Tell HN: Cisco WebEx on OS X uses the same pre-installer tricks as Zoom

And these apps deserve to have “breaking opening from Finder” and even more restrictions considering they have shown themselves to be completely untrustworthy, insecure, invasive and hostile.

Second, Zoom already runs sandboxed for the other two ways you can run their client on Apple operating systems: the (iOS) App Store and the web. The Mac sandbox is the least strict of the three. So whatever they do, it doesn't seem to be hindered by 'severe limitations'.

I have yet to hear any feature that a legitimate videoconferencing application would need that would be disallowed by the macOS sandbox. Lots of other video chat apps are on the Mac App Store, like Facebook Messenger. Is the issue simply that Zoom is being sketchy and wants to continue to be sketchy, and sandboxing would not allow them to? That's not because the MAS is 'a trap'. That's its main feature.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11298855/how-to-unpack-a...

    % pkgutil --expand foo-1.0.pkg foo_pkg
    % cd foo_pkg 
    % ls -Al
    total 352
    -rw-r--r--  1 magervalp staff  44491 16 Mar 12:19 Bom
    -rw-r--r--  1 magervalp staff    566  9 Apr 13:51 PackageInfo
    -rw-r--r--@ 1 magervalp staff  67794 16 Mar 12:19 Payload
    drwxr-xr-x  4 magervalp staff    128  9 Apr 13:51 Scripts
    % mv Payload Payload.cpio.gz
    % open Payload.cpio.gz

It is dead simple to remove a .app from the Applications folder. Sadly the pkg installers also throw files everywhere. Some software does include an uninstaller pkg, like Windows apps will include an uninstall.exe. But like windows, not everyone is meticulous about making sure you can uninstall cleanly.

Except that packaging (in the package manager sense) and distributing proprietary software for Linux, with its too-many distros and even-more-too-many library versions, is such a pain in the ass that almost no one does it in the first place.

Now AppImage, that's trivial.

Linux certainly does not make clean removal (/etc, /var, dotfiles/directories) easy.

Oh, and the “separate tool” can be pre-bundled, whether you have to download it separately is orthogonal. Pretty much every Windows program has a separate uninstaller, because on Windows you simply can’t uninstall yourself.

https://ss64.com/osx/lsbom.html

But I would vociferously disagree that an app store can be the only solution.

Giving anyone that much power over a platform is antithetical to the promise of computing.

Ergo, as GP noted, Apple has a lot of work to do on making non-app store installs a viable alternative.

1. Apple have a history of convoluted review processes and arbitrary rejections. It has a terrible reputation amongst devs.

2. Thanks to unpredictable reviews you can't time when a new upgrade becomes available to coincide with e.g. website changes, emails.

3. The App Store can't upgrade apps whilst they're running.

4. App Store 30% standard cut is far too high when a developer could sell direct from their website and pay 2% or less to a card processor.

5. The App Store UX is itself pretty bad. There's no flexibility or ability to customise how your app appears.

6. Devs are forced to allow app reviews and ratings although they may not wish to have that e.g. because users use reviews as a way to request support instead of an actual support system, but you can't reply.

7. App Stores often create problems for corporate or managed desktop deployments.

8. For software that is billed, despite exhorbitant fees their billing engines can be primitive. For instance even years after launch the Windows app store had no ability to do bulk discounts or other kinds of completely normal retail strategies. I don't know if it does these days, but I do know of an app developer who shipped via the WAS and whose business was badly hurt by Microsoft's lackadaisical attitude towards basic features like that. They could have sold big into education but couldn't get much traction because there was no way to offer reduced rates to schools.

9. App Stores enforce random policies unrelated to the core mission of app distribution. For instance the Mac App Store is extremely vague about to what extent plugin mechanisms are allowed. Good luck implementing an IDE or browser in the MAS; you'll always be living in a grey zone. It also forbids any kind of custom licensing mechanism or copy protection, so when Apple's is insufficient you're SOL and requires all languages to be in the same bundle yielding huge downloads (=lower conversion rate due to failed downloads). Those are just implementation limitations but you aren't allowed to do better.

Basically, Apple don't have a good track record of creating an excellent developer experience with their app stores. On mobile they forced devs into it against their will. On desktop where backwards compatibility prevents it, devs have nearly universally rejected app stores ... even when an app is in it, it's common for websites to direct users to their own distribution points.

On the Mac, the whole "drag an app to the trash to delete" thing has always been a lie, since most applications spew things in ~/Library, /Library, and other app support directories, which means you miss lots of stuff that AppCleaner has to find. It's still a terrible experience, and if you don't know that then downloading a new copy of the app won't fix anything because all of its preferences and extra files are in a directory you didn't think to clean out because its hidden by the system.

No. Please do set up a usability test in a lab and watch people try.

You will find:

1. Many users struggle with unusual mouse/trackpad movements like drag and drop, right clicking. That's why the Mac theoretically has a one-button mouse.

2. The instructions for what to do differ between DMGs and usually consists of a single arrow if present at all. This isn't clear enough to communicate "drag and drop" to people.

3. If the user figures out or has been shown that they have to drag and drop, they may then be confused when it appears nothing has happened, or by a small dialog that appears and then quickly disappears. It's now not clear how to actually start the app. Nothing appears in the dock, the app itself doesn't start. Launchpad made this better some years back because now there's at least a button to push to show you all apps and let you search for them iOS style, but the user has to realise they haven't started the app.

Note that if you use the App Store there's a sort of animation that (if the user sees it) suggests the app has been deposited into the launchpad. But you don't get that with out-of-store installs.

4. If the user isn't very familiar with this DMG process they may double click the app to start it from the DMG itself, which will look like they successfully installed it (because the app starts) but which may (a) break the app in subtle ways if it expects to be able to write to its own directory, (b) confuse the user when the folder disappears along with the downloaded file button in their browser, thus giving no obvious way to get back to it, except via a realisation that the window which popped up was a folder despite not looking like one and thus could be perhaps relocated via the Finder, unless you rebooted in between in which case maybe not.

Bizarrely and against all rules of good UX design the right thing to do isn't the simplest action that appears to work, but rather, several more steps in between.

5. If they do manage to drag it, find it in Launchpad and start it, very likely they won't realise they're supposed to "eject" the DMG to get rid of the prior copy, even though nothing is actually being physically ejected anywhere. They may also be confused by the presence of two icons that should be equivalent but aren't. If they do know they're meant to eject/unmount it there's nothing obvious to let you do that, for instance there's no button labelled "Eject", but rather you're meant to find the icon for the DMG on the desktop (which is covered), realise it's an icon that represents the window you saw earlier although in the absence of a branded icon there's no indication of that, be mystified by the strange metal object in the icon (who has seen a real HDD these days?) and then realise you're meant to start dragging it again to the trash can, which magically turns into an eject symbol? Or you could try using the Finder, in which case the sidebar entry for the DMG is going to be under "Locations" in a scrollable area that doesn't have scrollbars, and no visual indication it can be scrolled, and the icons next to the name of the app don't indicate what they do, and if your Finder is set to use e.g. tree mode then clicking it shows a view totally different to the one you saw earlier!

The entire UX is something only a UNIX hacker could ever think makes sense. Unless you have a really solid grip on filesystems, nested folders, mount points etc this whole thing is just totally mystifying and a lot of pointless busywork too.

Some Mac apps have code that detects when the user has made these sorts of mistakes and will offer to move the app to /Applications for them. It's intended to partly work around these usability problems, but ultimately, a PKG is still mu...

The UNIX-y solution to this is to ban proprietary apps and run only vetted free software, interoperate with protocols, not implementations.