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I'm glad to see successful apps exiting The Mac App Store, and I hope others will follow. Unlike its iOS counterpart, which is great in many ways (new app disco

I'm glad to see successful apps exiting The Mac App Store, and I hope others will follow. Unlike its iOS counterpart, which is great in many ways (new app discovery not being one of them), the MAS has unfortunately done more harm than good to the once-thriving indy Mac app-development scene. It offers a low cost of entry, but also encourages "pump-and-dump" development, in which developers are actively (though surely not intentionally) discouraged from updating their apps once they launch. It's designed to be the "anti-professional" means of app distribution, and it never reaches any higher.

jonknee 11y ago
Which is a real shame because it's great to not worry about billing information, key management and pushing out updates (for both users and developers).
- jasonbarone 11y ago
  This is the part I wish could be solved. I hate having to input billing into various websites and apps and not being able to track licenses unless I do myself.
- oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
  How viable would it be for a third-party alternative to act as a 'broker' between customer and developer, just to handle those aspects you mention?
  - jonknee 11y ago
    Steam has done well with that model for games, but being Mac only would be a tough sell. Apple's big advantage was instantly getting the App Store on every Mac.
    - s73v3r 11y ago
      Who says they have to be Mac only? It'd probably work out better to be on all major platforms, that way you can sell the feature of buy once, run on all platforms the software runs on. You also could allow single platform things onto your store too, like Sketch.
      - jonknee 11y ago
        Because the vast vast vast majority of apps aren't cross platform?
        s73v3r 11y ago
        So what? Steam sells plenty of games that are Windows only. Doesn't stop them from being available on other platforms.
  - s73v3r 11y ago
    Not very unless you set yourself up as a store, in which case you've got the problem of trust, both on the developer side (why should we deploy to yet another store), and the customer side (why should we trust your fly by night store).
cmdkeen 11y ago
Which is ridiculous when Steam is there as a shining example of what a store could be. Not having to worry about keys and updates is fantastic for me, plus good discovery and upselling opportunities for developers. Someone is going to crack desktop app stores one day and do very well. The cost of entry is high (not necessarily in cash, more in reputation) but there are plenty of players who could do it. There's even scope in the SME market in terms of rolling up licencing and deployment. Hell there's even a use case for families.
- chongli 11y ago
  Not having to worry about keys and updates is fantastic for me, plus good discovery and upselling opportunities for developers. It's not that great for me. I've had a bunch of my Steam games put out breaking updates and there's nothing I can do about it but wait for subsequent rollbacks. It's a major flaw in the system that a breaking update can be forced down users' throats.
  - philwelch 11y ago
    Many Steam games can be rolled back to previous versions using the "betas" feature.
  - cpcallen 11y ago
    This includes breaking updates to the Steam client itself - which stopped working on 10.6.8 in November. I can roll back to an earlier version, but it immediately auto-updates to the latest version. So now I can't update any of the games I've bought through Steam, or reinstall any I've removed. Obviously I can't buy any new ones, either - but, even if I eventually update OS X (breaking many older Apps I depend on for work) and am able to run the Steam client again, there's no way in hell I'll ever buy a game through Steam again.
    - aeontech 11y ago
      Just want to point out that you could upgrade the base OS to latest, and run 10.6.8 in a VM for any older apps that do break in new versions.
fuzzywalrus 11y ago
Sketch always seemed hampered by the Mac App store. I'm really hoping this opens the door for more flexible licensing for Sketch. The Mac App store is a bit of a pain for multi-seat licensing and upgrade pricing.
pkamb 11y ago
> but also encourages "pump-and-dump" development Not only encourages, but forces. Any non-sandboxed apps that were released in the App Store prior to the sandbox mandate can be updated for "bug fixes", but any new features can explicitly not be included.
api 11y ago
I keep wondering if Apple wants to kill OSX and take everything toward iOS, totally jailed everything, and the cloud. I know if they did they'd lose me as a customer for anything other that (maybe) phones, but maybe they don't care about that market. The only way they wouldn't would be if they grew up iOS into something you can do real work with -- allowed end user app installation, emulators and VMs, containers with full Darwin installs that could run homebrew, etc. It could be done, even without sacrificing ordinary user experience -- just hide the advanced stuff from regular users and require a little magic incantation to unlock it. But it would run counter to the padded room you-don't-own-your-device philosophy of mobile so I can't see the iOS team going that way without being pushed from above. Of course they have been updating OS X fairly well, so maybe not. Maybe the poor App Store experience is just like the poor Podcast app and other things -- an internal problem with motivation, direction, and focus in certain areas. Organizations can easily forget about things that are important but not 'hot'.
- kps 11y ago
  > I keep wondering if Apple wants to kill OSX and take everything toward iOS Tim Cook: “iPad is the clearest expression of our vision of the future of personal computing.” The writing is on the wall, assuming you count U+1F4A9 as writing.
- z1mm32m4n 11y ago
  > I keep wondering if Apple wants to kill OSX and take everything toward iOS, totally jailed everything, and the cloud. While the Surface and iPad Pro continue to improve, I have a really hard time seeing tablets "killing" laptops like, for example flash drives and cloud storage "killed" CDs. I'm not quite sure this is a winning strategy for them. There has been hype for a while that tablets will replace laptops. But looking back, there was a huge backlash against Windows 8 and the touch elements of it. Android tablets continue to vie for a segment of the market that feels like they're competing with iPod Touch, iOS, like you mention is still locked down.
