Microsoft is the king of incompatible parallel UI toolkits.

egypturnash• 5 years ago

god what is going on with this page, Safari keeps on deciding to stop rendering anything when I scroll up, none of the links work when I hover over them, it breaks Reader mode too.

edit: oh now that I bitched about it here it's loading fine, how peculiar.

PaulDavisThe1st8• 5 years ago

The more fundamental question here is: why, given what we know of the market share of devices running macOS, would anyone choose to develop solely for macOS (and thus target Apple-provided APIs)?

Now, let's be clear. I am not insisting that there are no reasons why anyone would do this. If you believe (rightly or wrongly) that your audience/user niche is overwhelmingly macOS-based, that's one pretty good reason right there.

But ... yep, truth be told, I can't imagine any other good reasons. If you're developing native applications in 2022, targetting a single platform makes almost no sense unless you pre-define your audience as limited to that platform. You may be able to create a viable revenue model doing that, but for every user on your chosen platform, there's somewhere between 2 and 20 who are irritated by your decision.

deergomoo5• 5 years ago

If you were to ask Mac-focussed companies like Panic or Rogue Amoeba I am certain they would tell you it's because they as individuals enjoy the Mac platform, and the user base is large enough to make it work despite being a niche of a niche.

I think as a society we often focus too much on growth and maximising. It's okay to keep steady and focus on the things you like.

Personally, I'm very glad that there are still companies out there targeting one platform, even for the platforms I don't use. Unless there are enough resources to focus on native versions for each platform, multi-platform software is often full of compromises IMO.

PaulDavisThe1st8• 5 years ago

It's okay to keep steady and focus on the things you like.

Absolutely, would never have it any other way.

Personally, I just want to believe in what I do, and if I believe in it, I don't want it restricted by platform. YMMV and that's cool.

aparticulate6• 5 years ago

Panic, Rogue (Bare Bones, Omni Group too) have built-in audience from ~3 decades of classic -> modern Mac development. I feel like it would be a lot different for a newcomer.

klabb35• 5 years ago

I love some of the Mac only apps, but it's undeniable that this 2010-like dream of building a native Apple software and the monetization model (selling it on the App Store) is almost entirely gone. I honestly think this was a first-movers pipe dream. Once the competition caught up and the industry matured, interoperability was going to dominate all other arguments.

Today we live in an entirely different world, and the big corps are still funneling money into keeping these ecosystems alive (heck, there's no other way). Yet, no developer want to learn 6 stacks, not even the big corps do this for their own apps for gods sake.

I will bet my left thumb that eventually GUIs will be predominantly made with web technologies, will run on all platforms, and will have native proprietary extensions. The web today even has a path to become language agnostic with wasm.

wmf5• 5 years ago

Native apps don't have to be exclusive.

PaulDavisThe1st8• 5 years ago

You cannot run an application that uses Apple's *Kit APIs on anything other than macOS.

eyelidlessness4• 5 years ago

The reason software shops used to justify developing either Mac-exclusive or at least Mac native apps was because Apple customers tend to spend more money on software in general. And that was when Apple had an even smaller market share. I suspect it’s still true to some extent, but probably much less so than in the past. And almost certainly because:

- The App Store(s) drive pricing down

- Free alternatives are more prevalent, particularly because of Electron

ridiculous_fish• 5 years ago

One answer is that you can write a better app, and that can be a competitive advantage. For example, I bought Fork and not GitKraken, because Fork's native experience is so much better than Electron-based alternatives.

This doesn't preclude you from releasing the app for other platforms: Fork also has a Windows app, with separate UIs but presumably shared business logic. This is how cross-platform development used to be done. It's certainly more total work, but you don't hit a quality ceiling like you do with write-once-run-anywhere frameworks.

klabb35• 5 years ago

Consistency across apps on the same platform is directly opposed to consistency across platforms within the same app.

As a multi platform user, I prefer that Figma, Discord, Spotify and vscode always look and feel the same independent of which machine I'm using.

PaulDavisThe1st8• 5 years ago

This is how cross-platform development used to be done.

Not for at least 20 years. We've had Qt, GTK, WxWidgets for longer than that. Those GUI toolkits are how cross-platform developer "used to be done", and to a large extent still is.

Electron is not the only way to do cross-platform, and there are lots of reasons why it absolutely is not the best way. What it does have in its favor is leveraging the knowledge of developers who've only ever worked on webstacks. Not much else.

viktorcode3• 5 years ago

Developing native application is not targeting single platform. It means choosing a different set of tools and technologies used for development. Instead of relying on some cross-platform framework / module / engine you just rely on different stuff which is closer to the platforms you plan supporting.

PaulDavisThe1st8• 5 years ago

If the tools & technologies are only available on one platform, as is the case with the overwhelming majority of Apple APIs (same for Windows), then I'm sorry, but selecting them is targeting a single platform.

rbreaves2• 5 years ago

They can exist because their "small" markets or audience will pay for their software. That simple.

tambourine_man2• 5 years ago

I’ve been a Mac user for over 30 years. What kept us when it was a slower, more expensive computer was the user experience.

The Mac UX team is being led by amateurs. Big Sur’s redesign is a joke that Monterey hasn’t began to fix. Let’s not even discuss whatever almost happened to Safari.

The Unix layer is abandoned. Why is it harder and slower to run docker on macOS than anywhere else? In the 2000-2010s, Macs were developer’s first choice.

Cocoa was not only a joy to the end user but for t he developer to write apps on. I’d rather write a Web app than a Mac app these days (but not use it, yet)

The article is spot on.

Good hardware alone won’t be enough to sustain the Mac’s relevance long term. It needs consistent, predictable, discoverable UX. It needs to be the best developing environment.

eyelidlessness4• 5 years ago

The Unix layer is abandoned.

