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by htormey 3001 days ago
“2) iOS apps on OS X. Why? Does anybody want this? The way I see it, web apps are perfectly adequate for the desktop environment when it comes to stuff like checking my bank account or browsing Hacker News. I don't want to deal with a desktop app to do any of the stuff I can currently do via a browser. Is there actually a use case?”

Right now many new desktop apps are just badly ported web apps wrapped in electron. They are slow and eat a lot of memory as all of their UI is a being rendered in a glorified standalone chrome tab.

This is less about iOS apps on OSX and more about making it easier for the iOS developer ecosystem to build desktop apps. Right now it’s web teams that are building desktop apps because for most companies it’s too expensive to hire a dedicated desktop team. Even big apps like slack/WhatsApp use electron.

Making it easier for iOS developers to build desktop applications with the APIs they currently use should hopefully lead to higher quality apps.
3 comments
so33 3001 days ago
The best case scenario is that Apple has cooked up some sort of awesome translation layer between the Cocoa Touch APIs and Cocoa, letting iOS apps function almost like native macOS apps. Hopefully this will happen. But I won't let it go past hope.
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emodendroket 3001 days ago
Don't a number of iOS apps use essentially the same technique?
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htormey 3001 days ago
Most if not all of the top 100 mobile apps are native applications.

Hybrid mobile frameworks like Cordova tend to get a bad rap these days especially with the arrival of more performant alternatives like React Native.

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emodendroket 3001 days ago
I avoid installing apps for most sites, but I kind of remember in the early days, anyway, people were just sneaking a Web view in there for most of the functionality in many apps.
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bad_user 3001 days ago
If you can build an iOS app, you can build a macOS app too.

Electron apps are not built by iOS developers, but by developers like myself who would rather hit 3 birds with one stone ;-)

And no, nothing would change, except the MacBook will get to be even more shitty. We'll remember fondly the MacBook Pro of year 2015 as the last model that didn't suck.

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