Is anyone building electron desktop apps? What do you struggle with the most? | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone building electron desktop apps? What do you struggle with the most?

electron-react-boilerplate.com

I recently started a new product based on electron and had a ton of issues getting things to work and spent countless hours trying to make things work the way I wanted them.

For me a new electron project had to include a few requirements: - use React.js and TailwindCSS + ShadCN components - use TypeScript/Prettier/ESLint + all other dev goodies - needed a cheap way to distribute + auto-updates - analytics: Amplitude for in-app events and Mezmo for log collection - integrate Supabase for Auth + DB + edge functions - use Stripe for processing payments

I went through a lot of pain integrating all of these tools in electron. Especially frustrating was trying to get published in the Microsoft Store. Curious to hear what other people struggle with. Even if it's just a side project, not a comercial one. I'm thinking about packaging my current setup and all learnings I had along the way into a reusable boilerplate for other people who'd need something like this. It can actually save entire days of coding work. If any of you would be interested, let me know what you think about the landing page.

> Especially frustrating was trying to get published in the Microsoft Store.

Attributed to Electron?

Mainly, yes. I waisted 3 days trying to build a production AppX build that would be accepted in the store

Ooo. What kinds were the rejections?

Surprisingly, a lot of issues with the icons that are packaged in the AppX. I pretty much had to get comfortable with the manifest to get it working

Baffled by this kind of thing not working still after so many years. Or has the Windows store recently tightened its requirements?

Next time, perhaps the first step should be to submit Hello World to the store. Then raise an issue to add same to the Electron release procedure...

No idea how it was before, but trying to build an AppX file from scratch in electron and having it approved in the store in still a pain in the ass

Yes this is a bit of a pain. You don't have to ship AppX to the MS Store but it helps.

If anyone else is looking for help with this, my company makes a product [1] for distributing desktop apps that understands Electron and can package apps using AppX/MSIX and upload them to the store for you. It handles all the details including things like icons, generating the manifest, signing it and it can do all that from Linux as well which is nice if you want to deploy from CI. It's free for open source projects.

[1] https://hydraulic.dev/

Nice. Thanks.

I’d like to partner with you on this, I’m going down a very similar path. Email? The links don’t work on the site yet.

This should be AskHN - without an external link, or a website posting. Putting an unrelated link in is just bad manners.

I tried editing the title, but it doesn’t work :((.

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