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The Mac App Store gives a hint at what would happen if there was any choice. The amount of software actually available for the Mac is far, far greater than wha

The Mac App Store gives a hint at what would happen if there was any choice. The amount of software actually available for the Mac is far, far greater than what’s listed in the store. Furthermore, while some quality and notable apps are still in the Mac App Store, many well-known apps are not there. The number of lousy apps is also extremely high every time I go to search or just look at the front page, to the point where Apple does itself no favors by even drawing attention to most of the apps on that store (and it gives the impression that “most” Mac software must be like this). If they simply listed all major Mac apps, e.g. linking to their web sites or download links or whatever, they would hugely increase the value of the Mac platform and bring enough direct benefit to developers to be worth some kind of fee (and of course Apple gets $99/year anyway). Instead, they tried to port the same clueless, greedy, review-burdened scheme to that store, layering completely unnecessary requirements on top (like poorly-thought-out sandboxing). And since developers had a choice, they mostly said No.

Reason077 5y ago
This is about allowing alternative payment systems for purchases made in-app. Not necessarily alternative app stores / install mechanisms, which is a separate issue.
- ezekg 5y ago
  But they are tightly related. Russia just issued a similar warning concerning iOS app distribution.
  - jonny_eh 5y ago
    I don't see how they're related at all, at least beyond them being about the App Store.
    - jacobr1 5y ago
      While they aren't _necessarily_ coupled, the bundling of an app-store and cloud services such as payments, notifications, and more, along with vetting (for security issues) does seem of value. One can certainly imagine third-party app stores including similar requires to apple. I can imagine a Yandex store, Tencent store, that both require you to use their payment platform if you want to host an app in their store. In fact, being integrated into a cloud-service-vendor's ecosystem might a reason to chose a particular store in the same way the Play and Apple are part of the decision today.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      Alternative in-app payments is about third-party developers receiving money in apps without the manufacturer getting a cut; alternative app stores is about third-party developers receiving money for apps without the manufacturer getting a cut. Seems very related.
- davidjytang 5y ago
  Yes. And which Apple is already supporting for their current definition of "Reader" apps.
realusername 5y ago
Maybe that's just a proof that there's not much value created by the app store if they can't convince developers to use it if they had a choice.
- webmobdev 5y ago
  Exactly - I've always pointed out that developers for the Apple's ecosystem are being dumbasses. Why would you willingly pay Apple money annually (and then a percentage of your profit too) to develop on their platform when you actually add value to it!? Platforms struggle and / or fail to be successful in the market when developers don't support them. (You just have to look at MS Windows Mobile, Samsung's Tizen OS, LG webOS, Jolla Sailfish OS etc. to realise this). (I was one of these dumbass too once and bought a mac and other apple devices to create apps on Apple's platform before I realised that I was being a dumbass).
  - megablast 5y ago
    Monthly fee??
barredo 5y ago
> The Mac App Store gives a hint at what would happen if there was any choice. There's a choice of app store in Android and almost nobody uses Amazon App Store, F-Droid, Samsung App Store and so on. It's great that they can exist, but I don't think the Mac App Store (which has been neglected since day 1) offers any guidance. People mostly use what they know or are giving by default. In desktop, be it Windows, Linux or macOS, people aren't used to app stores.
- jandrese 5y ago
  The Amazon store used to have a killer feature where they gave away "bullshit excised" versions of apps (the "Actually Free" program), but sadly that has been discontinued and now the Amazon Store is a completely pointless cut down version of the Play Store. It's a shame because the old Fire tablets were pretty good for kids, but now the malignant ad and micropayment cancer has returned so it's no good anymore.
- nephanth 5y ago
  Well on Linux people are used to repos, which work like app stores. Ubuntu users even have an actual app store
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  The problem with alternate app stores on Android is that before Android 12 (which is still only in beta), other stores couldn't update the apps they install, which is kind of fatal. You also can't install the various alternate stores themselves through Google Play and Google purposely makes installing APKs a pain for regular people. And then it's "see, nobody wants them" after they purposely put a wall in front of them which most people can't get past. So developers still need to be in Google Play to get all the users who can't figure it out, but if everything is in Google Play then even the customers who could figure it out have no incentive to go through the trouble.
