31 ms·

Going All in on the Mac App Store

128 points by s3cur3 6y ago

s3cur3 6y ago
OP here, happy to answer any questions. I know Apple gets a lot of well-deserved flack, but for a small-time dev like me, them taking a 15% cut makes things a lot simpler for me.
- RyJones 6y ago
  I bought it, I'll give it a whirl. I've been importing my photos from Flickr, which has led to thousands of duplicates.
  - s3cur3 6y ago
    Sweet! Give me a shout if you run into issues. :)
- sieabahlpark 6y ago
  That's precisely the point though. It works for small devs but as you grow that 15% is enough to pay a team to build your own app store. That's the problem with the model.
- abhinav22 6y ago
  I was thinking about this as well. When you are small, it’s definitely a lifesaver. When you get big, then you have to figure it out. But when you are small, you have enough problems to solve to bring a quality product to market, this is one headache you can happily avoid.
- offtop5 6y ago
  I completely agree with your direction, having Apple take the responsibility to safeguard user data makes things much easier. For better or worse Apple can do no wrong and the eyes of its customers, so even if they did somehow get hacked, you wouldn't have hundreds of angry emails headed your way. I personally really do love the walled garden of owning a Mac, when I'm working on a song or music video, I just want it to work using final cut and logic. If I really feel like compiling the Linux kernel from scratch, I have a PC for that
- fartcannon 6y ago
  Please don't do this. You're short term gain is the worlds long term loss.
  - quesera 6y ago
    Are you arguing for a zero-middleman retail relationship? Or just anti-Apple?
    - Mindwipe 6y ago
      I imagine it's anti-middleman when the middleman has the keys to all software operating on the OS and hardware.
    - webmobdev 6y ago
      It's about choice and loss of control / ownership of our device. Apple app store can exist. But they absolutely shouldn't FORCE us developers and users to use it.
      - zapzupnz 6y ago
        Just as well nobody's forced to use it, then.
  - zapzupnz 6y ago
    It's OP's side project; its their decision as to how they choose to spend their time and energy, what trade-offs are involved with each option, and what's most important to them. OP owes the world, outside of their paying customers, nothing.
  - webmobdev 6y ago
    Don't let the downvotes discourage you from speaking up again on this. OP is indeed being very shortsighted as a developer by supporting the app store.
    - fartcannon 6y ago
- ummonk 6y ago
  On the consumer side I also would prefer 15% higher pricing than to have to deal with various different payment forms as well as the difficulty of keeping track of and canceling various subscriptions.
  - thewebcount 6y ago
    Yeah, same here. And even when it's a processor I know like Stripe, Square, or Shopify, I don't really trust those companies very much. I've gotten spam, other people's receipts, etc. from them and their tech support is horrible for the consumer. And if they aren't a name I know like one of the above, I'm really leery of giving them my email and credit card info!
    - cuddlybacon 6y ago
      Same here. The last time I bought software that wasn't thru a well known store or processor I ended up with some fraudulent purchases on my next credit card bill[0]. Since then, I'll never do that again. [0] - Thankfully my bank handled this without issue.
    - YeBanKo 6y ago
      While I am skeptical of cryptocurrencies, more and more often I catch myself thinking: I wish this seller just accepted bitcoin or something. I want to make a transaction and be done with it. I don’t want my email and credit card number end up anywhere long term. There was a lunch place near my work that I frequented. They used Square POS terminal, once I noticed that it somehow linked my email to my credit card, I started using cash to pay. Cash is horribly inconvenient and gross to handle, but at least once you paid you don’t need to worry about it. You can’t be hit with some unexpected charges, wait to check the transaction when posted, no possibility of data leak, no privacy concerns, etc.
      - dylan604 6y ago
        Wasn't ApplePay supposed to address this? Each transaction creates a one-time-use number which is the only number the seller receives. It would no longer be valid if evilHacker(TM) tries to use that number for a fraudulent charge later.
- blunte 6y ago
  Are you not concerned with Apple potentially delisting you or rejecting a future update due to some reason which may or may not be clear? I suppose you can always go back to direct if that happens, but people who bought via App Store will be out of luck for updates then.
  - s3cur3 6y ago
    Eh, I toe the line as far as policy is concerned. I'm not worried, personally.
  - Razengan 6y ago
    > but people who bought via App Store will be out of luck for updates then. Apps like Coda have offered mechanisms for people to update from the App Store version to a non-Store version for free, by looking for a Store downloaded .app, so it's not impossible.
- ben509 6y ago
  How does the no paid upgrade issue affect you?
  - s3cur3 6y ago
    At some point I could imagine going subscription/IAP for new major features, and just grandfathering in all the people who bought it previously. But in my specific case, the app is a side project that honestly needs a lot of love, and it’s hard for me to imagine hitting up existing users for more money.
- smoldesu 6y ago
  I'm really sorry to hear you've been forced into this situation. I seldom use MacOS these days, but when I do, buying an app from the App Store is the one thing I'm least likely to do. I hope that one day it becomes viable to distribute your app through a less centralized platform.
  - zapzupnz 6y ago
    OP hasn't been forced into anything; as they describe in their post, this is a choice that they've made. I don't know who you think you're convincing by speaking so sanctimoniously about someone else's choices, as though they're incapable of taking the right decision without having asked you first or that they must've been forced into it, but it certainly won't be OP or me.
  - webmobdev 6y ago
    Well said. As I commented elsewhere Apple with its app store currently acts like a corrupt-middle-man-bureaucrat because it forces itself between the developer and the seller and demands a bribe from both for the "privilege" to develop / use an app. Limiting our choice means less profit for the developer, higher price for the user and a violation of your privacy rights by Apple (apart from profiteering).
- webmobdev 6y ago
  Just a feedback - As a developer, you are only encouraging Apple to gauge more money from developers like you by selling on App store, instead of boycotting it. Don't add value to the app store by making your app available on it. I never buy anything from the App Store. I prefer to buy directly from the seller. If you are selling exclusively only through the Apple app store, you are not only going to lose customers but also sabotaging yourself. It's incredibly shortsighted. I don't know why anyone even bothers with the app store on the macOS (or other platforms). We have been doing fine without it on the desktop for decades now, and suddenly every developer is supposed to drink the kool-aid that PAYING corporates for the privilege of adding value to that platform by developing and distributing your wares on that platform is supposed to be a GREAT thing?
  - EricE 6y ago