  - api 11y ago
    It feels a little bit like it's being pushed. The reality I think is that it's being pushed a little and pulled a lot by the mainstream of the market. By mainstream I mean non-tech-savvy users, non-hackers. That's most people. I can completely understand how wonderful a "managed platform" like iOS is to a non-technical user. No malware! (Or at least greatly reduced risk of it.) No OS rot! No IT! No complicated system administration! It's like replacing a hand-cranked car by one with electronic ignition and an engine that doesn't constantly need retuning. For most people "freedom" means the freedom to get crapware and malware, spend hours that you can't spare futzing with your computer and getting nothing done, and have to reinstall your OS every year because it gets borked. Non-hackers hate platforms like that with a passion that it's difficult to understand. I often try to communicate it by comparing it to cars: how would you feel if you had to tune your engine every week, manually inspect every tank of gas for adulterants, and periodically stop your car to perform an inspection as you drive down the highway? At the same time, the car analogy is deeply imperfect. In the computing world when you trade Windows or OS X for iOS you're giving up a lot of capability and a lot of freedom. Tech-savvy and professional users either don't want to give that up or as is the case with developers can't give it up. But the problem is that non-tech-savvy users are most of the market, especially as computing becomes more and more mainstream, and most of the market is the market for a large company like Apple. Edges of markets don't matter. As such, I see the majority opinion of the market pulling things away from open platforms and rich capability and toward a managed, simplified, jailed, iOS-like future. I think there's a real risk that the professional will be left with a choice between the awful UX offered by pure OSS and being forced to adapt to iOS or similar platforms. Hey, maybe it'll prod the OSS folks into really taking UX seriously. Yeah. I'm not encouraged by what I see there nor by the combative/ultra-defensive attitude you get in those circles if you bring up this topic. One camp will insist that the latest Linux desktop or Ubuntu phone or whatever is great and is totally comparable to iOS and OSX and call you an idiot (and worse) for daring to think otherwise, and the other camp will just call you an idiot for "needing" UX or even a GUI at all because "real men" blah blah blah and why don't you read e-mail in emacs? I used to wade into those debates from time to time, but I stopped after I wrote a blog post (years ago) about Linux usability with some ideas about how to improve UI/UX development on Linux and the responses were full of insults I hadn't heard since Jr. High... not to mention one DDOS attack against the server.
dperfect 11y ago
Just to play devil's advocate: what specific things about the MAS "[do] more harm than good" or encourage "pump-and-dump" development as you say? I'm not trying to defend the MAS, and I think it definitely needs improvement, but are we really worse off for it? The two things mentioned by the Sketch developers are app review time and sandbox limits. Those same things exist on iOS, but I keep hearing people say the MAS is somehow worse. From Apple's perspective, the sandbox limits are arguably justified by a desire to provide greater security and privacy controls. The review process is basically a consequence of that same goal - though of course, review time could be greatly reduced. It sounds like the core issue for people is sandboxing. But what specifically about sandboxing is the issue? Are the sandbox limits really too restrictive for most apps (I guess new APIs/permissions could improve that with time), or are there just a lot of developers who prefer not to rework their apps to deal with the sandbox restrictions? Or is the very idea of sandboxing the problem (or perhaps the default security setting for allowed app installation)? As long as apps can be distributed outside the MAS, I guess I don't really understand the problem. The MAS adds a lot of convenience, but as usual, the convenience comes at a cost, and thankfully users and developers can take it or leave it.
- s73v3r 11y ago
  I would say the sandbox limits on the MAS are worse, because they go against what a computer is supposed to do. Limits on the phone are considered ok, because first and foremost, the phone has to operate as a phone.
  - rarepostinlurkr 11y ago
    If I cannot use my computer to give a presentation because some "utility" app is crapping all over other apps because it has free reign of the system, isn't that going against what my computer is supposed to do for me? The ability for any normal person to identify, understand and resolve issues caused by the wild west of "desktop computing" should be well understood at this point -- they cannot.
- jacalata 11y ago
  They pretty specifically said that the inability to charge for updates encourages pump and dump development.
agopaul 11y ago
Also, the problem of unmaintained paid apps should be addressed. Yes, you can rate 1 star the app, but wouldn't be better to quickly file a 'not working' ticket, and let an Apple employee check the app? I mean, Apple is getting a generous cut from the sell anyway.
rmc 11y ago
> Unlike its iOS counterpart, which is great in many ways I think the fact that it's mandatory has something to do with why people don't leave the iOS App Store.
odbol 11y ago
Low cost of entry? It's actually quite high... my company still has to distribute instructions on how to disable Gatekeeper on your Mac so you can install our app. We don't have the resources to pay the $100/year "Apple tax" and also spend the 2-3 days developer time on figuring out how to sign our app and make it work with sandboxing. For me, low cost of entry means "you put the app up for download, the user downloads it." Like the old days. No certificates, no Apple tax, no hoops to jump through.
- imron 11y ago
  If $100/year is too high for your company, you quite probably have more serious problems than the App Store. I don't distribute Mac apps through the app store, and signing a regular app (no need to worry about sandboxing) with your developer certificate so that it can run without disabling Gatekeeper literally involves clicking a single radio button in Xcode.