ComputerGuru 5y ago
The Mac App Store came after there was a thriving ecosystem for Mac apps online/organically and without a middle man, and it provided close to zero value for developers on top of that. I don’t think it’s a fair comparison.
- grishka 5y ago
  I believe there are many iOS apps that have never seen the light of day simply because it wasn't at all possible to make them compliant with the "review guidelines".
  - jandrese 5y ago
    There are entire categories of apps that aren't allowed by the rules (although you do occasionally find some examples in the store somehow). Emulators that can run ROM files are a good example. You won't find MAME in the app store except occasionally when someone at AppleHQ makes a mistake. Even then it quickly disappears.
- giobox 5y ago
  I think there is still value in the comparison, but you are absolutely correct. Any comparison must include this huge caveat - the Mac had a third party software ecosystem for over 20 years, well before OS X or a Mac App Store came along. There simply was far, far less historical incentive to adopt the macOS App Store than there was on iOS, which of course mandated the App Store from the beginning. As a thought experiment: how many companies would leave the official iOS App Store if offered a choice tomorrow? Epic Im sure... but the experience on Android suggests to me not that many. As with Android, I think a lot will still want a presence on the default/"official" store regardless of the 30 percent take. Don't forget Apple have also done the hard part of getting a customer to enter their CC number to their iCloud account for their store, removing an enormous amount of friction in the sales process too.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    On the other side, as a customer I'm not exactly happy with the prior ecosystem either: - every app has their own licensing system - I have to keep track of emails, license key files, logins and other bullshit manually instead of having it synchronized automatically at application install. Not to mention I have a boatload of shop accounts that have collected my payment and other personal data (e.g. postal address) and whom I have to trust now that they keep their data secure enough to not have it stolen. - for subscription stuff, I have to update payment details for an awful lot of individual shops instead of having one single place - refund policies vary wildly, as is tax compliance for foreign companies I agree that Apple and Google must be reined in - 30% cut are absurd rip-offs, and the fact that stores can censor legal content (e.g. anything marijuana/tobacco/drug related or adult content) is troubling - but the central store model does have advantages.
Joeri 5y ago
Sometimes I try to imagine what the app store rules would look like if apple had to abide by those same rules for all of their own apps. I imagine the rules would be much more lenient, app review a lot less error prone, and developers would be chafed far less by those golden handcuffs. Pretty sure apple’s developer documentation would still be bad though.
- haswell 5y ago
  I work on a platform that provides its subscribers with a store for 1st and 3rd party apps/solutions built on that platform. Every app delivered on this store must go through the same review process whether it's internally built or not. This has led to healthy innovation on the app store and deep empathy for the 3rd party developer. To be fair, it is possible to ship components that are part of the core platform outside of this mechanism, but I think just having one subset of internal development go through the same review/approval channels as 3rd party apps has been very positive for our developer community. I'd love to see the same thing here.
  - novok 5y ago
    So what is the platform?
    - kernoble 5y ago
      If I had to guess it would be something like Slack, Shopify, Squarespace or some other SaaS platform that needs to meet the needs of a hugely diverse customer base.
      - haswell 5y ago
        I’d prefer not to name the specific platform to maintain anonymity, but you’re in the right ballpark.
    - frutiger 5y ago
      Somewhat obvious if you check their submission history.
kmonsen 5y ago
Isn't this mostly due to burdensome requirements which means most apps would have to remove features and the fact that they don't support upgrades? At least those are the arguments I have seen to not put the apps in the mac store.