    The Mac App store is convenient. People pay for convenience all the time. Apple thrives on convenience - the overall experience. You also completely disregarded the point he made that for him the value Apple brings now that they have discounted their fee to 15% for small developers far outweighs the 15% they charge. Paying for convenience. It's the key to their success and also the thing that many geeks seem to discount the most (just like you completely glossed over); hence the continual geek mystification of how Apple can be so successful. I sincerely doubt he's going to loose that many sales by being Mac app store exclusive. These days for the vast majority of apps I'm interested in I'm more than willing to buy them from the Mac App store. The only time I avoid the app store is if the sandboxing restrictions limit the app I want in some way; and there are very few apps that fall into that category - mostly utility or audio apps. So I buy them outside the store - which is a PITA to track all the relevant bits (payments, updates, keys, etc.). 1Password helps significantly with the license/payment tracking and thankfully more Mac developers are adding 1 click import of all your license details into password managers like 1Password - but it's still more stuff to track that you don't have to do when using the app store.
    - webmobdev 6y ago
      > You also completely disregarded the point he made that for him the value Apple brings now that they have discounted their fee to 15% for small developers far outweighs the 15% they charge. I pointed out that this is extremely short-sighted for developers. App Store on macOS doesn't have the kind of stranglehold it does on macOS like the ios platform. The more App store gains control, and the more developers are forced to distribute their apps on the platform, the more you give leverage to Apple to extort more money out of you. All the current lawsuits against the app store are indicative of this. We developers would be fools to ignore that.
mmastrac 6y ago
FWIW, I refuse to buy stuff from the Mac App Store because it's just not compatible with my life. I don't have any i-devices. I have a handful of iCloud/iTunes accounts of which I'm not sure which is technically the one I want to use (one of them is even a legacy pre-email one). I never connect my OSX box with my personal email and I will not in the future. I get it, but I just won't buy software from that store, hands down. Maybe I'm just in the dwindling minority of Mac users.
- s3cur3 6y ago
  Out of curiosity, do you buy software from small devs at all? It seems like, whatever the privacy/security implications may be when buying via Apple, they're worse when dealing with a totally unknown party.
  - mmastrac 6y ago
    Yep. Bartender, DaisyDisk, NoCrash for my MBP, and a few others.
    - s3cur3 6y ago
      Huh. Cool! As I said elsewhere in the thread, my personal intuition is that Apple is a significantly better steward of my information (and credit card!) than a random small-time dev on the internet, but I realize not everyone agrees.
      - mmastrac 6y ago
        The security of my credit card is really up to Visa or Mastercard to deal with. I'm more likely to have it stolen by a random fast-food worker than entering it into a PCI-compliant website (out of all the times it's been compromised, they've nearly always been because it was handed over to someone to scan in the USA).
      - xoa 6y ago
        FWIW, most small time devs aren't going to be "stewards of information" to any significant degree unless they're actively trying. Handling finance will be outsourced either way, using Stripe or one of many other 3rd party services, you wouldn't be processing any of that yourself. I buy a ton of 3rd party indy software on my Mac and always have, and nothing from the MAS, and typically the only "personal info", kind of, is an email and maybe my name (and it's not as if that's verified somehow, I could just put in whatever). I also have plenty of email accounts and can trivially make more, as well as developer-specific aliases. Plus there are other tools to further layer if it was ever a problem, like virtual credit card numbers. In practice the very nature of credit cards means it doesn't seem to generally be a problem, has been less of a real world risk than hacks of physical retailers. If I see a bad charge, I just report it and get a new number. Also FWIW, I've seen plenty of sites starting to offer Apple Pay as an option at checkout, I assume it's getting built into more payment systems now. That itself is solid defense, at least as good as the MAS though sometimes the checkout flows seem a bit wonky still.
webwielder2 6y ago
I don’t have much to say about the move to the App Store except that given that there is apparently a market for a standalone paid indie photo browser, the Mac market may be more vibrant than popularly assumed.
- s3cur3 6y ago
  There are fives of lattes per month to be made in this market, it's blowing up! ;)
- Hamuko 6y ago
  Looks like more of an organizer than browser. There's definitely a need for image browsers considering how bad Apple's Preview is for that. I'm still using my old and trusted Xee3 for any sort of image browsing on macOS because of that.
  - kergonath 6y ago
    Well, preview is not a browser so it’s not surprising (unless you’re thinking of Photos, which is ok but not great).
sneak 6y ago
This is disappointing and sad. The more people who do this, the more difficult it becomes for those who don't. You can't download even free apps from the App Store without providing an email address, phone number, and street address (to get an Apple ID). The App Store app also sends the mac's hardware serial number to Apple when you launch it, associating it with your identity in the logs. The email and phone required are verified so you can't just make some shit up. This means that to get any apps from the App Store, even free ones, you must be thoroughly de-anonymized. Not caring about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like not caring about free speech because you have nothing to say. Developers should reject the App Store on customer privacy grounds alone. When this becomes the sole method of distributing apps on the mac, as it is on iOS, the world becomes a much worse place, as then the US government had permanent access without a warrant to every app you use. Please don't contribute to building that world.
- globalproctd 6y ago
  ... you can install apps on Mac without going through the App Store.
- s3cur3 6y ago
  Is the implication that I, a random guy across the internet, am a better steward of your personally identifying information than Apple? I'm not saying you're wrong, but that definitely doesn't match my own intuitions.
  - sneak 6y ago
    The implication is that, regardless of price, making the App Store more useful and valuable harms privacy for everyone, as it reduces the ability of people to resist Apple restricting features or functionality to App Store only, as they have already done with VPN apps using the NetworkExtension API. These cannot be installed outside of the App Store at all, even self-built ones. There is also the issue of surveillance. Apple processed warrantless FISA surveillance orders for 30,000 users last year, per their own transparency report. It's possible that people don't want Apple (and by extension the FBI and US military, with no probable cause or warrant required) knowing the apps they purchase and use, or when, or on which devices. Being App Store only prohibits that, and requires that your users be subject to this surveillance. It's the same issue with posting to Instagram, for example: deciding to donate free content to Facebook there makes the product more attractive to Facebook's users and makes it harder for small businesses to opt out of using Facebook's ad business. Decisions like this make the whole world worse.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jbverschoor 6y ago
Thank you!
tunesmith 6y ago
Does the 15% have a shelf? Like... if a business makes $1,000,001, do they owe 30% on the entire amount, or just the extra dollar? In other words, is there a disincentive to go above a million until you're above two million?
