But Apple doesn't enjoy the luxury of solving this problem in a nuanced way, because Mac apps are not acting from a position of strength. I suspect you aren't downloading lots of Mac apps today, and the reason is not insufficient sandboxing, but instead the limited selection, annoying install experience, etc. These are the problems that Apple must fix first.
> Perhaps the emergence of Electron is a wake up call for Apple and Microsoft, there is clearly a demand for creating applications with web technologies
34 years ago, the Mac was new and generated developer excitement. But Apple was afraid the Mac would be dragged down via shitty DOS ports of apps like e.g. WordPerfect. Apple's response was to set a high bar via first-party "killer apps" like MacWrite, which would embarrass any such DOS ports. It worked: the Mac set the desktop publishing standard for years, decades even, and arguably still dominates.
Yes, there's a demand for developing apps with web technologies, but embracing that is a losing strategy for Apple. Why should I buy a Mac to run web apps that run equally well on a Chinese Chromebook? That's ceding any software advantage.
Instead Apple should leverage the Mac's unique software strengths. Aggressively evolve the Mac's unique "UI vocabulary" and application frameworks. Empower, not punish, the dedicated and passionate developer community. Ship love to the userbase (perhaps the only one in existence) that's willing to open their wallets for high-quality desktop software. And yes, tolerate web-tech apps too - but embarrass them!
Yes it's still much better than the typical Windows installer experience, but zero-install web apps are now setting the bar.
Web apps in the browser are OS-Agonstic and Electron apps can be easily made cross-platform.
More specifically:
1. Superior performance. Native apps are just faster. They launch faster. They use an order of magnitude less memory. Multithreading via GCD is much much nicer than Web Workers. Large files are better supported. You can have very large tables. etc.
2. They properly implement Mac UI idioms. By comparison even the nicest Electron-like app (VSCode) violates many longstanding expectations: it doesn't properly highlight the menu bar when typing a key equivalent, menu items don't disable properly, the text highlight color is wrong, text selection anchors incorrectly, no column selection, text drag and drop is badly broken, undo doesn't know what it's undoing, undo coalesces incorrectly, hell even arrow keys sometimes go the wrong way. It's an island app doing its own thing.
The theory of the Mac is to establish a set of UI conventions. When you launched a new app, you would already know how to use most of it, because it was a Mac app. It looks and behaves like other apps, so you feel at home already. And as a developer, you get the right behavior now and in the future, for free.
But if every developer builds a cross-platform app with a custom framework and appearance and behavior and UI, then the OS loses its role in defining the platform conventions. In that event, what's the point in having more than one OS?
From a developer point of view, it's just better to make a Web App or a Electron App that will be used by everyone irregardless of their OS. Not only it's less of a hassle to develop but also guarantees that more people are gonna use it.
I'd also argue that VS Code isn't much worse off than most native code editors. Most code editors outside of Xcode don't use NSTextView and so have to implement all of the behavior themselves anyhow. For example, as far as I'm aware Sublime Text pretty much implements just as much of the core editing logic as VS Code does.
I'm not denying your complaints, of course--they're valid--but I don't think the gap between native and Web/Electron is as big as you're implying.
Whereas developing Mac apps seems to rely on a set of arcane knowledge and having been in the scene for years. The documentation for AppKit is vastly outdated and there is almost no blogging/tutorials scene so as a newbie you are basically going to be going through a lot of trial and error.
And then most of the documentation you will find is in ObjC while everyone around you is telling you to develop in Swift, but then Swift changes every few months. You open up a project from a few months ago, it doesn't compile anymore, and you basically have to work at Apple or be a dev god to fix it.
So.... native is easier to develop for? No way.
That’s an okay decision to make if it fits your product and market needs, but it’s important not to forget the cost.
Native apps perform better, integrate better with other system services, are more power efficient, use less storage space… usually technically superior in every way, with the exception that that are less portable and in some cases more time consuming to build.
I'm not sure Apple should give up on it though, I don't want any old application I download to be able to read through the spreadsheets in my Accounting folder.
Perhaps the emergence of Electron is a wake up call for Apple and Microsoft, there is clearly a demand for creating applications with web technologies, OS developers need to respond to that rather than letting a third party eat their lunch.