Re:Apple says game streaming services violate App Store poli...
by pier25 on Saturday August 08, 2020 @12:56PM
(#24093108)
> provides little benefit but takes 30%
I understand the MAS is not a great fit for all use cases, but IMO this statement is wrong for the use cases where the MAS is a good fit.
I used the MAS as a dev, and it adds other benefits such as updates, cloud storage, etc.
I used it specifically for an education app and it was just great to tell macOS users to simply download it from the MAS and let it handle the updates from there.
Implementing updates on your own is not trivial in a desktop app. Before using the MAS we used Electron with Squirrel. We had to manage a server exclusively for the updates. Squirrel worked great in macOS but in Windows it was a nightmare. Also the Electron apps were huge, as you probably know.
For the MAS app, we kept the web UI but moved to Swift + WKWebView. The app went from a 50MB download to about 4MB. Memory consumption also decreased dramatically, I think the Swift version used something like 10-15MB of RAM.
I understand the MAS is not a great fit for all use cases, but IMO this statement is wrong for the use cases where the MAS is a good fit.
I used the MAS as a dev, and it adds other benefits such as updates, cloud storage, etc.
I used it specifically for an education app and it was just great to tell macOS users to simply download it from the MAS and let it handle the updates from there.
Implementing updates on your own is not trivial in a desktop app. Before using the MAS we used Electron with Squirrel. We had to manage a server exclusively for the updates. Squirrel worked great in macOS but in Windows it was a nightmare. Also the Electron apps were huge, as you probably know.
For the MAS app, we kept the web UI but moved to Swift + WKWebView. The app went from a 50MB download to about 4MB. Memory consumption also decreased dramatically, I think the Swift version used something like 10-15MB of RAM.