- ghshephard 6y ago
  I've asked that question of five or six Apple/IOS developers, some of them well known, and they've all just laughed at me. Worrying about coming close to $1mm/annual sales is something precisely zero of them were worried about. The answer to your question is, according to what I've read, yes - at $999,999 you owe $150K. At $1,000,001, you owe $300K. But - if you can get to $1mm, it's highly likely that $1.5mm, $2.0mm+, etc... are coming soon enough. Many developers are focussing on $50k, $60k, type scenarios, where the 30% to 15% means enough money in their pocket to afford new development hardware, etc...
  - s3cur3 6y ago
    As I understand it, if you make $1 more than $1M, it's not that you suddenly owe an extra $150k in "back taxes," but rather that going forward, you'll be in the 30% "tax bracket." It's still a tax cliff, and therefore kind of problematic (if it's November 2021 and you've made $950k, you're strongly incentivized to shut down sales until the new year!), but as you say, that's a problem 99% of devs would love to have.
    - ummonk 6y ago
      How is it a tax cliff? My understanding is that after you hit 1 million they will start taking 30% of money that comes in after that for the rest of the year.
      - chongli 6y ago
        The issue is that if you cross the $1m threshold in the current year then the next January you don’t go back to 15%, you stay at 30% for the whole next year. So if next year your sales fall slightly below $1m, you end up paying $150k in extra Apple tax. Then the following year you go back to the 15% rate.
camhart 6y ago
A "better experience"? Maybe for a Mac only app. But once your product spreads across multiple platforms is much easier for the customer to download the app for all platforms in one place--your website.
- s3cur3 6y ago
  Indeed! In this case, Unbound is Mac only, and probably will remain so for its entire life.
- kergonath 6y ago
  Why so? Having Office 365 on the Mac App Store does not make the lives of users on other platforms more difficult in any way. It’s trivial to put a link to the App Store page on a website anyway: click on “Windows”, get a .exe; click on “Mac”, get it through the store. It’s not like the two cannot be integrated together, and games publishers have been doing it for several stores on the same platform.
- swiley 6y ago
  Personally I have a number of unplayable games now that I no longer have a mac, the ones I bought directly (minecraft, KSP) aren't among them.
W-Stool 6y ago
Some years ago I looked at developing a MacOS app and distributing it through the App Store. I came away from that experience with two showstoppers: - Apple does not disclose to you who bought your app. - There is no mechanism to make paid updates possible. If you want to release a big update and get paid you need to release a new app. There is no way to contact current users and offer them an inexpensive update. Are these two issues still true of the MacOS App Store?
- jimbokun 6y ago
  Do developers get around the "no updates" problem with "In App Purchases"? Or do "In App Purchases" not really allow for deploying new code and features?
  - valuearb 6y ago
    You can use IAP for upgrades. it’s just a bit more work, grows your testing matrix significantly and is a bit more confusing to your customers.
  - gowld 6y ago
    That's a janky workaround. You have support both the old and new features/behaviors in one app, and push an update that wraps the old and new features in code like 'if(IAP_X_ENABLED())'. Any architectural refactorings aren't compatible with that model, so you'd have to launch MyApp2019 and MyApp2020, and hope Apple lets you do that.
  - cuddlybacon 6y ago
    Another work-around I've seen is updating the old app that has a one-time popup to alert users to the new version. As a user, I can live with that as long as it is a one-time popup. This is really something the store should handle.
    - duskwuff 6y ago
      Notifying users is the easy part. The hard part is offering upgrade pricing, rather than forcing users to buy the new version at full price. I think I've seen a workaround of offering the old and new versions as a bundle? That's pretty ugly, though.
fartcannon 6y ago
Don't? For the sake of the future, don't use app stores that are monopolies. Do both, at the very least.
- judge2020 6y ago
  The Mac App Store is further from a monopoly than the Play store is on Android. AFAIK even new Macs from Apple come with the gatekeeper setting allowing apps from both the Mac App Store and identified developers. You could say that the developer account + notarization requirement is still a way for Apple to have a monopoly, but there aren't many stories of legitimate (ie. not adware) applications getting their certificate revoked or being rejected by notarization.
- mandrizzle 6y ago
  What is a good alternative? Download.com?
gumby 6y ago
I buy directly from the publisher whenever that is an option simply because I figure they need the 30% more than Apple does. But I agree that the App Store is a far better experience both in purchase and then upgrade. My mum has one non-app store app on her Mac and is always befuddled by the upgrade prompt. Even for my own use I find the App Store upgrade is almost always better than other means.
racl101 6y ago
As a consumer I hate the Mac App Store so much if only for the reason that every time I want to do something I have login again and again. The Mac App store is quite buggy. Sometimes I have to log in two times in a row. I hate it so fucking much that I almost consider not buying a good product just to avoid the Mac App Store's shitty app. I also hate that the purchase is tied to my Apple ID, especially for a utility that I'd like to use in another computer. Say a workstation where I might have a different Apple ID. If an app, for example, can be installed in two work machines, I don't want my Apple ID to dictate which machines. Anyways rant over. I get that for the seller's point of view the Mac App Store's updated policy is a boon.
- SomeHacker44 6y ago
  I get it worse. Sometimes it goes in a permanent loop asking for my password infinitely many times and doing nothing, until I Force Quit, which does not usually help the problem. It truly sucks and I regret the few purchases I made with it. But, the light is at the end of the tunnel: Windows 10 and WSL.
  - qz2 6y ago
    Grass is not greener on the windows and WSL side. It’s yellowed and littered with turds to stand in. I run both platforms side by side and the Mac is by far the least painful. Windows 10 on an average day is like gargling sand. I mean for two months now alt-tab is broken on 20H2 release. No fix incoming yet. Zero days unpatched for 90 days etc. On WSL it’s a networking and HyperV encrusted nightmare. Have fun trying to get anything vaguely complicated to do anything even remotely sane. Total shit show. A fine comparison is the windows App Store which is genuinely like playing Russian roulette with a gun made of butter. The Mac App Store is much much much less crazy. The Mac has its fair share of suck but my word at least they actually tried to put something cohesive together. Going to put it honestly but I don’t think Microsoft are earning my respect or attention, just shouting about how wonderful their product is while it’s falling to pieces in my hands.
    - manderley 6y ago
diebeforei485 6y ago
I prefer the Mac App Store over any other alternative, as a consumer. I understand 30% is a large cut and I wish they'd cut it down to 15% across the board [it could be a competitive advantage, too].
- Razengan 6y ago
