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Comment by drcongo | Hacker News Reader

I'm starting to wish Apple would ban Electron apps on macOS. They'd all be so much better if I never had to look at them.

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I'd be happy with some "nutritional" information alongside the usual app info. If I'm trying to choose between several note taking apps for instance (assuming they both claim to deliver a similar set of functionality) I might just go with the one that's not going to hog all my memory or drain my battery. Like nutritional labels on food it won't be completely accurate, but at least I'll know to choose the crackers over the chocolate cake if I'm trying to lose weight.

This is a really cool idea. This could start with a small but growing group of apps that opt into that transparency.

Something Apple could do is extend macOS’ finger-pointing at resource hogs. It already lists egregiously heavy apps in the battery status item, but if it did something more visible like show a notification (or maybe even paint a red outline around windows of offending apps, it’d increase user awareness and thus pressure on developers to do better when it comes to efficiency.

>It already lists egregiously heavy apps in the battery status item

Based on my own experience it should be called the Electron status item.

macOS doesn't give Apple anywhere near the leverage on desktops that iOS gives them in mobile.

If they banned Electron, the only thing that would change is you would now run the app in Chrome or not at all.

Yeah, good point. It will remain a fanciful daydream.

I feel your pain! I was furious when I learned that Slack disallowed running their iOS app on M1 Macs. They specifically opted out of this, so everyone would continue suffering their "desktop" client.

Is there not some easy way to not care what slack thinks and run it anyways?

There was, but only temporarily, as Apple disallowed running every iOS app bundle.

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