| ▲ | App Store web has exposed all its source code(reddit.com) |
| 209 points by redbell 2 days ago | 74 comments |
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| ▲ | firecall 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| You mean it's no longer built with WebObjects! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebObjects |
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| ▲ | themafia 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Java has it's place but it was delivered in such a way that it created an immense amount of collateral damage and lasting technical debt. | | |
| ▲ | firecall 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I was kinda trying being funny or sarcastic or something like that :-) And amusing to myself how many people actually remember or know what WebObjects was! |
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| ▲ | redbell 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| OP here.. Here's the original post by the author of the repo himself:
https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1onnzlj/app_store_w... |
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| ▲ | aitchnyu 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Is there any reason sourcemaps are a genuine problem? I'm out of touch with the JS world, but I wonder if code is shared between server and client and server code may show in sourcemaps. |
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| ▲ | ChrisMarshallNY 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| As a frequent user of the backend (Connect), I am skeptical that this is source that you want to reproduce (unless you're a scammer). |
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| ▲ | numpy-thagoras 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The source code had a very elegant and systematic use of intents (including prefetched intents) and a dependency injection container. The pattern itself is a little bit different, has some conceptual overhead, but it's also fairly clean and scaleable. |
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| ▲ | paulddraper 22 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I remember when all websites “exposed” their source code. |
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| ▲ | dzonga 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| sourcemaps should be enabled -- that's how people learn. a lot of people learned to code on the web via viewsource - now we are obfuscating the code |
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| ▲ | namegulf 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | sourcemaps are not for learning, it's for debugging | | |
| ▲ | embedding-shape 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Some sites want to ship small bundles to the client by default, sourcemaps enables that + you get to introspect it because it's downloaded only when requested. Literally best of both worlds :) | | |
| ▲ | samdoesnothing 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I love shipping source maps for my stuff bc it lets other developers take a peek and I love doing that with other peoples sites :) |
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| ▲ | silverwind 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yep, sourcemaps are essential to get usable error stack traces, and that's their only purpose. | |
| ▲ | samtheprogram 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Idk why you are getting downvoted. To elaborate on your comment, if you just ship sourcemaps in production, that means you can ship minified code and track down what _actual_ source that you _aren't_ shipping to users is getting called, is in stack traces, etc. I'm not aware of a point of sourcemaps otherwise. |
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| ▲ | zerr 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Probably due to usage of fat front end frameworks which also include whole business logics. |
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| ▲ | wackget 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Honestly the site[1] is very basic and pretty damn slow. When I click into a different category there is a noticeable delay of 1-2 seconds before the new page loads. I don't want to replicate this in any of my own projects. 1: https://apps.apple.com/ |
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| ▲ | pwdisswordfishs 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Just checked, and it's pretty snappy... under Firefox... on 10-year old hardware... that was originally a Chromebook. Have you tried visiting the site on a worse machine? | |
| ▲ | samdoesnothing 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's what this type of SPA architecture leads to unfortunately. Routers should immediately display the navigated to route with place holder content / skeletons, but instead all the frameworks basically wait for all the data to load before transitioning. You can technically stream the data in but even a single awaited promise will block the navigation until it succeeds. And it's not an issue that shows up in dev because typically the data loading is instant. | | |
| ▲ | cyberax 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Nope. Skeletons are the worst. Down with the necromancy! They try to create a _perception_ of a quick answer while adding overhead and distracting people. | | |
| ▲ | bastawhiz 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Skeletons are a loading state. Get rid of skeletons and you either have unresponsiveness or flashes of nothingness | | |
| ▲ | themafia 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The flashes signify actual changes. It's a secondary signal to resume paying attention to the page. What I truly hate are animated skeleton boxes or element level spinners. Why are you trying to hold my attention on something that's not even loaded yet? We all understand the UI paradigm and implicitly understand network delay, you don't need "comfort animations" to keep me happy. I'd rather use the time to look at any of the other tabs or applications across my screens. Then the flash of content actually means something. | | |
| ▲ | shooly 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The point of skeleton loaders is to prevent the page from jumping around furiously, which would force the user to re-parse the layout (possibly) multiple times. |
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| ▲ | pier25 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Either you wait to get all the data to display the new UI, you show spinners, or you show skeletons. Personally I prefer to wait than having multiple flashes of content but I do agree no approach is perfect. | |
| ▲ | cyberax 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Which is fine. Nothingness, or a generic spinner actually don't lie to me. Skeletons lie by making an impression that the data is just about ready. So there's this failure mode where data is NOT ready because of a slow app/network, and I end up staring at a fake. Even worse, sometimes skeletons also break scrolling, so you end up even more frustrated because your controls don't work. |
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| ▲ | eviks 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's not a perception if partial load shows some information faster than waiting for the full load | |
| ▲ | samdoesnothing 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It far and away beats the alternative which is clicking on a link and nothing happening. Feedback should be within a frame or two of latency, not seconds... | | |
| ▲ | halapro 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If you let the browser change page, then you do have feedback. Super native. | |
| ▲ | kid64 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's not the only alternative, there are a range of options between those extremes. |
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| ▲ | namegulf 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Still not sure What was the excitement about. Was it, HTML, CSS & Javascript? |
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| ▲ | Yaina 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's written in Svelte, which personally I'm excited about just because it means that a pretty big tech company is using it :) And the "leak" is fun for me because you can see how they write their components haha | | |