  All comments here saying they prefer the App Store as users are being downvoted. Probably by user-hostile developers who want to give the impression that people don't want the App Store, likely because Apple's policies prevent them from preying upon users. (One of the top comments here is by a dev acting surprised they can't snoop on users who buy their products)
earthboundkid 6y ago
If the Mac App Store sucks so bad why don’t a couple indie Mac people just make their own store?
- danpalmer 6y ago
  The closest thing to this right now, other than Paddle which is fairly different as it does no aggregation, is probably Setapp – it's more like Netflix for Mac apps. Unfortunately I think it's let down by mostly having the 2nd/3rd choice apps in any given category.
- webwielder2 6y ago
  They did: https://setapp.com/ https://setapp.com/
nbzso 6y ago
What a nice piece of whataboutism. Convenience is king. And stupidity is his queen. When I sell products I want full control of my CX, just as Apple. Creating, maintaining and optimising CX is not for everyone. It requires new mindset, new priorities, new expenses and mind geared towards product for customers, feedback, support etc. If your dream software is egoistic projection with profit only goal you will be better with App Store bonanza. If by any chance you want to Serve people and have valuable product the idea of using App Store is absurd. In App Store you have no control over UX. It is what Apple is decided to be. You have no direct customer feedback or connection. Apple owns this channel. In summary: You are working not for you and your customers. You are working for Apple and paying for the "privilege".
- nbzso 6y ago
  For those who have need for critical thinking: Reality is that New Apple are masters in dark UX. They don't appeal to rationality and logic. They model UX for psychology of appeal. In short deep in our psyche we crave Father/Mother figure and majority of us are in some form of misbalance. When You listen to Apple Marketing you are witnessing the work of the best of the best. Everything is with neutral tone, presentations are balanced with Man/Woman dynamic etc. The difference with Jobs era is that when he used psychology (NLP) he backed it up with real features and added long term value. App Store marketing is perfect for small developers, small developers are perfect for Apple profit. Small developers are wiling to obey every rule. They have no choice. Until small developers start to read about marketing, business operation and UX, App Store will prevail.
figbert 6y ago
Starts the article: > [not-publicly-disclosed-but-substantially-less-than–30]% Later in the article: > a 3.5% fee with all those downsides is substantially worse for both me and my customers than a flat 15%. I wonder what Paddle's fee is...
- s3cur3 6y ago
  More than the 3.5% that Stripe or whatever would charge, less than the 15% Apple charges. :)
krono 6y ago
Is there a convenient way to sandbox non-appstore apps? It's a real chore to figure out what apps that aren't available through the appstore (Chrome, VSCode, etc.) are doing to my computer. So much so that I'd rather just castrate them by default and deal with breakage later.
- s3cur3 6y ago
  As a developer, assuming your app isn’t doing stuff not supported in sandbox mode, it’s as easy as a checkbox. As a user, Catalina’s absurd barrage of dialogs asking for your permission for an app to so much as look at your data may be annoying, but the dialogs are at least potentially effective. (For instance, I’ve disallowed Dropbox from touching anything outside its folder—despite it trying to access everything.)
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Yes: add the com.apple.security.app-sandbox entitlement and re-sign the app.
jokethrowaway 6y ago
Sounds like a sensible choice for his product. Things would be different with a higher revenue
deleted 6y ago
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lupinglade 6y ago
The problem with the Mac (and iOS) App Store is too many API restrictions - Apple can do too many things that developers can’t. And I don’t mean crazy things. I mean normal things that a normal application would want to do.
- anonymouse008 6y ago
  Can you define one of those? I've met some huge obstacles with adding tables into UITextViews - but there are work arounds for pretty much anything you could want (within reason). Mac Addresses and Device Identifiers APIs make sense to limit coming from the privacy minded company.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    All new apps on the Mac App Store must opt-in to the sandbox, for example.
gfxgirl 6y ago
Let's not forget the international headaches. This is an issue in both iOS and Mac app stores. Certain apps are (arguably rightly) only available in certain regions (like banking apps) but Apple's poor design means you now have to switch stores to upgrade. So Capital One tells me I have to upgrade my app I need to log out my Apple account, switch the region to USA, type in my address, phone numbers, and a USA credit card (this is for apple), then start the store back up. Sometimes it takes a while for it to switch. I can then download the new version of the Capital One app. Then my MUFG Bank app needs an update so I have to repeat the process to switch back the Japan store. Even funnier, the app store will tell me I need to upgrade but then won't upgrade (Because I'm not on the right store) so it's clearly the same store since the upgrade notices flow through the same store app, it's just bad design. Why Apple can't figure this out is beyond me. They're an international company. They must have 1000s of employees that have to deal with this issue. Sure I get it does not affect the majority of users. The same can be said for accessibility features yet they still make them.
- mmis1000 6y ago
  Meanwhile that's a feature that google already finished for years. You just login all your accounts at once and it will chose the correct one to update software. And even some chat software like telegram already has this build in. Do google patient this or for whatever reason that apple can't implement it?
Razengan 6y ago
As a user, I have the following honest question for anyone who's clamoring for the abolishment of the App Store(s): Can you guarantee that your proposed distribution mechanism will give me a refund if I ask for it? Apple has always given me a refund for all third-party apps, almost no questions asked, ever. Whereas on the other hand, apps/services which bypass In-App Purchases and use their own payment systems stall me for weeks or months before they refund, if ever. For example I'm still trying to get my money back from Couchsurfing after they basically hijacked my account about a month ago until I paid a "COVID contribution" just to delete my info.
- Razengan 6y ago
  No answers, as expected. What these people are suggesting is the worse evil, with the goal or at least the end result being to make users more vulnerable to all sorts of predatory third-parties. You may downvote these comments to manufacture an impression of homogenous opinion in this echo chamber but I will continue to support Apple with my money to counter that. The App Store is necessary, for users and for devs.
lycopodiopsida 6y ago
I am a bit split on that one. I see the convenience of using the app store, but I try to buy directly if I can. I lot of tools for power users have problems with scripting when containerized, direct purchases are much more convenient if I need to buy an upgrade license (which means cheaper in the long run) and developer gets more money that way.
- webmobdev 6y ago
  Yes, this is the far-sighted approach. Apple with its app store currently acts like a corrupt-middle-man-bureaucrat because it forces itself between the developer and the seller and demands a bribe from both for the "privilege" to develop / use an app. This means less profit for the developer, higher price for the user, and a violation of your privacy rights by Apple (apart from profiteering).

