What your parent is suggesting is to make those private APIs public, or at least make a public replacement. It's not calling into question the ban, but instead saying that there's a hole in the public API Apple provide and that they should bring in new public APIs to fix that hole. The last time this came up I asked why those APIs were being used, and was sent two interesting links by users skymt and Humphrey, explaining why both Chrome and Firefox use those private APIs:

- Chrome explanation: https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/chromiu...

- Firefox explanation: https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/dramatically-red...

Windows has public APIs for doing those things. It's pretty clear that there's a need for them. Apple should absolutely design a stable solution for those, since there's a clear demand.

I don't think Firefox actually uses those private APIs. Do you have proof of this? That post only mentions CALayer and IOSurface, which are public.

I am not completely familiar with these APIs but from what I gather they are primarily intended for low level rendering and to support them means supporting frameworks that bypass all of Apple’s native APIs.

Apple does not want to do this for business reasons. Microsoft does, but they have a different business model than Apple. Apple is in the business of selling their own hardware which means they want exclusive apps. If everything is cross platform then Macs become an overpriced commodity. Why even develop macOS at that point?

Ultimately Apple wants to make users happy and I suppose therefore buying more Apple stuff.

If you think the only way to achieve that is inevitable pursuit of "exclusive apps" then fine. But I would say, a user who gets the apps they want and isn't artificially constrained in that goal is a happy user, who will be satisfied with Apple letting them achieve that.

I am all in favour of exclusive apps. I've been using Macs since the early 90s and I have long sought out the apps which show the most care and attention to detail by developers, conforming to all of the user interface guidelines. These apps feel so much better because they are predictable in a way that cross platform apps aren't.

Cross platform UI toolkits have their own internal "logic" that clashes with the native UI, frustrating user expectations.

I wonder if “these private APIs are about to change in the next release” is part of why they decided to stop giving Electron apps a pass on this.