Granted I’m still on Catalina, but I have never heard anything like this before. That seems like it would cause a huge uproar. But…

Why is it harder and slower to run docker on macOS than anywhere else?

… I don’t think this has to do with the Unix layer, and I’d expect other Unixes to similarly struggle with Docker. Because Docker only runs natively on Linux. All other OSes need either a VM or (in Windows’ case) WSL.

To be honest I think this is one of the biggest problems with Docker and I’m not sure what Apple can do about it (switching to Linux underpinnings is entirely unrealistic).

Otherwise I largely agree, but I feel this deserves clarification.

ricardobeat2• 5 years ago

We’ve been running VMs at near native speeds for a decade. Docker on Mac runs 20-50x slower mostly due to poor I/O which is a platform “feature”, they are already on the latest hypervisor framework provided by Apple.

linguae3• 5 years ago

macOS has not abandoned its Unix layer, and in fact is still a certified Unix (https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/). However, there is a growing gap between certified Unix and the innovations that *nix-like systems have included in the past decade. macOS has not kept up with Linux and the BSDs in terms of feature parity, resulting in a growing gap between the features that come with modern Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD versus macOS. A minor issue is macOS's BSD-derived utilities being based on late 1990s-early 2000s versions and thus not taking advantage of functionality added in later versions of these BSDs. Other issues include no support for file systems such as ZFS and btrfs in macOS (though I remember when ZFS support was proposed for Mac OS X Leopard), and macOS not supporting FreeBSD jails (https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/jails/).

PaulDavisThe1st8• 5 years ago

Cocoa was not only a joy to the end user but for t he developer to write apps on.

Cocoa is still there and has hardly changed. Maybe there are some new macOS capabilities that it doesn't provide the right access to, but I'm not sure what.

macOS will only ever be the best development platform for macOS. For cross-platform development, it's always going to be worse than Linux, just because the Linux world takes x-platform seriously.

deergomoo5• 5 years ago

I wish they’d abandon the annual release cycle. At this point I’d argue even the iPhone is mature enough that annual releases are more hindrance than help, but this is certainly the case for the Mac.

The Mac UX team is being led by amateurs

At some point it appears software design at Apple was taken over by someone who thinks that hiding controls behind hover states and overflow menus (such that you can’t actually see what an app can do without discovering it by accident) counts as making the software simpler, when in fact the opposite is true.

xxpor• 5 years ago

I think the every 6 month minor release cycle Windows and Ubuntu have converged on is probably the right one. You can't actually do enough stuff in a year in something like an OS to justify a major version upgrade.

ksec• 5 years ago

I wish they abandon user feature release. Apart from UI changes like Dark Mode, I cant remember a single new feature from the past 5 - 6 years that I used on macOS.

There is no need for user feature as marketing. Bug Fix, Security Update, Performance, Drivers, API update are good enough.

To the point I am thinking, OS UX are near the end of the S curve. It is pretty much done.

andrekandre• 5 years ago

  > At some point it appears software design at Apple was taken over by someone who thinks that hiding controls behind hover states and overflow menus (such that you can’t actually see what an app can do without discovering it by accident) counts as making the software simpler, when in fact the opposite is true.

when design is done for marketing purposes, that is what you get

Wowfunhappy5• 5 years ago

Why is it harder and slower to run docker on macOS than anywhere else?

Is it harder than on Windows?

It's harder than on Linux for sure, but that's because Docker uses features that are part of the Linux kernel, and so doesn't really work natively anywhere else.

alerighi2• 5 years ago

Docker is slower because it runs a VM. The macOS kernel doesn't include any containerization API, thus a native Docker cannot be built. Of course even if it can be built the kernel would be completely different than Linux and you could only run macOS containers and not the containers on the public registry, but it would still be an improvement.

Microsoft solved the problem by running an optimized Linux kernel in a lightweight VM that integrates with the host operating system.

Mac are not friendly to a developer. And they never were. The only reason why developer use them is because they need to program on iOS and thus need XCode (that is a terrible IDE) and the iOS toolchain.

As a developer I want a system where I am in full control and not a system that is locked down as macOS. I use Linux as a developer (in the embedded area) and it's perfect to me. Only sometime I have to use a Windows VM because of some esoteric hardware platform that have their proprietary compiler that works only on Windows.

akfanta• 5 years ago

Mac are not friendly to a developer. And they never were. The only reason why developer use them is because they need to program on iOS and thus need XCode (that is a terrible IDE) and the iOS toolchain.

That's just wrong on so many levels. The majority of developers using Mac don't touch Xcode at all.

kitsunesoba4• 5 years ago

Docker running badly is just as much a Docker problem for it being so tied to Linux as it is a macOS problem. It’s one of the big cons of a “ship the whole rainforest” approach: you’re trading fewer variables for your application for performances losses due to greater possible incongruities between the abstraction and the host.

One would have similar issues rigging up Docker to run on FreeBSD, because that’s also not Linux despite being plenty UNIXy.

wmf5• 5 years ago

AFAIK macOS doesn't have namespaces/jails/zones so it would be near-impossible to build native Docker for macOS.

linguae3• 5 years ago

Exactly. As a long-time Mac user, I miss the days when Apple and Microsoft were focused on advancing desktop computing, and when they heavily invested in the macOS and Windows platforms.

