Chris Adamson, an Apple platform developer, writes about iOS, media streaming, and the state of Apple's developer tools.
HN links it in discussions of Apple platform and app-store issues; the one comment given is a reply about TV and set-top box development.
> Now, imagine if they had just lifted one of open source the JS engines into the device.
As someone who writes TV applications and Set-Top Box UI/UX code as my day job (and speaking only for myself and no one else), I actually vastly prefer Roku's approach here.
If Roku had done what you suggest (use an open source JS engine), it would probably be a far worse experience for developers and users. As an example, I submit most "SmartTV" devices (anything pre-Tizen from Samsung, anything pre-WebOS from LG, most commercial/industrial STBs for hotels or signage, etc). These devices typically use some version of classic Presto-based Opera or Google Chromium (2012-ish forks). Devices with these codebases are still sold today, in new 2017 models.
The problem with using a JS engine is that most developers (or their managers) will inevitably overload TVs with heavy JS clients, the same kind they send to $500+ laptops. They'll claim it's great for code reuse, or lower costs. And there may be some truth to that. But the experience somehow always goes bad. They'll re-implement bad versions of common controls that break all standard convention, and they'll port over a UI that sort-of runs ok-ish on a Desktop PC, but is slow as hell, frustrating, laggy to use.
It's every complaint everyone has with Slack's "desktop app", except vastly more painful now the client isn't a super fast $1000 laptop, but a super slow (by comparison) $50 stick or box.
The end result of this is people buying…