128 points by s3cur3 6y ago

OP here, happy to answer any questions. I know Apple gets a lot of well-deserved flack, but for a small-time dev like me, them taking a 15% cut makes things a lot simpler for me.

RyJones 6y ago
I bought it, I'll give it a whirl. I've been importing my photos from Flickr, which has led to thousands of duplicates.
- s3cur3 6y ago
  Sweet! Give me a shout if you run into issues. :)
sieabahlpark 6y ago
That's precisely the point though. It works for small devs but as you grow that 15% is enough to pay a team to build your own app store. That's the problem with the model.
abhinav22 6y ago
I was thinking about this as well. When you are small, it’s definitely a lifesaver. When you get big, then you have to figure it out. But when you are small, you have enough problems to solve to bring a quality product to market, this is one headache you can happily avoid.
offtop5 6y ago
I completely agree with your direction, having Apple take the responsibility to safeguard user data makes things much easier. For better or worse Apple can do no wrong and the eyes of its customers, so even if they did somehow get hacked, you wouldn't have hundreds of angry emails headed your way. I personally really do love the walled garden of owning a Mac, when I'm working on a song or music video, I just want it to work using final cut and logic. If I really feel like compiling the Linux kernel from scratch, I have a PC for that
fartcannon 6y ago
Please don't do this. You're short term gain is the worlds long term loss.
- quesera 6y ago
  Are you arguing for a zero-middleman retail relationship? Or just anti-Apple?
  - Mindwipe 6y ago
    I imagine it's anti-middleman when the middleman has the keys to all software operating on the OS and hardware.
  - webmobdev 6y ago
    It's about choice and loss of control / ownership of our device. Apple app store can exist. But they absolutely shouldn't FORCE us developers and users to use it.
    - zapzupnz 6y ago
      Just as well nobody's forced to use it, then.
- zapzupnz 6y ago
  It's OP's side project; its their decision as to how they choose to spend their time and energy, what trade-offs are involved with each option, and what's most important to them. OP owes the world, outside of their paying customers, nothing.
- webmobdev 6y ago
  Don't let the downvotes discourage you from speaking up again on this. OP is indeed being very shortsighted as a developer by supporting the app store.
  - fartcannon 6y ago
ummonk 6y ago
On the consumer side I also would prefer 15% higher pricing than to have to deal with various different payment forms as well as the difficulty of keeping track of and canceling various subscriptions.
- thewebcount 6y ago
  Yeah, same here. And even when it's a processor I know like Stripe, Square, or Shopify, I don't really trust those companies very much. I've gotten spam, other people's receipts, etc. from them and their tech support is horrible for the consumer. And if they aren't a name I know like one of the above, I'm really leery of giving them my email and credit card info!
  - cuddlybacon 6y ago
    Same here. The last time I bought software that wasn't thru a well known store or processor I ended up with some fraudulent purchases on my next credit card bill[0]. Since then, I'll never do that again. [0] - Thankfully my bank handled this without issue.
  - YeBanKo 6y ago
    While I am skeptical of cryptocurrencies, more and more often I catch myself thinking: I wish this seller just accepted bitcoin or something. I want to make a transaction and be done with it. I don’t want my email and credit card number end up anywhere long term. There was a lunch place near my work that I frequented. They used Square POS terminal, once I noticed that it somehow linked my email to my credit card, I started using cash to pay. Cash is horribly inconvenient and gross to handle, but at least once you paid you don’t need to worry about it. You can’t be hit with some unexpected charges, wait to check the transaction when posted, no possibility of data leak, no privacy concerns, etc.
    - dylan604 6y ago
      Wasn't ApplePay supposed to address this? Each transaction creates a one-time-use number which is the only number the seller receives. It would no longer be valid if evilHacker(TM) tries to use that number for a fraudulent charge later.
blunte 6y ago
Are you not concerned with Apple potentially delisting you or rejecting a future update due to some reason which may or may not be clear? I suppose you can always go back to direct if that happens, but people who bought via App Store will be out of luck for updates then.
- s3cur3 6y ago
  Eh, I toe the line as far as policy is concerned. I'm not worried, personally.
- Razengan 6y ago
  > but people who bought via App Store will be out of luck for updates then. Apps like Coda have offered mechanisms for people to update from the App Store version to a non-Store version for free, by looking for a Store downloaded .app, so it's not impossible.
ben509 6y ago
How does the no paid upgrade issue affect you?
- s3cur3 6y ago
  At some point I could imagine going subscription/IAP for new major features, and just grandfathering in all the people who bought it previously. But in my specific case, the app is a side project that honestly needs a lot of love, and it’s hard for me to imagine hitting up existing users for more money.
smoldesu 6y ago
I'm really sorry to hear you've been forced into this situation. I seldom use MacOS these days, but when I do, buying an app from the App Store is the one thing I'm least likely to do. I hope that one day it becomes viable to distribute your app through a less centralized platform.
- zapzupnz 6y ago
  OP hasn't been forced into anything; as they describe in their post, this is a choice that they've made. I don't know who you think you're convincing by speaking so sanctimoniously about someone else's choices, as though they're incapable of taking the right decision without having asked you first or that they must've been forced into it, but it certainly won't be OP or me.
- webmobdev 6y ago
  Well said. As I commented elsewhere Apple with its app store currently acts like a corrupt-middle-man-bureaucrat because it forces itself between the developer and the seller and demands a bribe from both for the "privilege" to develop / use an app. Limiting our choice means less profit for the developer, higher price for the user and a violation of your privacy rights by Apple (apart from profiteering).
webmobdev 6y ago
Just a feedback - As a developer, you are only encouraging Apple to gauge more money from developers like you by selling on App store, instead of boycotting it. Don't add value to the app store by making your app available on it. I never buy anything from the App Store. I prefer to buy directly from the seller. If you are selling exclusively only through the Apple app store, you are not only going to lose customers but also sabotaging yourself. It's incredibly shortsighted. I don't know why anyone even bothers with the app store on the macOS (or other platforms). We have been doing fine without it on the desktop for decades now, and suddenly every developer is supposed to drink the kool-aid that PAYING corporates for the privilege of adding value to that platform by developing and distributing your wares on that platform is supposed to be a GREAT thing?
- EricE 6y ago
  The Mac App store is convenient. People pay for convenience all the time. Apple thrives on convenience - the overall experience. You also completely disregarded the point he made that for him the value Apple brings now that they have discounted their fee to 15% for small developers far outweighs the 15% they charge. Paying for convenience. It's the key to their success and also the thing that many geeks seem to discount the most (just like you completely glossed over); hence the continual geek mystification of how Apple can be so successful. I sincerely doubt he's going to loose that many sales by being Mac app store exclusive. These days for the vast majority of apps I'm interested in I'm more than willing to buy them from the Mac App store. The only time I avoid the app store is if the sandboxing restrictions limit the app I want in some way; and there are very few apps that fall into that category - mostly utility or audio apps. So I buy them outside the store - which is a PITA to track all the relevant bits (payments, updates, keys, etc.). 1Password helps significantly with the license/payment tracking and thankfully more Mac developers are adding 1 click import of all your license details into password managers like 1Password - but it's still more stuff to track that you don't have to do when using the app store.
  - webmobdev 6y ago
    > You also completely disregarded the point he made that for him the value Apple brings now that they have discounted their fee to 15% for small developers far outweighs the 15% they charge. I pointed out that this is extremely short-sighted for developers. App Store on macOS doesn't have the kind of stranglehold it does on macOS like the ios platform. The more App store gains control, and the more developers are forced to distribute their apps on the platform, the more you give leverage to Apple to extort more money out of you. All the current lawsuits against the app store are indicative of this. We developers would be fools to ignore that.

