I made an App Store

patrickweb

Just Patrick

Posted on August 22, 2021

I made an App Store

Why

I love checking out new stuff, apps, apis, websites and such. And my obsession for trying out new stuff found me continuously visiting https://electronjs.org/apps. Its a website that allows people to browse apps made with electron. Developers add their apps by making a pull request to electronjs apps repo on Github. Every week there's always a new app added.

After visiting the website hundreds of times I started thinking why it wasn't an app store. I mean the general layout of it looks like an app store. At that time I was learning about reverse engineering closed apis and I thought it would be a fun project to build a desktop client for the website. On checking I saw that the api requests send back html which was not a problem as I had had some experience with parsing html from a previous project of mine FLB Podcasts. So I knew how to build it but I didn't really have time to do it. But last week I decided to take a break from building FLB Music and build it.

Where can I find it

I just pushed the alpha build yesterday so its only available here in the releases.

Features

  • Browse Apps from 10+ Categories
  • Search for apps by keyword and app name
  • Download .exe , .appimage ,.dmg and other file formats
  • Automatic Install for .exe files (.appimage soon, see roadmap)
  • Loads the app website if the ReadMe is absent for the app page

Screenshots

Some screenshots...
Explore Page
Download
App Page

Roadmap

  • Install apps without spawning the installer modal
  • Support installation of Appimages
  • Create a CLI that has the same functionalty
  • Encourage a Common ReadMe format from the app developers to have the app pages look more seeamless
  • Support for Youtube preview videos shown on the website
💖 💪 🙅 🚩
patrickweb
Just Patrick

Posted on August 22, 2021

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