It seems that ever since mobile computing gained a foothold and when Web applications started becoming to be feature-by-feature competitive with native desktop applications, the industry has largely and effectively abandoned the desktop except to serve essentially to provide platforms for device drivers and windowing systems that will ultimately run web browsers (which, lo and behold, happen to be developed by these same platform vendors). Native mobile applications exist, but only to justify the existence of walled-garden app stores. Modern operating systems have essentially become ChromeOS with support for "legacy" APIs like Cocoa and Win32 for running "legacy" desktop applications.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the success of the iPhone was the worst thing that happened to the Mac. Compared to the iOS ecosystem, the Mac now makes up a small minority of Apple's profits. While Apple's ARM-based Macs are undoubtedly a major advance in terms of computer hardware, unfortunately on the software side macOS just isn't the same as it used to be. Mac OS X in the 2000's was truly ahead of its time, but today macOS is no longer heads-and-shoulders better than its competition, and its Unix core lags behind modern Linux and *BSD in terms of features.

While the Web has many advantages such as ease of distribution, there are key advantages of traditional desktops, such as better latency, the lack of dependence on Internet access, and the idea of desktop applications conforming to the UI/UX guidelines specified by the platform. Unfortunately, if all of our applications are Web applications, whether they are running in a web browser or as Electron apps, we lose out on the consistency and interoperability benefits that come from well-designed desktop applications.

I think the days of a polished ecosystem of well-designed applications that have consistent UI/UX guidelines with each other is coming to an end due to these market pressures.

sneak2• 5 years ago

Let's not forget that they are shipping signed, unmodifiable OSes (in the default security config) that will be scanning your local files without your consent for contraband, and any true or false positives will be reported to Apple and the police.

They are proceeding with this plan, now that the initial fervor has died down.

You can't turn it off without disabling the majority of the platform security protections on the machine.

aparticulate6• 5 years ago

Let’s not even discuss whatever almost happened to Safari.

The weird Safari summer was beta process working properly imo. They incorporated literally all of the constructive feedback. The common sentiment is that Safari now is better than the previous version.

Now if only Firefox could have followed this path with the removal of compact tabs but that's another story...

tambourine_man2• 5 years ago

Regarding the many Docker/Unix comments: there was a time when Apple led the way on Unix land. If you love or hate systemd, you have Apple and launchd to thank for.

Apple should have either let or at least recognized the need for containerization and followed.

Process isolation done right could solve end user security issues, instead of the half baked annoying dialog boxes they have littered throughout the system. It could also allow something similar to Docker for developers.

They also need to solve their relationship with GPL3. If it’s indeed that toxic, then they need to write or adopt alternatives with different licenses, instead of just shipping decades old binary.

rcarmo2• 5 years ago

Docker is based on Linux namespacing, and the Mac does not use a Linux kernel, so you have to run a VM to have one. That's it, period.

The "harder and slower" bit is debatable (you can run podman, for instance), but a lot of it is on Docker's side, not Apple's -- they even provide a hypervisor you can use with 10 or so lines of code!

melissalobos• 5 years ago

In the end Electron may be slow and bloated, but it is easy to distribute and you can make it look exactly how you want. People often say they want apps to look "native", but really most people I have met don't really care that Spotify doesn't use native Windows widgets.

Also, I liked the idea on this site of responding to twitter comments by posting them whole on the site and writing the response below. It feels more like it is an older style mailing list that way.

c0balt• 5 years ago

I fully agree. Nobody cares if it doesn't look native as long as the relevant native integrations, like app/ tray icon, notifications and URL handlers, are there. Even without native speed it's fast enough for most users.

Electron also has an (comparatively) awesome Dev experience in regard to the tooling available and the nodejs ecosystem.

aaaaaaaaaaab3• 5 years ago

most people I have met don't really care that Spotify doesn't use native Windows widgets

Probably because Windows was always a UI/UX clusterfuck, so Windows users don’t notice the difference. Mac enthusiasts on the other hand…

jolux9• 5 years ago

It definitely pisses me off that billion-dollar companies can't be bothered to write native apps for desktop platforms anymore, but not enough to make it worth it to forgo the benefits of Electron apps and web apps as an end user.

deergomoo5• 5 years ago

People may not care whether apps fit in visually (I do, but I acknowledge the vast majority of people don’t), but I think the subtle differences in behaviour caused by software having to or choosing to reinvent the wheel is a major problem.

It’s always small things like keyboard shortcuts, focus behaviour, placement of controls, but it’s all one more roadblock to using the computer. The more we have to consciously think about what we’re doing because we can’t rely on consistent muscle memory, the less effective of a tool the computer becomes.

It’s not even just the Electron/web based stuff either. Drag and drop in Office for Mac doesn’t work the same way as every other Mac app, and it throws me every single time.

userbinator• 5 years ago

caused by software having to or choosing to reinvent the wheel is a major problem.

One of the biggest examples of this is "dark mode", something which arguably isn't that old in a Mac context, but Windows let you choose the appearance of individual UI elements --- colours, fonts, sizes, etc. --- and everything native in the system would automatically match. That is, until Windows ~8 or so, when they gutted most of the customisation, only to later reintroduce as a half-baked "dark mode".

WA2• 5 years ago

It’s always small things like keyboard shortcuts, focus behaviour, placement of controls, but it’s all one more roadblock to using the computer.

Let me check something... I open "Terminal.app" and what is this? I can't move around my cursor with my keybindings that I use in Sublime and VSCode (Cmd + Arrow to jump to start or end of line). Why do I quit a session with Ctrl + D? What is even this Ctrl key, I'm used to Cmd + anything on the Mac?