mmastrac 6y ago

FWIW, I refuse to buy stuff from the Mac App Store because it's just not compatible with my life. I don't have any i-devices. I have a handful of iCloud/iTunes accounts of which I'm not sure which is technically the one I want to use (one of them is even a legacy pre-email one). I never connect my OSX box with my personal email and I will not in the future. I get it, but I just won't buy software from that store, hands down. Maybe I'm just in the dwindling minority of Mac users.

s3cur3 6y ago
Out of curiosity, do you buy software from small devs at all? It seems like, whatever the privacy/security implications may be when buying via Apple, they're worse when dealing with a totally unknown party.
- mmastrac 6y ago
  Yep. Bartender, DaisyDisk, NoCrash for my MBP, and a few others.
  - s3cur3 6y ago
    Huh. Cool! As I said elsewhere in the thread, my personal intuition is that Apple is a significantly better steward of my information (and credit card!) than a random small-time dev on the internet, but I realize not everyone agrees.
    - mmastrac 6y ago
      The security of my credit card is really up to Visa or Mastercard to deal with. I'm more likely to have it stolen by a random fast-food worker than entering it into a PCI-compliant website (out of all the times it's been compromised, they've nearly always been because it was handed over to someone to scan in the USA).
    - xoa 6y ago
      FWIW, most small time devs aren't going to be "stewards of information" to any significant degree unless they're actively trying. Handling finance will be outsourced either way, using Stripe or one of many other 3rd party services, you wouldn't be processing any of that yourself. I buy a ton of 3rd party indy software on my Mac and always have, and nothing from the MAS, and typically the only "personal info", kind of, is an email and maybe my name (and it's not as if that's verified somehow, I could just put in whatever). I also have plenty of email accounts and can trivially make more, as well as developer-specific aliases. Plus there are other tools to further layer if it was ever a problem, like virtual credit card numbers. In practice the very nature of credit cards means it doesn't seem to generally be a problem, has been less of a real world risk than hacks of physical retailers. If I see a bad charge, I just report it and get a new number. Also FWIW, I've seen plenty of sites starting to offer Apple Pay as an option at checkout, I assume it's getting built into more payment systems now. That itself is solid defense, at least as good as the MAS though sometimes the checkout flows seem a bit wonky still.

webwielder2 6y ago

I don’t have much to say about the move to the App Store except that given that there is apparently a market for a standalone paid indie photo browser, the Mac market may be more vibrant than popularly assumed.

s3cur3 6y ago
There are fives of lattes per month to be made in this market, it's blowing up! ;)
Hamuko 6y ago
Looks like more of an organizer than browser. There's definitely a need for image browsers considering how bad Apple's Preview is for that. I'm still using my old and trusted Xee3 for any sort of image browsing on macOS because of that.
- kergonath 6y ago
  Well, preview is not a browser so it’s not surprising (unless you’re thinking of Photos, which is ok but not great).

sneak 6y ago

This is disappointing and sad. The more people who do this, the more difficult it becomes for those who don't. You can't download even free apps from the App Store without providing an email address, phone number, and street address (to get an Apple ID). The App Store app also sends the mac's hardware serial number to Apple when you launch it, associating it with your identity in the logs. The email and phone required are verified so you can't just make some shit up. This means that to get any apps from the App Store, even free ones, you must be thoroughly de-anonymized. Not caring about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like not caring about free speech because you have nothing to say. Developers should reject the App Store on customer privacy grounds alone. When this becomes the sole method of distributing apps on the mac, as it is on iOS, the world becomes a much worse place, as then the US government had permanent access without a warrant to every app you use. Please don't contribute to building that world.

globalproctd 6y ago
... you can install apps on Mac without going through the App Store.
s3cur3 6y ago
Is the implication that I, a random guy across the internet, am a better steward of your personally identifying information than Apple? I'm not saying you're wrong, but that definitely doesn't match my own intuitions.
- sneak 6y ago
  The implication is that, regardless of price, making the App Store more useful and valuable harms privacy for everyone, as it reduces the ability of people to resist Apple restricting features or functionality to App Store only, as they have already done with VPN apps using the NetworkExtension API. These cannot be installed outside of the App Store at all, even self-built ones. There is also the issue of surveillance. Apple processed warrantless FISA surveillance orders for 30,000 users last year, per their own transparency report. It's possible that people don't want Apple (and by extension the FBI and US military, with no probable cause or warrant required) knowing the apps they purchase and use, or when, or on which devices. Being App Store only prohibits that, and requires that your users be subject to this surveillance. It's the same issue with posting to Instagram, for example: deciding to donate free content to Facebook there makes the product more attractive to Facebook's users and makes it harder for small businesses to opt out of using Facebook's ad business. Decisions like this make the whole world worse.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jbverschoor 6y ago

Thank you!

tunesmith 6y ago

Does the 15% have a shelf? Like... if a business makes $1,000,001, do they owe 30% on the entire amount, or just the extra dollar? In other words, is there a disincentive to go above a million until you're above two million?

