I was just reading the “My App is Dead in the Water” post on Hacker News and was reminded of one of the main architectural decisions behind Polar.

I don’t want to be Sharecropper.

I don’t want someone to be able to decide, overnight, that they don’t like my app and kick me off their platform. I don’t want to be at the mercy of a review committee which gets to decide if my app lives or dies.

In the case of Polar I decided to build it based on Electron because there’s (essentially) no way I can get kicked off a platform— and if I am kicked off I can at least find workarounds.

I’m trying to build something that can stand the test of time. Something that people can use 10–20 years from now.

Polar is an offline-first browser for reading and annotating books and web content. It supports capturing a web page and storing it in an offline cache enabling you to read it in the future.

A few people have mentioned that I could do this as a PWA (Progressive Web App) — using the browser caching capabilities.

I think this could work but my concern is that at some point Google or Apple could decide that small apps that cache */* basically aren’t worth the trouble due to malware concerns.

What I find interesting is how Apple kicked out this app due to this clause:

5.2.2 Third Party Sites/Services: If your app uses, accesses, monetizes access to, or displays content from a third party service, ensure that you are specifically permitted to do so under the service’s terms of use. Authorization must be provided upon request.

That sounds a LOT like what a web browser does.

Sounds a lot like Safari actually!

I guess perhaps the argument is that this site specifically focuses on a few sites — but these sites are specifically providing a free service. There’s an implied license in place.

The main challenge developers have is that not everyone can fight back by refusing to ship their app on a specific platform. There are some massive apps that would simply not be possible without deploying on iOS or Android.

What I think is frustrating here is that the user base is partly to blame.

There are core issues around privacy, security, and monetization around these platforms that should have everyone concerned but users don’t seem to care. They flock to these platforms for free services and don’t seem to mind (collectively at least) that their data is being sold or that apps are getting kicked off their favorite platforms due to the whims of their corporate overlords.

GDPR and other legislation protects us to a certain degree but it seems that half of it is wrong-headed and poorly designed.

What’s clear though is that Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and other players in the system are going to continue to do the wrong thing and make mistakes. They’ve shown over and over again that they can’t be trusted with consumer and developer rights.

To a certain extent it’s not their responsibility. If Google tries to do the right thing this leaves and opening for another company to do the wrong thing and make a massive amount of cash.

Independent software developers are going to have to start standing together and push for fair access to these platforms.

I’m not sure about the best path forward but we have a problem here and it’s going to continue to bite us unless we look it in the eye and address the problem head-on.