I made an App Store
Just Patrick
Posted on August 22, 2021
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
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
Posted on August 22, 2021
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