ghshephard 6y ago
I've asked that question of five or six Apple/IOS developers, some of them well known, and they've all just laughed at me. Worrying about coming close to $1mm/annual sales is something precisely zero of them were worried about. The answer to your question is, according to what I've read, yes - at $999,999 you owe $150K. At $1,000,001, you owe $300K. But - if you can get to $1mm, it's highly likely that $1.5mm, $2.0mm+, etc... are coming soon enough. Many developers are focussing on $50k, $60k, type scenarios, where the 30% to 15% means enough money in their pocket to afford new development hardware, etc...
- s3cur3 6y ago
  As I understand it, if you make $1 more than $1M, it's not that you suddenly owe an extra $150k in "back taxes," but rather that going forward, you'll be in the 30% "tax bracket." It's still a tax cliff, and therefore kind of problematic (if it's November 2021 and you've made $950k, you're strongly incentivized to shut down sales until the new year!), but as you say, that's a problem 99% of devs would love to have.
  - ummonk 6y ago
    How is it a tax cliff? My understanding is that after you hit 1 million they will start taking 30% of money that comes in after that for the rest of the year.
    - chongli 6y ago
      The issue is that if you cross the $1m threshold in the current year then the next January you don’t go back to 15%, you stay at 30% for the whole next year. So if next year your sales fall slightly below $1m, you end up paying $150k in extra Apple tax. Then the following year you go back to the 15% rate.

camhart 6y ago

A "better experience"? Maybe for a Mac only app. But once your product spreads across multiple platforms is much easier for the customer to download the app for all platforms in one place--your website.

s3cur3 6y ago
Indeed! In this case, Unbound is Mac only, and probably will remain so for its entire life.
kergonath 6y ago
Why so? Having Office 365 on the Mac App Store does not make the lives of users on other platforms more difficult in any way. It’s trivial to put a link to the App Store page on a website anyway: click on “Windows”, get a .exe; click on “Mac”, get it through the store. It’s not like the two cannot be integrated together, and games publishers have been doing it for several stores on the same platform.
swiley 6y ago
Personally I have a number of unplayable games now that I no longer have a mac, the ones I bought directly (minecraft, KSP) aren't among them.

W-Stool 6y ago

Some years ago I looked at developing a MacOS app and distributing it through the App Store. I came away from that experience with two showstoppers: - Apple does not disclose to you who bought your app. - There is no mechanism to make paid updates possible. If you want to release a big update and get paid you need to release a new app. There is no way to contact current users and offer them an inexpensive update. Are these two issues still true of the MacOS App Store?

jimbokun 6y ago
Do developers get around the "no updates" problem with "In App Purchases"? Or do "In App Purchases" not really allow for deploying new code and features?
- valuearb 6y ago
  You can use IAP for upgrades. it’s just a bit more work, grows your testing matrix significantly and is a bit more confusing to your customers.
- gowld 6y ago
  That's a janky workaround. You have support both the old and new features/behaviors in one app, and push an update that wraps the old and new features in code like 'if(IAP_X_ENABLED())'. Any architectural refactorings aren't compatible with that model, so you'd have to launch MyApp2019 and MyApp2020, and hope Apple lets you do that.
- cuddlybacon 6y ago
  Another work-around I've seen is updating the old app that has a one-time popup to alert users to the new version. As a user, I can live with that as long as it is a one-time popup. This is really something the store should handle.
  - duskwuff 6y ago
    Notifying users is the easy part. The hard part is offering upgrade pricing, rather than forcing users to buy the new version at full price. I think I've seen a workaround of offering the old and new versions as a bundle? That's pretty ugly, though.

fartcannon 6y ago

Don't? For the sake of the future, don't use app stores that are monopolies. Do both, at the very least.

judge2020 6y ago
The Mac App Store is further from a monopoly than the Play store is on Android. AFAIK even new Macs from Apple come with the gatekeeper setting allowing apps from both the Mac App Store and identified developers. You could say that the developer account + notarization requirement is still a way for Apple to have a monopoly, but there aren't many stories of legitimate (ie. not adware) applications getting their certificate revoked or being rejected by notarization.
mandrizzle 6y ago
What is a good alternative? Download.com?

gumby 6y ago

I buy directly from the publisher whenever that is an option simply because I figure they need the 30% more than Apple does. But I agree that the App Store is a far better experience both in purchase and then upgrade. My mum has one non-app store app on her Mac and is always befuddled by the upgrade prompt. Even for my own use I find the App Store upgrade is almost always better than other means.

racl101 6y ago

As a consumer I hate the Mac App Store so much if only for the reason that every time I want to do something I have login again and again. The Mac App store is quite buggy. Sometimes I have to log in two times in a row. I hate it so fucking much that I almost consider not buying a good product just to avoid the Mac App Store's shitty app. I also hate that the purchase is tied to my Apple ID, especially for a utility that I'd like to use in another computer. Say a workstation where I might have a different Apple ID. If an app, for example, can be installed in two work machines, I don't want my Apple ID to dictate which machines. Anyways rant over. I get that for the seller's point of view the Mac App Store's updated policy is a boon.

SomeHacker44 6y ago
I get it worse. Sometimes it goes in a permanent loop asking for my password infinitely many times and doing nothing, until I Force Quit, which does not usually help the problem. It truly sucks and I regret the few purchases I made with it. But, the light is at the end of the tunnel: Windows 10 and WSL.
- qz2 6y ago
  Grass is not greener on the windows and WSL side. It’s yellowed and littered with turds to stand in. I run both platforms side by side and the Mac is by far the least painful. Windows 10 on an average day is like gargling sand. I mean for two months now alt-tab is broken on 20H2 release. No fix incoming yet. Zero days unpatched for 90 days etc. On WSL it’s a networking and HyperV encrusted nightmare. Have fun trying to get anything vaguely complicated to do anything even remotely sane. Total shit show. A fine comparison is the windows App Store which is genuinely like playing Russian roulette with a gun made of butter. The Mac App Store is much much much less crazy. The Mac has its fair share of suck but my word at least they actually tried to put something cohesive together. Going to put it honestly but I don’t think Microsoft are earning my respect or attention, just shouting about how wonderful their product is while it’s falling to pieces in my hands.
  - manderley 6y ago

diebeforei485 6y ago

I prefer the Mac App Store over any other alternative, as a consumer. I understand 30% is a large cut and I wish they'd cut it down to 15% across the board [it could be a competitive advantage, too].

