Yes I think Apple is to blame there. Electron is so prominent that they should have detected the problem and found a solution well before the general release.
Apple releases betas of their OS specifically so that developers can try their apps on them. macOS is so prominent that Electron-using developers should have detected the problem and found a solution well before the general release.
Well, I personally know of cases Apple did explicit patching for specific apps to keep them working / avoid breaking.
My simple guess is that slipped QA or wasn’t escalated from Apple’s feedback.
Considering the amount of electron apps, expecting all developers and all users to update all their app (and guessing which one is Electron based) isn’t good user-experience.
Let’s say the change is needed in the OS, you’d expect transition time.
Also, a good UX on OS would be to notify user this app is using some API in a way that could reduce experience. but guessing and expecting only the developer and user parties without the OS side is making less sense imho.
I don't do desktop applications professionally (firmware is my thing) but I would balk at the suggestion that I should run a beta OS on the machine that pays my rent.
What portion of, say, Slack devs actually run a MacOS beta at work? Are they regular devs, or are they in QA/test? It seems to me like the latter is the far more appropriate team for this.
I write macOS software (among other things). I always run the earlier betas on another machine for testing. The primary dev box gets the beta a few weeks before release. It’s never been a problem.
This is 100% on electron, they didn’t do their due diligence that every Mac & iOS dev goes through every summer before the next release. It’s been two decades of the same song and dance every year. There’s just no excuse.
Apple just doesn’t work that way, and hasn’t since I worked there in the 90s. Private APIs are out of bounds. It’s like a “the FBI doesn’t negotiate with kidnappers” situation.
Apple's private API situation was also much more nuanced, back in the days if Adobe was using an API, private or not, it probably wouldn't be degraded in any way until the core applications moved forward. Current Apple might not give a damn though.
Yeah true, there was a period when they couldn’t really afford to annoy the big developers. But it doesn’t seem like the underlying attitude changed much!
Sure, someone will depend on it, we all ignored "private" vs "public" at least once. Okay to do and okay to be mad when your thing breaks because you decided to depend on it? Nope.
That's a good initial step. But once it got put on a zillion computers, there should have been additional mitigation steps.
In an ideal situation, they would have noticed the widespread use of this private function a long time ago, put a note on the bug report that it works around, and after they fixed the bug they would have reached out to electron to have them remove that access.
If you owe the bank $100 and don't pay, that's your problem: you'll get in trouble for it, and the bank isn't going to be unduly harmed.
If you owe the bank $100 million and don't pay, that's the bank's problem: the loss of that $100 million is going to hit the bank hard, whether or not they're the ones who are in the right and regardless of how much trouble you get in over it.
Likewise, if you're a small time app developer and you use a private method that gets yanked and your app breaks, that's your problem: your users are going to be pissed at you, you'll take the reputational damage, and even if your users are also pissed at the OS vendor they represent such a small group of individuals that the OS vendor isn't going to be unduly harmed by that.
If, on the other hand, you develop one of the most widely used frameworks and you use a private method that gets yanked and your app breaks, that's the OS vendor's problem: the number of people who are pissed off at them (rightly or wrongly) is now much larger and they're going to take some reputational damage over it, whether or not they're the ones who have the moral high ground and regardless of how much reputational damage you also take.
And that's exactly what we're seeing here: it doesn't matter that Electron used an API they weren't supposed to, people are pissed at Apple about this and Apple, rightly or wrongly, has to contend with that reputational damage if they don't take steps to prevent this sort of thing before it happens (like letting the developers know that private-on-paper API is going to be yanked in advance, or making it mechanically impossible for anyone outside of Apple's own code to invoke that API long before someone depends on it).
Yes, sorry, it wasn't clear. I meant this quote has nothing in common with this situation we're talking about.
> has to contend with that reputational damage if they don't take steps to prevent this sort of thing before it happens (like letting the developers know that private-on-paper API is going to be yanked in advance, or making it mechanically impossible for anyone outside of Apple's own code to invoke that API long before someone depends on it).
Again, that is what dev builds are for. Developers had months to verify their software still works on an OS that has confirmed release date and has very high ration of users that install the latest and greatest.
That's true, and yet they didn't. We can (rightfully) blame them for that, but people are still pissed off at Apple, and whether or not they deserve it they still suffer the reputational damage.
That's why this quote is relevant to this situation: it's totally Electron's fault for not adequately testing their framework against Apple's latest developer builds, but Apple could have absolutely done more to minimize the chance that Electron would make a mistake like this and cause lots of folks to be mad at Apple over it.
Should Apple be required to? No. Will they still suffer reputational damage if they don't and something like this happens? Yes.
