It's funny to me that there's no acknowledgment that high fidelity web apps and electron apps are taking the wind out of the sails of platform specific desktop app development.
Indeed — they often don’t respect the keyboard shortcuts I’ve come to expect, tab behaviour for keyboard navigation, UI signals that show default enter/space key actions, drag and drop, non-native UI designs, right-click context menus, amongst countless other things. Electron apps “work” but they are noticeably inferior on macOS (and probably on every other platform too).
“High fidelity” web apps, and their electron kin are pretty terrible at basic macOS tasks - they generally use non-Mac shortcuts, and lack many of the standard Mac-isms that make mac software pleasant (for Mac users - obviously matching windows behavior for windows users is fine).
To be completely clear: this isn’t just a “web apps being limited by the browser” issue, because the same problems exist in electron apps.
The core problem I think for new Mac apps is the market for apps that charge enough to cover dev costs has shrunk considerably.
The App Store model encourages software that is priced far too low to be cover costs unless you sell in sufficient quantities, but at the same time it’s created the idea that apps should be less than $10 even on non-mobile platforms. The result is that if you’re not a triple-A game with marketing to match you’re unlikely to be able to charge $60.
That means an indie dev needs to serve as many people as possible, as cheaply as possible. Whether Mac users like it or not that will in general mean things like electron or crummy iOS ports. Even apple’s own catalyst apps can be annoyingly buggy, what hope does an indie dev have?
That may be true today but it feels like it's changing, though. And I think it kind of aligns with what the authors are talking about. Apps started today are natively collaborative and they're written with web technology.
gumby|4 years ago
neilalexander|4 years ago
Razengan|4 years ago
olliej|4 years ago
To be completely clear: this isn’t just a “web apps being limited by the browser” issue, because the same problems exist in electron apps.
The core problem I think for new Mac apps is the market for apps that charge enough to cover dev costs has shrunk considerably.
The App Store model encourages software that is priced far too low to be cover costs unless you sell in sufficient quantities, but at the same time it’s created the idea that apps should be less than $10 even on non-mobile platforms. The result is that if you’re not a triple-A game with marketing to match you’re unlikely to be able to charge $60.
That means an indie dev needs to serve as many people as possible, as cheaply as possible. Whether Mac users like it or not that will in general mean things like electron or crummy iOS ports. Even apple’s own catalyst apps can be annoyingly buggy, what hope does an indie dev have?
Torwald|4 years ago
AlabasterAxe|4 years ago
lupire|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
lkxijlewlf|4 years ago
ohCh6zos|4 years ago
infinityio|4 years ago