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Comment by staticvar | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, if you distribute your app as an installable PWA, the google guidelines are clear for reducing install friction on Windows/Chrome/Mac/Android and Let's Encrypt is your cert generator. Perhaps platform vendors treat binaries malicious by default because it so often leads to privilege escalation. Build an app in the web context and you have a cross platform sandbox with a standardized permission model. Alas, this is not very helpful advice for folks who haven't grown up developing for the web.

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Apart from being a horrible vision of the future, it doesn't make sense trust-wise: The only thing Let's Encrypt verifies is that you control the domain name. It doesn't verify that what you serve on that domain is benign and it doesn't give users any guarantees about who you are.

In terms of apps, the only thing it ensures is that only the entity that published the app in the first place can apply updates to it. For binaries, you can get this level of trust by using any kind of digital signature for your updates.

The author of this article is the creator of the bsnes SNES emulator[1], which is surprisingly resource-intensive even as a native binary. Making it a PWA (via WebAssembly or asm.js or whatever) just isn't practical, at least with the current state of browser tech.

[1]: https://byuu.org/bsnes

OP develops emulators (and high-fidelity ones, for that matter), these have to be native apps in order to attain the required performance. Webcrap just doesn't cut it, you can go to the archive.org games showroom and watch it peg your cpu to 100% and spin up your fans (while looking terrible and adding huge latency) if you want proof. No offense intended for archive.org, they're great at what they do. But still.

> Webcrap

No need to be this dismissive.

> if you want proof

While I agree that there are many reasons to prefer native technologies in many cases, this is not a proof. A clue, at best.

It's increasingly a single platform called Chromium.

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