Apple Silicon Mac Is About to Kill Web Apps

Apple Silicon Mac Is About to Kill Web Apps(medium.com)

27 points by nimeshneema 5 years ago | 18 comments

pdpi 5 years ago |

This is a frankly ridiculous take and completely misunderstands what makes Electron attractive.

There are no "Electron-based Mac apps", because nobody is targeting the Mac specifically with those apps. What we do have is web-first apps that use Electron to provide a desktop experience (like Slack), and desktop-first apps that use Electron as a multi-platform runtime (like VS Code).

The first group tends to have webview-based "native" apps and running those on the Mac wouldn't realise any of the expected advantages of a native app. The latter group won't have any sort of native iOS app to begin with. At any rate, neither of those groups is likely to migrate to native apps because of this move.

maxcan 5 years ago | |

> This is a frankly ridiculous take and completely misunderstands what makes Electron attractive.

Came here to say that.

KabirKwatra 5 years ago | | |

Same

tecnocriollo 5 years ago |

Electron could run on Windows and Mac. If Apple promised better performance from M1 chips... Why I'd want to create an optimized native version?

dschu 5 years ago |

I think the author has a misconception of why most developers use electron instead of SwiftUI: The MS universe.

I’ve built my most recent app using electron because I could easily target both os‘es using the same code base.

This will not change with the M1 and Big Sur.

I would love to see Apple going all in with SwiftUI and implement Win10 support. But I doubt this will ever happen.

devnerd239 5 years ago |

Does this support all iOS apps? Like Instagram? If so, do we need a separate software to run them or is it directly downloadable from the Mac App Store?

hasmolo 5 years ago | |

you can run any iOS app on an M1 powered mac. that said, it opens in a window only, and emulating touch actions requires you dig out a cheat sheet hidden in menus

supermatt 5 years ago | | |

The "cheatsheet" is for gestures - some of which are the usual trackpad ones anyway. Touch actions are a click. Its bad, but its not THAT moronic.

mytailorisrich 5 years ago |

I wouldn't call an iOS app built with Electron a "web app". The title is quite misleading.

Sidetalker 5 years ago | |

Slack's iOS app is written in Obj-C and Swift[1]. I think the author's suggestion was that the macOS desktop app built with Electron will become obsolete because the superior iOS version will be able to run on macOS.

[1] https://wiredelta.com/how-was-slack-developed/

hankchinaski 5 years ago |

>The new M1 chip unifies Apple’s ecosystem and marks the end of Electron-based mac apps

the end of Electron-based mac apps for good!

griffindorite 5 years ago |

The Slack Mac App certainly consumes a lot of memory. Hopefully the iOS app addresses those issues.

pcdoodle 5 years ago |

This title sucks.

swiley 5 years ago |

Quite the opposite, it will kill electron apps which no one likes.

cmlars 5 years ago | |

I would wager that that vast majority of electron app users, have no idea they are using an electron app and wouldn’t care if they did. I’m inclined to believe that the animosity towards electron is largely held by a pretty small minority.

As a developer I use several electron apps daily on a MBP, I never give them a second thought.

The inelegance of high memory consumption is far less infuriating than the many product and UX sins committed by apps.

griffindorite 5 years ago | |

Isn't that what the author is saying as well? That Electron apps are memory hungry and eat battery

1_player 5 years ago | |

Quite the opposite, Electron apps will be even more prevalent as they'll run faster and drain much less battery.

swiley 5 years ago | | |

If you're idling most of the time (which well written GUI apps and seemingly few Electron apps do) then execution overhead affects battery drain very little.