Bring your game to Mac, Part 1: Make a game plan

developer.apple.com

13 points·generichuman··5 comments

everyone I've ever spoken to developing for Apple, including many of the biggest apps and technology companies, describe the horror show that is submitting to either the Mac or iOS app stores.

not only do you know that Apple is actively working to create internal copies of the best public work, but their policies are so opaque and anti competitive that it's just not worth it for most. Go onto the Mac app store, pick a category that Apple owns on its devices (so browsers against Safari for example) and see how many of the biggest ones are even available on the Mac App Store. None? That's not because they don't submit to the store, it's because some rejects them.

Can't you just install firefox from mozilla.org ?

web browsers on ios can't ship their own rendering engine. It's all apple rendering engine internally, with a skin for chrome/firefox/safari etc.

edit: aha, you mean on the mac.

> That's not because they don't submit to the store, it's because some rejects them.

Citation needed.

Browsers are a special category. They are a runtime for remote code which has to be sandboxed correctly and as such crucial for security and the promise of privacy Apple makes. I don't trust Apple absolutely, but they seem to be committed to privacy and have the correct incentives to fix things on iOS. Besides, browsers seems to become 'the OS' and grab all available memory for all the stuff you've got open. Now imagine having two or more of those things open on an iPhone with 4Gb memory.

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