Isn't it odd that devs spend a lot of time in the Terminal, but apparently aren't as obsessed about the inconsistent keybindings vs the rest of macOS there?

jamil72• 5 years ago

There are plenty of good arguments for Electron or using web tech but this one never really sticks for me. Users indeed care if the software runs slowly or is missing functionality, shortcuts or accessibility features they're used to but they might not know that these issues are exacerbated by using cross-platform tech. You can overcome these of course but many developers won't bother.

hn_throwaway_992• 5 years ago

In the end Electron may be slow and bloated

I'm going to push back against this just because it feels like sort of the "cool" thing to say around HN. I certainly understand some users on some hardware may have had a negative experience with Electron, but I haven't. I have never felt an Electron app (primarily Slack and Spotify) was sluggish or negatively affected my overall experience on my laptop in any way. Granted, I've always had relatively decent MacBook Pros, but this "common HN refrain" has simply never been an issue for me.

nmilo• 5 years ago

Coming from someone that has been using an old computer for a while, I could definitely tell the difference between Electron and non-Electron apps based on their speed. E.g. Spotify and Discord. They take forever to start (the worst part IMO), there's significant lag when changing pages, and they just feel bad to use. If you've never noticed it, then your computers are very good.

viktorcode3• 5 years ago

Try unplugging from the power outlet and you will notice the difference.

throw109203• 5 years ago

Granted, I've always had relatively decent MacBook Pros, but this "common HN refrain" has simply never been an issue for me.

That's exactly why it's never been an issue, and will likely never be an issue for you.

Most people (with the exception of gamers, who are still not "most people") do not have relatively recent MacBook Pros - they have machines that are significantly weaker. All of my non-gamer, non-techie friends have 4-to-7-year-old computers that are significantly weaker than my already-lackluster ultrabook that struggles to run Discord and watch a 1080p YouTube video at the same time. That is the average person's experience on desktop/laptop computers (not mobile devices).

You may never had had to deal with this, but that's because you've only used machines that are far more powerful than the median.

robertoandred• 5 years ago

Maybe for something like Spotify it doesn’t matter, but what about a real app?

Why doesn’t VS Code have macOS’s native file name/location controls in the title bar? Why does it freak out if I move a file while it’s open?

BalinKing• 5 years ago

a real app

This is just moving the goalposts.

linguae3• 5 years ago

It's possible to make cross-platform apps look native, but it's much harder work to make cross-platform apps act native. For example, there are themes that make an XFCE desktop look like Mac OS 9 or Windows 2000, but it doesn't make applications behave like native Mac OS 9 or Windows 2000 applications. This is not just a criticism of Electron; this criticism extends to many other cross-platform toolkits. Using non-native controls, for example, has accessibility consequences if the cross-platform toolkit does not properly hook with the native platform's accessibility API.

A cross-platform toolkit that implemented compliant looks and behaviors across all of its supported platforms would be an amazing thing.

klabb35• 5 years ago

Using non-native controls, for example, has accessibility consequences

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't people with serious accessibility needs typically prefer web because there are way more tools optimized for web than for native?

dmitriid3• 5 years ago

People often say they want apps to look "native", but really most people I have met don't really care

They do. It's just that they are not technical enough to say "I don't want a web based app".

They say "this app is slow". "Why is my computer hot all the time?". "Why doesn't my screenreader work in the app?". "Why can't I use my keyboard the way I use it in other apps?" "Why can't it keep window size and location"

And a thousand other questions.

dmitriid3• 5 years ago

I'll add another one of "user doesn't care". They do: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29930397 It's a thousand little things.

viktorcode3• 5 years ago

That's maybe a good argument for a product manager, but very poor one for the end users.

Users don't like slow and bloated. Given equal choice users prefer small and fast. Of course, they are okay with Spotify client, because there's no native Spotify client with the same functionality. People want to have the service, but don't think that everyone is okay with how this service is packaged.

klabb35• 5 years ago

Electron is bloated because it's vendoring two major pieces of software (chrome and node). The binary size and memory footprint can be solved with some minor help from platforms (already in progress - see webview). Web itself is more than fast enough for GUI, and is incredibly optimized, both layout and js engines (or wasm, if that's your thing).

jolux9• 5 years ago

The best part of this article is this comment from Plume:

This has always been wrong, because it completely discounts the advantages of the web. Cross-platform compatibility makes an app greater. No installation makes an app better. Simple collaboration and sharing with anyone, including people on weird devices like Chromebooks, makes an app greater. Automatic updating makes an app greater. Being able to open the app I normally use on my desktop on my phone in a pinch makes an app greater. Not locking me into using a Mac makes an app greater.

I'm all-in on the Apple ecosystem, but collaboration and universal access on all platforms and automatic updates are considered table stakes for growth-focused products (edit: most products that normal people care about) these days. The cost-benefit analysis of using Mac apps when I have to collaborate with people so often just doesn't pencil out in favor of native apps for most of the things I do. The few places where it does are things like Notes, which is a first party app that all Apple users have, but even then it's a pain for people on other platforms to collaborate.

Forgot about all the Unix stuff. That part is easy to fix if they care about it. If Apple still wants the Mac to succeed as a native platform, they will have to solve enough of these problems for their developers that the Mac is a competitive native platform to the web. I don't really see a way forward for that strategy except building some sort of cross-platform UI toolkit, whether that means web apps run natively on the Mac or Mac apps run natively on the web and other platforms or what. Microsoft has been working fairly aggressively in integrating Windows with Android apps and building a new cross-platform app toolkit. Without progress on this front, I predict continuing decline of the Mac as a developer platform.

aaaaaaaaaaab3• 5 years ago

growth-focused products

Yuck, no thanks. Can we just have good products?

groby_b• 5 years ago

What do you think pays for these good products?

Building high-quality software costs money. If you produce consumer software, growth is a must to finance that. Some smaller efforts can certainly live with organic growth, but it's rare.

