Apple App Store frontend source code archive

(github.com)

173 points | by redbell 2 days ago ago

37 comments

  • redbell 3 hours ago

    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...

  • namegulf 30 minutes ago

    Still not sure What was the excitement about.

    Was it, HTML, CSS & Javascript?

    • Yaina 13 minutes ago

      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

      • no_wizard 5 minutes ago

        I wonder what the heck @jet is. Never heard of that before. Must be an internal lib?

  • wackget 28 minutes ago

    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/

    • samdoesnothing 22 minutes ago

      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 5 minutes ago

        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.

  • dzonga 2 days ago

    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

    • namegulf 26 minutes ago

      sourcemaps are not for learning, it's for debugging

    • zerr 3 hours ago

      Probably due to usage of fat front end frameworks which also include whole business logics.

  • ChrisMarshallNY 4 hours ago

    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).

  • zb3 3 hours ago

    Damn, I was about to clone this but it's now taken down :(

  • burntice 3 hours ago

    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?!

    • cyral 3 hours ago

      This is the source for the web version of the app store

      • elpakal 11 minutes ago

        which is definitely not buttery smooth, I use it every day

  • andoando 2 days ago

    App store uses svelte? :o

    • ranger_danger 4 hours ago

      And the Windows 11 start menu is just React Native. Strange times indeed.

      • dlivingston 4 hours ago

        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 2 hours ago

          Personally I love it. HTML/CSS is still the best, most well documented and familiar gui framework

      • hebelehubele 4 hours ago

        What the fuck. Does that mean alternative start menus (e.g. Stardock Start11) are provably faster & lighter on resources?

        • Chabsff 3 hours ago

          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.

    • zote 2 days ago

      Apple Music uses Svelte too

      • qn9n 13 hours ago

        And Apple Podcasts

  • zb3 3 hours ago

    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)

  • lapcat 3 hours ago

    I downloaded the code from the repository yesterday, but it's really not very interesting.

  • nacozarina 15 hours ago

    hilarious —- great score !

  • OCTAGRAM a day ago

    There was Cappucino by ex-Apple employees, and actual Apple devs had SproutCore. So where did they go? Why some unknown libraries?

    • afavour 4 hours ago

      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 14 hours ago

      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.

  • AbstractH24 2 days ago

    Just came here to post this.

    Curious if it was done intentionally or simply due to hurrying.

    • isodev 20 hours ago

      It's not a bug! Websites are supposed to have human-readable markup and scripts.

    • rxliuli 2 days ago

      It appears to have been an accident now - they fixed the issue two hours after I posted on Reddit.

      • AbstractH24 a day ago

        Curious if you get any sort of takedown notice.

        • rxliuli a day ago

          Haven't received it yet.

    • phillipseamore 2 days ago

      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.