What's the best way to distribute application binaries? (Outside of an App Store)
I'll need to start distributing downloads for my application soon and I'm not sure what the most economical solution is. My initial thought is to distribute through S3 and cloudfront but I'm not sure if there's a better way?
Hi Don,
S3 is great in my opinion, easy to use, free to get started with and backed by a big company. You can also use temporary urls if you want to restrict who downloads your application.
Best regards
-Andreas
I haven't tried it yet, but https://hockeyapp.net looks very promising. However, it depends if you are looking for a general public distribution or more like beta testing format with a more targetted audience. As you can see, that platform does not have sort of catalog, nobody will be able to find your app there.
Quick update: 2020-1-7 https://hockeyapp.net is shutting down.
The first article on the front page says "HockeyApp is being retired"
"The time has come to say goodbye. Last year, we announced the transition from HockeyApp to Visual Studio App Center, a single solution for continuously building, testing, releasing, and monitoring your apps."
HockeyApp would be great, except my codebase is almost entirely Java (and not for Android)
It's 2020 now, May I ask what's your final decision? How did you solve the issue?
What is your java client UI technology? There are a couple good solutions for deploying Java in the browser now (natively, without plugin-in, as JavaScript), CheerpJ and TeaVM. I believe Java is coming back to the browser - particularly with WebAssembly gaining ground.
I built the first version in JavaFX. Willing to pivot to something new given it moving out of the JDK with 11. I'll look into the browser native tools tho, they could be useful. At first blush, desktop is more natural for a first version of my app simply because it's meant to interoperate with other desktop environments like R scripting.
I wrote my flagship app (ReportMill) in Swing, then I ported it to JavaFX, then I wrote my own thin UI kit as a layer that runs on either (because it was hard to know how serious Oracle was about JFX). So I've been down this road, too. :-)
Here's some of my latest stuff using TeaVM and CheerpJ:
http://reportmill.com/snaptea/
Theres some good desktop stuff there (also running in the browser). A page layout app, a UI builder, a game, a toy IDE.
This is great, thanks!
My UI is such a small part of the app to date, so I've been thinking of porting to electron for the UI layer. I'll look into this.