ILMostro7• 5 years ago

They have enough money to solve any problem, including through acquisitions of potential rival technology. They also have enough influence to steer standards in a way that suits them. I haven't been interested enough to check, but I just assumed that their developer ecosystem was healthy enough; other than push-back against the fees in the appstore.

Although, I had also assumed that developers would be moving toward web-based apps anyway.

jolux9• 5 years ago

I think Figma is a good example of a product that spells trouble for Apple's Mac platform strategy. It is the exact kind of app you would have expected to be Mac-first or Mac-exclusive (like Sketch!) just ten years ago or so (highly visual, with a primary audience of designers, who historically have used Macs).

But with WebAssembly and other advancements in web technology, the performance of Figma can rival and even exceed that of native apps, and it beats the pants off Sketch for collaboration and cross-platform compatibility. Figma is just a better product, and that's in large part due to being web-native. You cannot make a Mac app to compete with it without putting enormous resources towards all of the things it gets for free by being on the web.

hn_throwaway_992• 5 years ago

In addition to this, I think one thing many people discount is that when you have a good cross-platform dev experience, your devs can actually build more features that you care about much faster than if they're porting and debugging for every app platform. Obviously some amount of cross-platform validation and debugging is always necessary, but the simple fact is that OSes are just not differentiated enough these days to make me think "Oh yay, I'm so glad this developer spent months on the perfect 'native experience'" - when they actually could have been building shit I really need.

Wowfunhappy5• 5 years ago

Your devs can actually build more features that you care about much faster than if they're porting and debugging for every app platform.

But do I care about those features? Do they actually make the software better?

I believe a major reason software gets worse over time is because companies add features which detract from the app's core purpose and make it more difficult to use. "Oh, you like Dropbox because it's a reliable way to sync files between computers? Great, let's add in a password manager and a word processor!"

aikinai2• 5 years ago

when they actually could have been building shit I really need.

The shit I really need is almost always what I would have gotten if the developer had focused on a "perfect native experience" in the first place. Multi-window support, keyboard shortcuts, scripting support, better performance, etc. I find myself wishing for those improvements 10x more than wishing for some "feature."

badsectoracula5• 5 years ago

The best part of this article is this comment

For me that was the worst part since...

Cross-platform compatibility makes an app greater

This is largely a developer's concern, not a user's concern unless the user uses multiple platforms and wants exactly the same app everywhere regardless of other issues - in practice this is a niche situation and the most people use either a single platform or two platforms that are still considerably different (ie. mobile phone and desktop/laptop) where having the same UX is actually a negative.

On the other hand, cross-platform compatibility actually makes apps lesser because they are designed with a lowest-common denominator approach where each apps uses its own controls, its own framework and libraries, etc for things that the native platform already provides - while not taking advantage (or using at a very surface level) functionality that is exclusive to the user's platform (e.g. Services on macOS - cross-platform applications either do not support it at all or have some surface support for things like text).

No installation makes an app better.

No installation in the web app sense means that the user is not in control over the applications they are using - one can't just decide to stay on an older version because the developer broke the UI in an attempt to improve the UX while having no idea how people use their application (or trying to target some imaginary "common user" that supposedly had no interest in their app but now that they "improved" the UX everyone would fall in love with it) - they have to keep using the latest and "greatest" version (a very common story). Similarly if the developer shuts down the server or closes shop or drops dead the application is forever lost.

Also installation in rarely an issue in most platforms - and macOS has the simplest among all.

Simple collaboration and sharing with anyone, including people on weird devices like Chromebooks, makes an app greater

While this can be useful functionality, in practice many web applications do not really "collaborate" with other web applications but instead just provide multiple sessions over the same application and all data is held hostage to them. Even with open source web applications that you can host yourself, it is very rare for multiple web applications to be able to share data with each other.

Automatic updating makes an app greater.

See my comment on not installing.

Being able to open the app I normally use on my desktop on my phone in a pinch makes an app greater.

This means that either the phone UX or the desktop UX are going to suffer to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of the other one. Either case does not make an app "greater".

Not locking me into using a Mac makes an app greater.

And again this is only true if you are not a macOS user.

tashoecraft• 5 years ago

You can be right as much as you want, but the majority of users do not care.

Native apps are better in so many ways, and users continue to not care. And that’s what apple is just ignoring. That’s what users like you are missing.

Underphil• 5 years ago

I hate to cherry-pick, but the comment on cross-platformness being a developer issue isn't always the case. I use Linux for everything, and an app being cross-platform increases the likelihood that I can use it.

Windows and Mac users are typically catered for.

lmm2• 5 years ago

two platforms that are still considerably different (ie. mobile phone and desktop/laptop) where having the same UX is actually a negative.

I disagree. I think most users want app foo to behave the same on their phone and their PC, even if that means not fitting in with the native platform conventions on one or both.

Similarly if the developer shuts down the server or closes shop or drops dead the application is forever lost.
Also installation in rarely an issue in most platforms - and macOS has the simplest among all.

Isn't it macOS that now prevents you from installing (native) applications from developers who have shut down, by requiring an up-to-date digital signature?

in practice many web applications do not really "collaborate" with other web applications but instead just provide multiple sessions over the same application and all data is held hostage to them.

And in practice that's the most useful thing for person-to-person collaboration.

gnud• 5 years ago

No installation makes an app better.

Yet Another Account makes an app worse.

Simple collaboration and sharing with anyone, including people on weird devices like Chromebooks, makes an app greater.

Web apps usually only lets you share within the app. You can't use the data in ways not imagined by the developers, and you force the app onto those you want to collaborate with.

Automatic updating makes an app greater.

Not really, no. It usually makes me worried the developers will pull the rug out under me.

capableweb3• 5 years ago

Yet Another Account makes an app worse.