Razengan 6y ago
All comments here saying they prefer the App Store as users are being downvoted. Probably by user-hostile developers who want to give the impression that people don't want the App Store, likely because Apple's policies prevent them from preying upon users. (One of the top comments here is by a dev acting surprised they can't snoop on users who buy their products)

earthboundkid 6y ago

If the Mac App Store sucks so bad why don’t a couple indie Mac people just make their own store?

danpalmer 6y ago
The closest thing to this right now, other than Paddle which is fairly different as it does no aggregation, is probably Setapp – it's more like Netflix for Mac apps. Unfortunately I think it's let down by mostly having the 2nd/3rd choice apps in any given category.
webwielder2 6y ago
They did: https://setapp.com/ https://setapp.com/

nbzso 6y ago

What a nice piece of whataboutism. Convenience is king. And stupidity is his queen. When I sell products I want full control of my CX, just as Apple. Creating, maintaining and optimising CX is not for everyone. It requires new mindset, new priorities, new expenses and mind geared towards product for customers, feedback, support etc. If your dream software is egoistic projection with profit only goal you will be better with App Store bonanza. If by any chance you want to Serve people and have valuable product the idea of using App Store is absurd. In App Store you have no control over UX. It is what Apple is decided to be. You have no direct customer feedback or connection. Apple owns this channel. In summary: You are working not for you and your customers. You are working for Apple and paying for the "privilege".

nbzso 6y ago
For those who have need for critical thinking: Reality is that New Apple are masters in dark UX. They don't appeal to rationality and logic. They model UX for psychology of appeal. In short deep in our psyche we crave Father/Mother figure and majority of us are in some form of misbalance. When You listen to Apple Marketing you are witnessing the work of the best of the best. Everything is with neutral tone, presentations are balanced with Man/Woman dynamic etc. The difference with Jobs era is that when he used psychology (NLP) he backed it up with real features and added long term value. App Store marketing is perfect for small developers, small developers are perfect for Apple profit. Small developers are wiling to obey every rule. They have no choice. Until small developers start to read about marketing, business operation and UX, App Store will prevail.

figbert 6y ago

Starts the article: > [not-publicly-disclosed-but-substantially-less-than–30]% Later in the article: > a 3.5% fee with all those downsides is substantially worse for both me and my customers than a flat 15%. I wonder what Paddle's fee is...

s3cur3 6y ago
More than the 3.5% that Stripe or whatever would charge, less than the 15% Apple charges. :)

krono 6y ago

Is there a convenient way to sandbox non-appstore apps? It's a real chore to figure out what apps that aren't available through the appstore (Chrome, VSCode, etc.) are doing to my computer. So much so that I'd rather just castrate them by default and deal with breakage later.

s3cur3 6y ago
As a developer, assuming your app isn’t doing stuff not supported in sandbox mode, it’s as easy as a checkbox. As a user, Catalina’s absurd barrage of dialogs asking for your permission for an app to so much as look at your data may be annoying, but the dialogs are at least potentially effective. (For instance, I’ve disallowed Dropbox from touching anything outside its folder—despite it trying to access everything.)
saagarjha 6y ago
Yes: add the com.apple.security.app-sandbox entitlement and re-sign the app.

jokethrowaway 6y ago

Sounds like a sensible choice for his product. Things would be different with a higher revenue

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

lupinglade 6y ago

The problem with the Mac (and iOS) App Store is too many API restrictions - Apple can do too many things that developers can’t. And I don’t mean crazy things. I mean normal things that a normal application would want to do.

anonymouse008 6y ago
Can you define one of those? I've met some huge obstacles with adding tables into UITextViews - but there are work arounds for pretty much anything you could want (within reason). Mac Addresses and Device Identifiers APIs make sense to limit coming from the privacy minded company.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  All new apps on the Mac App Store must opt-in to the sandbox, for example.

gfxgirl 6y ago

Let's not forget the international headaches. This is an issue in both iOS and Mac app stores. Certain apps are (arguably rightly) only available in certain regions (like banking apps) but Apple's poor design means you now have to switch stores to upgrade. So Capital One tells me I have to upgrade my app I need to log out my Apple account, switch the region to USA, type in my address, phone numbers, and a USA credit card (this is for apple), then start the store back up. Sometimes it takes a while for it to switch. I can then download the new version of the Capital One app. Then my MUFG Bank app needs an update so I have to repeat the process to switch back the Japan store. Even funnier, the app store will tell me I need to upgrade but then won't upgrade (Because I'm not on the right store) so it's clearly the same store since the upgrade notices flow through the same store app, it's just bad design. Why Apple can't figure this out is beyond me. They're an international company. They must have 1000s of employees that have to deal with this issue. Sure I get it does not affect the majority of users. The same can be said for accessibility features yet they still make them.

mmis1000 6y ago
Meanwhile that's a feature that google already finished for years. You just login all your accounts at once and it will chose the correct one to update software. And even some chat software like telegram already has this build in. Do google patient this or for whatever reason that apple can't implement it?

Razengan 6y ago

As a user, I have the following honest question for anyone who's clamoring for the abolishment of the App Store(s): Can you guarantee that your proposed distribution mechanism will give me a refund if I ask for it? Apple has always given me a refund for all third-party apps, almost no questions asked, ever. Whereas on the other hand, apps/services which bypass In-App Purchases and use their own payment systems stall me for weeks or months before they refund, if ever. For example I'm still trying to get my money back from Couchsurfing after they basically hijacked my account about a month ago until I paid a "COVID contribution" just to delete my info.

Razengan 6y ago
No answers, as expected. What these people are suggesting is the worse evil, with the goal or at least the end result being to make users more vulnerable to all sorts of predatory third-parties. You may downvote these comments to manufacture an impression of homogenous opinion in this echo chamber but I will continue to support Apple with my money to counter that. The App Store is necessary, for users and for devs.

lycopodiopsida 6y ago

I am a bit split on that one. I see the convenience of using the app store, but I try to buy directly if I can. I lot of tools for power users have problems with scripting when containerized, direct purchases are much more convenient if I need to buy an upgrade license (which means cheaper in the long run) and developer gets more money that way.

webmobdev 6y ago
Yes, this is the far-sighted approach. Apple with its app store currently acts like a corrupt-middle-man-bureaucrat because it forces itself between the developer and the seller and demands a bribe from both for the "privilege" to develop / use an app. This means less profit for the developer, higher price for the user, and a violation of your privacy rights by Apple (apart from profiteering).