No but perhaps I wasn't being clear what I meant sorry.

What I mean is that using web view make it way easier to layout out networked assets. At least thats my experience having worked with both.

WebView can work, but with no loading meters or error displays it's very painful. If a third-party developer released an app using WebViews the way Apple does, they would get a ton of complaints.

Sure I am not saying their implementation is good, just that the reason why they use it is most probably because it's much less painful to layout.

What I mean is that laying out using xcode isn't as easy as using a web view for the kind of layout that are needed for something like the app store.

Not sure why this is such a crazy thing to say that I need to be down voted for it.

100% with you. I love AppKit, but the amount of code required to make a simple custom button is insane. What is 5 seconds of CSS takes a good 30 minutes of wrangling with NSButton/NSButtonCell. The very existence of PaintCode is an indictment.

It doesn't make sense to say that WebViews aren't "native". With a little effort they can be made to blend in perfectly. It's the same CoreGraphics.

I think that’s countered a bit by less of a need for custom widgets. In fact I’d argue that one of the big points of appeal for native Mac apps is that they eschew tons of custom widgets in favor of the standard system kit whenever possible.

There’s also a good deal of power that you gain when writing custom Cocoa widgets; drawing is usually done with Core Graphics, which is a blazing fast, extremely capable C API. There’s a lot you can do in custom Cocoa widgets that would be impractical or dog slow with HTML+CSS+JS.

EDIT: Also, one big, big difference between WebView apps and AppKit apps is that while WebView apps might get their appearance reasonably close to native, they almost always miss the mark entirely when it comes to widget behavior.

Yes but the context is the mac app store which is much more a web-layout than a native app layout.

That's the problem, yes.

> What is 5 seconds of CSS takes a good 30 minutes of wrangling with NSButton/NSButtonCell. The very existence of PaintCode is an indictment.

Imperative graphics and view hierarchies certainly make simple things tedious, but they'll never match the DOM's ability to occasionally make simple things nigh-impossible either.

I'm curious, if you call drawRect ugly then what do you call the menagerie of frameworks required to strong-arm the declarative environment of the web into the simplest of desktop tasks (shadow DOM, anyone?) Pot, kettle?

> With a little effort they can be made to blend in perfectly.

I'll believe it when I see it. I'll grant you that this works OK on windows, but that's due to MS making the decision to bring the widget kit down to web-level rather than the other way around. Meanwhile, iTunes and the AppStore continue the long and well-established tradition of poor integration.

> It's the same CoreGraphics.

Hidden behind a dozen trendy frameworks, a hundred bloated abstractions, and a thousand crusty layout engine implementation details to glue it all together.

The context is layout not logic. There is a world of difference between the flexibility and portability of web formatting and desktop formatting.

Apps like Uber, Instagram and others use the hybrid approach.