That's an argument against having to sign up to use something, not against that you don't have to install something...

Web apps usually only lets you share within the app. You can't use the data in ways not imagined by the developers, and you force the app onto those you want to collaborate with.

Sometimes, that's true yeah. But sometimes, they offer APIs. Semantic Web tried to connect websites with each other even more. If not, they tend to be trivial to scrape. I think what the author is aiming for though, is that because it's not an native app, anyone with access to a browser, can usually access the application too.

Not really, no. It usually makes me worried the developers will pull the rug out under me.

Indeed this is one of the biggest drawbacks and benefit of the web. It always moves forward, but it always moves forward, even when I don't want it to. There is nothing worse than a redesigned web application that is worse than it's predecessor, which tends to happen a lot.

We need something in-between. Something that maybe defaults to always being on the latest version, but when the user wants, allows them to use an older version. Just like native applications (mostly) do.

hombre_fatal• 5 years ago

At least I can get the data out of web apps, for the most part, since they tend to run in a scriptable environment with built-in dev tools.

There are native apps on my phone where I can't even select the text because they didn't use the right control.

pjerem• 5 years ago

you force the app onto those you want to collaborate with.

Ah ah ! Exactly why I don’t like this trend to have Discord on every project. I don’t really care about the chat room being hosted on Discord servers. Eventually, it’s the channel owner’s choice.

But forcing me to execute the client ? Sorry but I can’t. It’s not that I don’t like it, but that I can’t trust it. Well, and that it doesn’t integrate well with any of my OS (well, except on Windows where not being integrated is now the norm for pretty much everything).

yesimahuman• 5 years ago

Sketch vs Figma is the famous example of this. By the time Sketch evolved beyond their native Mac app focus, Figma had already captured a ton of the market that wanted cross-platform and web support. Turns out that mattered a lot more than having a great native Mac app.

bromuro• 5 years ago

I can’t understand how designers can work on the browser

It’s an horrible UX. No surprise it come out in these times where user interfaces are html documents masked as inconsistent UI.

interpol_p• 5 years ago

Yeah this is something that was brought home to me when my nine year old son wanted to design his own deck of playing cards

I thought about giving up my Mac so he could use Sketch. But then my partner suggested he try Figma on his iPad

I connected my old Magic Mouse and keyboard up to his iPad, Air-dropped the initial Sketch file we had made to him, and imported it into Figma. Once I taught him the basics of components, transforms and the shapes and vector tool he was up and running (I was pretty strict about naming his layers properly!). He quickly got through the whole deck in two suits

It still bothered me though: why was Figma using windows hotkeys, except for copy and paste? Why did the layers panels sometimes not scroll all the way to the bottom, text editing was clunky, things didn't feel quite as smooth. But it did the job

novok2• 5 years ago

Figma is a C++ application compiled to webasm that paints to a blank canvas for the majority of it's usage. It's about as 'web' as the unity game engine compiling to web. In development they compile to a macOS app and use instruments to profile it.

arthur_sav2• 5 years ago

I don't know about that, most designers i know stick with Sketch. Figma captured everyone else except the designers - i guess we'll find out how useful that is.

pulsarmx• 5 years ago

The funniest thing about this is that Sketch used to claim that it was impossible for them to port it to other platforms (i.e. Windows or Linux, let alone web) because only Mac OS had the kind of APIs the app needed to even work.

Siira2• 5 years ago

Why are web apps so much worse performance-wise than cross-platform UI toolkits? Is it a result of the web’s historical baggage, or are the tradeoffs inevitable?

jolux9• 5 years ago

It depends. I have no idea why Microsoft Teams has such terrible performance on my Mac, for example. Slack is perfectly performant.

If there's a general ("inevitable") reason it's that updating the DOM (i.e., adding, removing, and changing HTML elements) is very slow compared to the function calls that native apps use to draw on the screen. That's why frameworks like React are designed to update the DOM as minimally as possible. It's also why Figma is written in C++ that compiles to WebAssembly and draws its content with WebGL instead of using the DOM.

brazzledazzle• 5 years ago

I agree with a lot of what you’ve said here but Microsoft might not be the best example. They’re good about some things but not others. They aren’t even close to feature parity in every single version of their apps, be it web, windows, macos, ios and android. The windows clients probably have the most features but even they don’t have all of the same features as their web applications. And I’m not even talking about things that don’t make sense on a given platform due to UX or other constraints. You can search your mailbox on macos but not your online archive. So you have to switch to the Outlook web app to do that.

And the web apps... there are a bunch of small issues and differences between using their webapps on macos and windows. Browser standards aren’t perfect but building cross platform web apps in 2021 is way easier than it once was. And that’s not even getting into just how awful they’ve been from the start. When they first announced O365 I was sure they’d use their expertise with their own products like excel to quickly catch up to Google and surpass them. They’ve never come close in features and, more importantly, quality.

My suspicion is that basing their webapps on SharePoint has put them in a spot where they’re iterating on features as much as they are fighting the platform’s limitations and constraints. At one point Teams couldn’t handle more than x number of users per team because they were storing the membership in a SharePoint list which has a obnoxiously small limit to the number of items it can store. This was a major pain in the ass at least as far back as SharePoint 2013 (maybe even 2010) when their on-prem implementation of one drive was based on SharePoint and people would hit the list limit as soon as they did a sync with their local machine.

Microsoft will cripple their own velocity and productivity with some products in order to prop up others. They’re ruthless from a business perspective and leverage their existing enterprise agreements and relationships which allows them to capture large numbers of users by using IT decision makers who care more about budget to force the rest of the enterprise to use it regardless of quality or appropriateness. So I doubt they’re feeling much financial pain from it but there’s a reason people have a lot of hate for some of their products and services. Developing your product around whether or not a sales team can convince a business unit to force it down users throats instead of building something people want to use has resulted in a Microsoft that has a weird lack of consistency across the board.