jonknee 11y ago

Which is a real shame because it's great to not worry about billing information, key management and pushing out updates (for both users and developers).

jasonbarone 11y ago
This is the part I wish could be solved. I hate having to input billing into various websites and apps and not being able to track licenses unless I do myself.
oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
How viable would it be for a third-party alternative to act as a 'broker' between customer and developer, just to handle those aspects you mention?
- jonknee 11y ago
  Steam has done well with that model for games, but being Mac only would be a tough sell. Apple's big advantage was instantly getting the App Store on every Mac.
  - s73v3r 11y ago
    Who says they have to be Mac only? It'd probably work out better to be on all major platforms, that way you can sell the feature of buy once, run on all platforms the software runs on. You also could allow single platform things onto your store too, like Sketch.
    - jonknee 11y ago
      Because the vast vast vast majority of apps aren't cross platform?
      - s73v3r 11y ago
        So what? Steam sells plenty of games that are Windows only. Doesn't stop them from being available on other platforms.
- s73v3r 11y ago
  Not very unless you set yourself up as a store, in which case you've got the problem of trust, both on the developer side (why should we deploy to yet another store), and the customer side (why should we trust your fly by night store).

cmdkeen 11y ago

Which is ridiculous when Steam is there as a shining example of what a store could be. Not having to worry about keys and updates is fantastic for me, plus good discovery and upselling opportunities for developers. Someone is going to crack desktop app stores one day and do very well. The cost of entry is high (not necessarily in cash, more in reputation) but there are plenty of players who could do it. There's even scope in the SME market in terms of rolling up licencing and deployment. Hell there's even a use case for families.

