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Comment by mikewarot | Hacker News Reader

The main advantage of writing a program instead of an app is that you can utilize all of the power of the underlying operating system to give the user an experience that is fast, user friendly, and efficient.

If everyone is willing to throw that away, say goodbye to general purpose computing, and say welcome to your new App Store Overlords.

The last GUI program I wrote in Lazarus worked out to a 24 megabyte executable, because I left the debug information in. It used MySQL and did a lot of computing with gear information. I didn't have to sign the code, or ask ANYONE's permission to deploy it.

I'm not giving up general purpose computing, neither should you.

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> The last GUI program I wrote in Lazarus worked out to a 24 megabyte executable, because I left the debug information in. It used MySQL and did a lot of computing with gear information. I didn't have to sign the code, or ask ANYONE's permission to deploy it.

I agree with this in some context, I bought the device, I own it and I should be able to use it as I see fit.

However not all uses are equal. Take my elderly mother, her needs are much different and in fact centralized distribution channels, app reviews, signing etc are all mechanisms which benefit her.

My limited experience with App stores is that there are usually a large number of "fake" apps that are indistinguishable from the real thing. Has this been addressed on the platforms you're familiar with?

That's a fair comment. But I believe the number of these is probably a small percentage given the size of the stores (at least for Apple). At least in the case of my mother, she has somewhere to go to when there is a problem.

I am not discounting the personal computer as a utility, but app stores and restrictions for some are not a hinderance either. With a mac (I am not sure about windows, I gather with ARM it is not possible), the ability to be in a hybrid mode suits most cases.

A mobile device at least from an Apple perspective is not a general computing device. Android on the other hand is more general purpose. But even with Apple's case there are ways to deploy your own app to your own device.

At least in the desktop space there is a choice, and it's not bad thing.

I have seen most fakes in Apple store, especially targeting apps that weren't available in App Store by itself - so if you were searching, you wouldn't get any good result out.

Who said anything about giving up? But if you need a UI that's cross-platform compatible with literally zero effort, good luck beating something like React/Vue running in a webview that works both online, offline, and happily on android and ios to boot.

You can do that with JavaFX as well actually. Not many people know about it or do it but you can compile the same codebase to Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS. It's not particularly high effort. You can get native binaries without JIT compilation out the other end.

Having created JavaFX apps in the past: that's comparing mopeds to racecars, because the actual code writing part in JavaFX is so much more tedious. The upside of moving fast and breaking things (which you're absolutely going to with a webview app) is that you move REALLY fast, and breaking things is almost trivially fixed because everything lets you either look at the dev console directly, or attach a dev console in seconds, and off you go setting your breakpoints and var watchers.

(and as always, how bad you break things and how quickly you can determine where and how to fix it has nothing to do with the choice in tech, and everything to do with your experience as a software engineer, or "dev" as we apparently call folks these days)

More tedious than HTML? That's a surprise. Java is more verbose than JavaScript it's true, but I've been using Kotlin for years and Kotlin is more concise than both. HTML doesn't even have much of a widget library beyond a few basics, so to get even close to the basics JavaFX provides you need to import a whole pile of libraries.

I'm curious to learn more about the dev console thing. The dev console is a nice thing but you're talking about breakpoints and watches. Any IDE has a great integrated debugger, and with JavaFX you can step into the entire GUI framework right now to where it issues draw calls to Direct3D or OpenGL, so it's far more debuggable than a webview. I would understand more if you were talking about things like the network explorer views, but debugging? Java debuggers are great!

PWAs and Electron apps don’t depend on walled gardens and app stores - they’re every bit as open by default.

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