One thing I will give them is that they put a lot of effort into security, policy and enforcement across products. But ultimately that’s as much good architecture as it is a way to ensure they can leverage those IT teams. Does it really matter that slack won’t let an ignorant but well meaning security team frustrate your entire company by invalidating your session every 5 minutes? No. But since you can do that with O365 it shows up on a security theater checklist.

If you’re still somehow reading this sorry about the rant, went a bit off topic.

jolux9• 5 years ago

I'm not a particular fan of Microsoft products, like I said I'm all-in with Apple stuff. But they have always understood developers better than Apple has, and I think their recent strategic efforts with .NET and Android demonstrate a clearer view of where the puck is going with application development than anything Apple is doing currently.

srcreigh• 5 years ago

I don't think plume has ever tried to build a cross platform app which works on iOS. No notifications, no local storage, second class in every way.

greggman3• 5 years ago

What is special about notes vs say Google Keep? I used to use Notes on my iPhone but switched to keep since it's available everywhere (both my 3 Macs and my Gaming PC).

PS: I know there's an icloud web version of notes but Apple's crappy requiring an Apple device only code every few times I use it and the fact that it's written in some kind of non-webby framework so that each non-ASCII character takes 100-2000ms to appear just really turned me off.

aparticulate6• 5 years ago

Notes has loads more features than Keep. Things like document scanning, instantaneous capture with pencil, better sharing etc. The simple UI makes it seem like they are similar.

(I also use Keep for the same reason as you but it isn't even close in terms of functionality.)

manmal• 5 years ago

Apple is in the business of selling hardware, and developing a cross-platform toolkit would have the potential to cannibalize that. I think Swift's weak footing in other OSs is also owed to that fact.

Apple's best bet is to create an ecosystem of hardware and software that is self-sustaining and moated. I'd argue that they have been successful in that, but all those web platforms have significantly weakened the moat. You don't need apps like Sketch anymore (infact I consider Figma way superior), and you don't need most of their bundled native apps—there are great replacements that are either 3rd party native, or web based, or hybrid apps.

So how will they strengthen the moat? Probably not by sharing code with other platforms. They seem to be ready to accept that distributed systems won't go away and are obviously actively buying into that space (https://github.com/apple/swift-distributed-actors/). But, UI-wise, I'm only seeing renewed determination to push native apps: https://www.imore.com/apple-rebuilding-apple-music-native-ap.... And I think it makes sense for their bread-and-butter hardware business.

arthur_sav2• 5 years ago

Native apps feel like they're built from rock and web apps feel like they're built with paper. I don't care if the web app is available on my phone & laptop if the experience sucks on both.

yepthatsreality• 5 years ago

Side rant:

No installation makes an app better.

No install isn’t really true of web apps. It’s a fallacy in my mind, it’s more accurately continuous implicit installation. You still have to install a browser. Then that browser downloads website data which then implicitly renders UI and executes JavaScript. Which is what installation in the modern day is, download the file then setup the file to execute.

pacifika• 5 years ago

Otoh You don’t have to register an account for native apps.

friedman233• 5 years ago

Which ones? Native or not has nothing to do with requiring account registration.

collaborative• 5 years ago

I am ditching 5-year's efforts to code native apps and porting to js/wasm (as "native" as possible). Already have a beta that feels ok. Sad but true

vorpalhex• 5 years ago

Yup. Attempted to write a cross-platform app with MacOS support being a big part of it.

It basically just worked on Linux. Windows had a few odd bugs for usability. MacOS I gave up on.. despite building and testing the app on MacOS.

lenkite• 5 years ago

Can you elucidate the problems you ran into on MacOS ?

synergy20• 5 years ago

Make Mac's key-binding(yes the option-command-thing) work across non-Mac will be a good first step, after all, on the Desktop level, Mac is not even the mainstream yet, and I hope it will never be.

I tried really hard to embrace apple ecosystem since last August with a $4000 macbook pro(assigned by my employer with no other alternatives), now I apply for an exchange to any non-Mac laptop(or desktop), be it a windows or linux one. I don't want to touch Apple's product for the rest of my life.

I could list a top-10 reasons why I "hate" Mac, but I will just stop here, anything more on the subject is a waste of time.

Klonoar2• 5 years ago

Web app developers don’t need permission to deploy their code.

I think there's one ultra-nitpicky distinction I'd make here: people shipping things in a browser don't need to sign stuff.

People shipping Electron apps should probably sign their stuff. They're in the same boat as desktop app authors here. Desktop authors can also choose not to sign/notarize - many do.

The difference is that I've noticed far more Electron-based devs don't care about this and just opt not to. I don't mind signing/notarizing, but with how it's done outside of Xcode, I can't fault people for not wanting to put up with it.

Note that I'm just defining the distinction for Electron vs Desktop; I generally agree with the rest of the points made here.

Edit: formatting.

harryf• 5 years ago

At the end of this...

Why did this happen in the first place?
My answer is something I call “consistency sin”. Understanding the cause lets us avoid similar situations in the future.

Oh seen this happen. Something like...

Random boss: "Our iOS and Android apps are not consistent!"

Mobile PM/Dev: "But Android users don't care what the iOS app is like. They want the best version of our app for Android"

Random boss" "But our iOS and Android apps are not consistent!"