chongli 11y ago
Not having to worry about keys and updates is fantastic for me, plus good discovery and upselling opportunities for developers. It's not that great for me. I've had a bunch of my Steam games put out breaking updates and there's nothing I can do about it but wait for subsequent rollbacks. It's a major flaw in the system that a breaking update can be forced down users' throats.
- philwelch 11y ago
  Many Steam games can be rolled back to previous versions using the "betas" feature.
- cpcallen 11y ago
  This includes breaking updates to the Steam client itself - which stopped working on 10.6.8 in November. I can roll back to an earlier version, but it immediately auto-updates to the latest version. So now I can't update any of the games I've bought through Steam, or reinstall any I've removed. Obviously I can't buy any new ones, either - but, even if I eventually update OS X (breaking many older Apps I depend on for work) and am able to run the Steam client again, there's no way in hell I'll ever buy a game through Steam again.
  - aeontech 11y ago
    Just want to point out that you could upgrade the base OS to latest, and run 10.6.8 in a VM for any older apps that do break in new versions.

fuzzywalrus 11y ago

Sketch always seemed hampered by the Mac App store. I'm really hoping this opens the door for more flexible licensing for Sketch. The Mac App store is a bit of a pain for multi-seat licensing and upgrade pricing.

pkamb 11y ago

> but also encourages "pump-and-dump" development Not only encourages, but forces. Any non-sandboxed apps that were released in the App Store prior to the sandbox mandate can be updated for "bug fixes", but any new features can explicitly not be included.

api 11y ago

I keep wondering if Apple wants to kill OSX and take everything toward iOS, totally jailed everything, and the cloud. I know if they did they'd lose me as a customer for anything other that (maybe) phones, but maybe they don't care about that market. The only way they wouldn't would be if they grew up iOS into something you can do real work with -- allowed end user app installation, emulators and VMs, containers with full Darwin installs that could run homebrew, etc. It could be done, even without sacrificing ordinary user experience -- just hide the advanced stuff from regular users and require a little magic incantation to unlock it. But it would run counter to the padded room you-don't-own-your-device philosophy of mobile so I can't see the iOS team going that way without being pushed from above. Of course they have been updating OS X fairly well, so maybe not. Maybe the poor App Store experience is just like the poor Podcast app and other things -- an internal problem with motivation, direction, and focus in certain areas. Organizations can easily forget about things that are important but not 'hot'.

kps 11y ago
> I keep wondering if Apple wants to kill OSX and take everything toward iOS Tim Cook: “iPad is the clearest expression of our vision of the future of personal computing.” The writing is on the wall, assuming you count U+1F4A9 as writing.
z1mm32m4n 11y ago
> I keep wondering if Apple wants to kill OSX and take everything toward iOS, totally jailed everything, and the cloud. While the Surface and iPad Pro continue to improve, I have a really hard time seeing tablets "killing" laptops like, for example flash drives and cloud storage "killed" CDs. I'm not quite sure this is a winning strategy for them. There has been hype for a while that tablets will replace laptops. But looking back, there was a huge backlash against Windows 8 and the touch elements of it. Android tablets continue to vie for a segment of the market that feels like they're competing with iPod Touch, iOS, like you mention is still locked down.
- api 11y ago
  It feels a little bit like it's being pushed. The reality I think is that it's being pushed a little and pulled a lot by the mainstream of the market. By mainstream I mean non-tech-savvy users, non-hackers. That's most people. I can completely understand how wonderful a "managed platform" like iOS is to a non-technical user. No malware! (Or at least greatly reduced risk of it.) No OS rot! No IT! No complicated system administration! It's like replacing a hand-cranked car by one with electronic ignition and an engine that doesn't constantly need retuning. For most people "freedom" means the freedom to get crapware and malware, spend hours that you can't spare futzing with your computer and getting nothing done, and have to reinstall your OS every year because it gets borked. Non-hackers hate platforms like that with a passion that it's difficult to understand. I often try to communicate it by comparing it to cars: how would you feel if you had to tune your engine every week, manually inspect every tank of gas for adulterants, and periodically stop your car to perform an inspection as you drive down the highway? At the same time, the car analogy is deeply imperfect. In the computing world when you trade Windows or OS X for iOS you're giving up a lot of capability and a lot of freedom. Tech-savvy and professional users either don't want to give that up or as is the case with developers can't give it up. But the problem is that non-tech-savvy users are most of the market, especially as computing becomes more and more mainstream, and most of the market is the market for a large company like Apple. Edges of markets don't matter. As such, I see the majority opinion of the market pulling things away from open platforms and rich capability and toward a managed, simplified, jailed, iOS-like future. I think there's a real risk that the professional will be left with a choice between the awful UX offered by pure OSS and being forced to adapt to iOS or similar platforms. Hey, maybe it'll prod the OSS folks into really taking UX seriously. Yeah. I'm not encouraged by what I see there nor by the combative/ultra-defensive attitude you get in those circles if you bring up this topic. One camp will insist that the latest Linux desktop or Ubuntu phone or whatever is great and is totally comparable to iOS and OSX and call you an idiot (and worse) for daring to think otherwise, and the other camp will just call you an idiot for "needing" UX or even a GUI at all because "real men" blah blah blah and why don't you read e-mail in emacs? I used to wade into those debates from time to time, but I stopped after I wrote a blog post (years ago) about Linux usability with some ideas about how to improve UI/UX development on Linux and the responses were full of insults I hadn't heard since Jr. High... not to mention one DDOS attack against the server.