| ▲ | arvinsim 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Can you tell me what is the number 1 feature that Svelte has over the incumbents like React? | | |
| ▲ | flowerthoughts an hour ago | parent [-] | | (Not a user, just evaluated it previously. Please correct what I got wrong.) They compile the reactivity statically, so instead of tracking effects at runtime, they generate code for it. I'd guess it means slightly more JS to download, but less initialization in runtime. However, they recently added runtime reactivity to be more flexible, so it seems to me they are becoming VueJS. |
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| ▲ | no_wizard 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I wonder what the heck @jet is. Never heard of that before. Must be an internal lib? |
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| ▲ | burntice 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Dumb question but Apple’s apps are buttery smooth. I just assumed they were using swift and not a web stack to render their UI. Am I completely wrong?! |
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| ▲ | cyral 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is the source for the web version of the app store | | |
| ▲ | elpakal 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | which is definitely not buttery smooth, I use it every day | |
| ▲ | socalgal2 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | which is the same as they use in their native app. It's just a webview |
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| ▲ | andoando 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| App store uses svelte? :o |
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| ▲ | silverwind 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | And MacOS Settings uses react. | | | |
| ▲ | zote 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Apple Music uses Svelte too | | | |
| ▲ | ranger_danger 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | And the Windows 11 start menu is just React Native. Strange times indeed. | | |
| ▲ | dlivingston 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's pretty clear to me that JavaScript is becoming the de facto standard for UI/UX programming, regardless of platform, and regardless of web vs. native targets. Even GNOME has JavaScript bindings. [0] [0]: https://gjs.guide/ | | |
| ▲ | andoando 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Personally I love it. HTML/CSS is still the best, most well documented and familiar gui framework | | |
| ▲ | NooneAtAll3 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | html/css yes js? get that thing off of me | |
| ▲ | ranger_danger 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The problem is performance... requiring a web browser to draw a UI takes a LOT of CPU and memory, and not all devices have enough power to deliver a smooth experience across all potential workloads. I worry that every year we keep increasing our processing requirements and bloat without good reason for it. Why should every Windows release require a faster and faster CPU, and more and more RAM? The recommended amount of memory for Windows 95 was 8 megabytes, and for Windows 11 it is 8 gigabytes. Why is this not horrifying? My small Linux system with openbox GUI barely cracks 100MB memory usage in 2025. | | |
| ▲ | Rohansi 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > requiring a web browser to draw a UI takes a LOT of CPU and memory What makes a browser so much more inefficient vs. other UI frameworks? Is it really the browser's fault or the website's you're visiting? | |
| ▲ | edoceo 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There are slim webviews, that can do core HTML and CSS, make a nice UI and not chew all the RAM. | |
| ▲ | shooly 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Why should every Windows release require a faster and faster CPU, and more and more RAM? I don't know. But does it? It doesn't seem like you verified that yourself - you're comparing stated recommended specs of Windows to actual usage of Linux. |
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| ▲ | samdoesnothing 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Have you used other ones? Not a dig, I've primarily used HTML/CSS for UIs and have been playing around with Compose recently and haven't made up my mind what I like more. | | |
| ▲ | nish__ 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Same here. I've grown to really love Jetpack Compose. Personally, I'd say I like it better than any other framework I've tried before. |
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| ▲ | arvinsim 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Atwood's law strikes again[0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Atwood | |
| ▲ | ranger_danger 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | From what I have seen, most of the current GNOME UI is in fact just javascript. And any plugins people write for it are also javascript. |
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| ▲ | 010101010101 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This was a false rumor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124688 | |
| ▲ | hebelehubele 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What the fuck. Does that mean alternative start menus (e.g. Stardock Start11) are provably faster & lighter on resources? | | |
| ▲ | Chabsff 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Not by virtue of that alone. A choice of tech stack can never be enough to prove anything. It only establishes a lower bound on resource usage, but there is never and upper bound as long as while() and malloc() are available. |
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| ▲ | OCTAGRAM 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There was Cappucino by ex-Apple employees, and actual Apple devs had SproutCore. So where did they go? Why some unknown libraries? |
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| ▲ | afavour 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's using Svelte, I wouldn't exactly call that unknown. Why maintain your own library when a third party one does exactly what you need? | |
| ▲ | frou_dh 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Unsurprisingly there are many frameworks/initiatives that end up falling by the wayside over the years, e.g. MacRuby was being lined up to supersede Objective-C for app development at one point. |
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| ▲ | lapcat 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I downloaded the code from the repository yesterday, but it's really not very interesting. |
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| ▲ | zb3 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Damn, I was about to clone this but it's now taken down :( |
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| ▲ | zb3 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| In case you want to save sources with the ability to fetch all possible lazy chunks, last year I made a tool to do exactly that:
https://github.com/zb3/getfrontend (note it won't work on apps.apple.com because apple has removed these sourcemaps) |
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| ▲ | nacozarina 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| hilarious —- great score ! |
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| ▲ | AbstractH24 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Just came here to post this. Curious if it was done intentionally or simply due to hurrying. |
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| ▲ | isodev a day ago | parent | next [-] | | It's not a bug! Websites are supposed to have human-readable markup and scripts. | |
| ▲ | rxliuli 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It appears to have been an accident now - they fixed the issue two hours after I posted on Reddit. | | | |
| ▲ | phillipseamore 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | The web version of the App Store? It's always been web and webview based, there used to be a preferences/default command to enable web inspector for App store, Music and more Apple apps on MacOS. |
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