Mobile PM/Dev: sigh

lultimouomo• 5 years ago

This is truly one of the biggest issues when developing apps for customers. They check the app holding an iOS phone in their left hand and an Android one in their right hand, and couldn't for their own life imagine that a user is not in that situation.

magicalhippo• 5 years ago

As a random user, I'm annoyed non-OS-specific functionality is only implemented on a different platform. So I most definitely care that they're not consistent in that sense.

ary• 5 years ago

While I wholeheartedly agree I can't imagine why the author left out a key pillar of the problem: Apple's documentation has become useless and/or non-existent.

- All of the good stuff is in the Documentation Archive.

- New documentation is barely more than the function/method signatures from the API.

- Apple has the resources to do better and did so when they were significantly smaller (both in terms of employees and market cap).

They don't care.

chadcmulligan2• 5 years ago

You can make cross platform native apps with Delphi https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi

It has screen painters, drag and drop components, database access, everything you could want and is fast, it has a community edition and free trials. Catch up with the 21st century :-D

udbhavs• 5 years ago

I have seen this brought up a few times and from the website the crossplatform native claims are impressive, but I can't find any basic guide or documentation for getting started anywhere. Why is Delphi never a part of the conversation when React Native, Flutter, Ionic, Xamarin etc are discussed?

rcarmo2• 5 years ago

Because it's not as cool, mostly. It's _very_ stable tech, and thus perceived as old.

Also, nobody really wants to code in Object Pascal anymore (despite its readability, etc.).

chadcmulligan2• 5 years ago

Compared to the others you mention Delphi is streets ahead. There's a free download at https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/free-dow...

Here's some resources to get you started

There's a free book here: https://lp.embarcadero.com/Object-Pascal-Handbook-2021

and another here (pdf) (probably the best to start) https://www.marcocantu.com/edelphi/EssentialDelphi_1033_2020...

There's intro videos here https://www.embarcadero.com/resources/videos

They have a YouTube channel here, that has a lot of more in depth stuff https://www.youtube.com/c/EmbarcaderoTechnologies

There's some books by Nick Hodges (former delphi product manager) 'Coding in Delphi' and 'More coding in delphi' for more advanced stuff

The negatives with delphi are its been poorly marketed for years, and it costs money to use, though the community edition is available now. Object pascal is a bit dated imho, but what makes Delphi powerful is the components, there's 2 the VCL which is the original in windows only, then fire monkey which is the new cross platform one.

If you want to see components have a look at tmssoftware.com for some drag and drop components, you can even make web applications with Delphi with their web components (they cross compile to javascript)

pornel• 5 years ago

Meanwhile, Apple is no longer leading by example, at least not in a good way, as its recent Mac apps have been Catalyst ports or weird hybrids that feel more Web or iOS than Mac.

Indeed. Home.app for macOS is an atrocious half-assed iOS port, and on macOS it feels worse than an Electron app. Why should macOS developers care about polished macOS UX when Apple has gaven up?

Second problem is that Apple's post-Aqua flat design is bland. They've made it clean and simple to the point of removing all of its character. The design is now nothing but sterile sans-serif font and rounded corners with a box shadow. You used to be able to use just Cocoa, and have an app that has a unique Mac-specific look (even if not everyone loved brushed aluminium or toothpaste buttons, these were very distinctive elements). The widgets were polished and pixel-perfect to the point you could instantly tell which apps were native, and which were merely copying the look. But now this is gone. If you stick to only Apple's UI toolkit, your application will look like a low-effort webapp styled with 5 lines of CSS.

Klonoar2• 5 years ago

If you stick to only Apple's UI toolkit, your application will look like a low-effort webapp styled with 5 lines of CSS.

I think it's pretty clear at this point that Apple's been adding the tools to do more of the kinds of designs you see over in Electron rather than "native" looking pieces. Anybody building with solely native controls in 2022 will look out of place (unless they're trying to look system-integrated, in which case you'd go the opposite way and try to blend as much as possible - the middle ground is gone now though).

Hell, the only native things you need to use from Cocoa's standard toolbox these days:

- NSToolbar (if even) - SFSymbols or other system images - NSTableView styling - Buttons, dropdowns, menus

The rest you can style however the hell you want - I would consider it the most flexible platform after HTML/CSS/JS.

aparticulate6• 5 years ago

The Mac’s Unix layer has been withering

Kind of a strange comment, updating those programs listed is a one-line string of text.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 5 years ago

I just like writing native apps. I always have. I’ve been doing it for a long time. I liken it to an impressionistic-style oil painter, in this age of photorealistic 3D artwork. The 3D work is amazing, and often takes even more effort than the oil painting, but they feel different, to make, and result in unquantifiable, visceral, differences to the viewers. Some will prefer the 3D work; others will prefer the oil painting.

Not all Apple programming has been done by the use of Apple tools. There was a significant stretch of time, when Metrowerks CodeWarrior/C++/PowerPlant was the tool of choice for serious Apple development.

We’ll see what the future brings. I’ve stuck with native Apple, through many, many dead pool sessions. Being a long-term native Apple developer means that I’ve been hearing insults, and looking up noses, for a very long time.

I am glad that I am not really competing with anyone. It’s very freeing, to be an oil painter. For me, the medium is important. I like to feel as if I can produce work that will make its users happy. It makes me happy.

donkeybeer• 5 years ago

I will say generally web applications would be like the impressionist painting and native apps the exacting 3d work if we use a more obvious criterion for the analogy.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 5 years ago

Fair point.

anonimamente• 5 years ago

A computer should still function when offline. A time will come when more people distrust the internet and return to using their computer and its apps disconnected from it, or at least highly restricting what apps try to connect to. I do this already using Simplewall because it warns and asks permission for any app or protocol that I do not specifically allow, and I end up blocking most of them, especially OS "services".

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