dperfect 11y ago

Just to play devil's advocate: what specific things about the MAS "[do] more harm than good" or encourage "pump-and-dump" development as you say? I'm not trying to defend the MAS, and I think it definitely needs improvement, but are we really worse off for it? The two things mentioned by the Sketch developers are app review time and sandbox limits. Those same things exist on iOS, but I keep hearing people say the MAS is somehow worse. From Apple's perspective, the sandbox limits are arguably justified by a desire to provide greater security and privacy controls. The review process is basically a consequence of that same goal - though of course, review time could be greatly reduced. It sounds like the core issue for people is sandboxing. But what specifically about sandboxing is the issue? Are the sandbox limits really too restrictive for most apps (I guess new APIs/permissions could improve that with time), or are there just a lot of developers who prefer not to rework their apps to deal with the sandbox restrictions? Or is the very idea of sandboxing the problem (or perhaps the default security setting for allowed app installation)? As long as apps can be distributed outside the MAS, I guess I don't really understand the problem. The MAS adds a lot of convenience, but as usual, the convenience comes at a cost, and thankfully users and developers can take it or leave it.

s73v3r 11y ago
I would say the sandbox limits on the MAS are worse, because they go against what a computer is supposed to do. Limits on the phone are considered ok, because first and foremost, the phone has to operate as a phone.
- rarepostinlurkr 11y ago
  If I cannot use my computer to give a presentation because some "utility" app is crapping all over other apps because it has free reign of the system, isn't that going against what my computer is supposed to do for me? The ability for any normal person to identify, understand and resolve issues caused by the wild west of "desktop computing" should be well understood at this point -- they cannot.
jacalata 11y ago
They pretty specifically said that the inability to charge for updates encourages pump and dump development.

agopaul 11y ago

Also, the problem of unmaintained paid apps should be addressed. Yes, you can rate 1 star the app, but wouldn't be better to quickly file a 'not working' ticket, and let an Apple employee check the app? I mean, Apple is getting a generous cut from the sell anyway.

rmc 11y ago

> Unlike its iOS counterpart, which is great in many ways I think the fact that it's mandatory has something to do with why people don't leave the iOS App Store.

odbol 11y ago

Low cost of entry? It's actually quite high... my company still has to distribute instructions on how to disable Gatekeeper on your Mac so you can install our app. We don't have the resources to pay the $100/year "Apple tax" and also spend the 2-3 days developer time on figuring out how to sign our app and make it work with sandboxing. For me, low cost of entry means "you put the app up for download, the user downloads it." Like the old days. No certificates, no Apple tax, no hoops to jump through.

imron 11y ago
If $100/year is too high for your company, you quite probably have more serious problems than the App Store. I don't distribute Mac apps through the app store, and signing a regular app (no need to worry about sandboxing) with your developer certificate so that it can run without disabling Gatekeeper literally involves clicking a single radio button in Xcode.