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Comment by cdnsteve | Hacker News Reader

Can you put Electron apps in Windows store so they could run on Windows 10 S?

There's an automated packager for the Centennial/Desktop Bridge: https://github.com/felixrieseberg/electron-windows-store

Slack in the Windows Store is packaged by that. It packages the Win32 executable, so it only runs on Desktop environments.

If your codebase is adaptable enough, you can often run directly on the Windows 10 Native HTML+JS stack and cross-compile to that, either directly or maybe through Cordova if you want mobile platform reach.

(I'm wishing there were more convergence between the Electron and Cordova stacks, but writing portable code that mostly runs on both isn't terribly difficult. Every now and then it would be great to have a Cordova plugin in Electron or vice versa.)

Well yes. Electron apps are still win32 apps underneath.

There's also a 'native' HTML+JS stack for UWP/Win10.

The Windows Store already supports HTML/JS-based apps, but not using electron. (It uses Microsoft Edge's engine IIRC)

Let's be honest though, no one is going through the trouble to port their app to Windows 10 only HTML and JS. I don't think MS has even talked about that stack at their recent developer conferences.

It's not a "sexy" stack to talk about, but I don't think it is going anywhere. There are quite a few Windows Store applications built on it, including several first party applications from Microsoft themselves. It's a quiet workhorse stack that does the job and gets out of the way. So quiet I don't think people often realize when an app is built on it.

The Store app is built on it.

>isn't sexy

But why not?

The singular issue with electron is how fucking huge the simplest of apps have to be. I see desktop HTML/JS as a RUNTIME being a very near-future standard.

I'm sure electron has thought about it. It couldn't possibly be any bigger of a hassle than the java runtime.

For what it is worth, I agree. The web browser is a required component of operating systems these days and first class/"native" support for web applications is a standard that we should celebrate and encourage.

I don't think it is "sexy" to most developers right now because there are still a lot of developers that still cling to ancient "native" control toolkits, ancient ideas that web platform is already the main UI platform for the majority of user these days, and for whatever reasons dislike HTML and JS for application development. You see a lot of the complaints here on HN every time Electron or Cordova are brought up.

I'm sure Microsoft knows they don't get a lot of enthusiasm from a lot of developers for the native Windows 10 web stack, so I'm not surprised they underplay it at conferences. Those of us that do care know we can follow the Edge team blogs and know that UWP API enhancements benefit all three main stacks.

You can use that but you can also bundle Electron apps with WebKit/Blink if you want. Both cases are possible but using the "Windows way" leads to smaller downloads since it doesn't require bundling the engine.

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