- dwaite 5y ago
  For many apps the issue isn't feature removal but sandboxing. https://panic.com/blog/coda-2-5-and-the-mac-app-store/ https://panic.com/blog/coda-2-5-and-the-mac-app-store/ MAS requires sandboxing, distribution outside the store does not. That said, Apple turns the 'default sandboxing' screw another half turn with every release. In addition to subscription revenue, upgrades are possible by releasing a new product version (e.g. "OmniGraffle 7" in MAS) with a free tier ("read-only mode") and in-app purchases for new users as well as upgrades from OG 6. I believe you can read purchase receipts within your developer team to determine upgrades.
  - greggman3 5y ago
    I see those 2 things are orthogonal. if it was up to me all apps, even apps not from the app store would be sandboxed by default (and if you wanted to you could give the permissions to un-sandbox them). ideally though they'd run in the sandbox.
mauricio 5y ago
I would disagree with the premise that the two stores are comparable. The alternative to not use the Mac App Store is not just financial, but also allows developers to bypass the sandbox requirements. Whether or not Apple permits alternative payment systems for iOS/iPadOS, all the apps will likely remain sandboxed.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Precisely: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/19/apples-head-of-software-says-current-level-of-mac-malware-is-not-acceptable.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/19/apples-head-of-software-says...
- webmobdev 5y ago
  Any OS feature should be in control of the user, not Apple who can sell access to these features to developers in the form of "entitlements".
FpUser 5y ago
>"many well-known apps are not there" Not Mac user but I guess it is the same as for Windows. I have some desktop products for Windows. The thought of releasing them to MS Store had never crossed my mind.
ipaddr 5y ago
You want Apple to pick 100 big apps and promote them? That would take away from the smaller person's chance. That list grows stale and complaints over who is on the list starts.
- arthurcolle 5y ago
  The arbitrary integer n = 100 is out of place, comparing your example with GP's comment. The commenter is totally right - the Mac App Store is just a gimmick in the same way that the iOS App Store is a total gimmick to accumulate fees from app developers. The fact that the review system is so broken is a pure indictment of the model itself.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Using reviews seems like the fairest idea 10 years ago. Society has changed. Couldn't they take reviews/rating on every app from the public, critics and other stats like downloads to create a scoring system like rotten tomatoes?
    - arthurcolle 5y ago
      I meant app reviews from apple itself before getting any new update approved for listing on the app store, not user reviews of the app utility
- makecheck 5y ago
  Well honestly they should just have links to all apps but that would require the search engine to not also suck (different discussion). It’s just surprising to me that Apple didn’t take such a basic step to do this, when it seems it would so clearly increase the value of the platform. It is why it is difficult to believe anything they say about how much they “love” the Mac...every single action they take to “help” the Mac platform is just baffling.
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
Developers said no because the proposition was bad.
tsycho 5y ago
I don't think that follows, sadly. The evolutionary history matters a lot in these things, since they set the culture and precedent on the platform. Macs and desktops started (or at least, became popular) as an open environment where users obtained software directly from vendors. iOS and Android (with the caveat that it has always supported sideloading) started as closed systems, and the vast majority of customers are used to getting their software from the official app store. UPDATE: Fixed a typo
cactus2093 5y ago
Not only that, but if you ever have the option of buying a software license directly from the developer or through the Mac App Store, you usually get much worse terms from the Mac App Store. You'll pay the same price, but instead of getting a license you can run on unlimited of your own machines, or sometimes a fixed number like you can register it to 3 machines at a time, you can only install it on other computers that are managed by the same iCloud account. I've learned this the hard way with a bunch of productivity apps, if you want to use it on a personal machine and a work machine in the same way you can easily install all the free apps that you use on both machines, you're out of luck if you bought it on the Mac App Store. I've ended up re-buying a few different productivity tools over the years that I made the mistake of buying on the Mac App Store first, so that I actually had a portable license I could use that wasn't tightly coupled to making my personal text messages and iCloud files available on the same computer I want to use the license on. You also can't install mac app store apps via homebrew in a setup script or any kind of tooling you use to manage the computer (maybe this is getting better with shortcuts, but I'm not aware of a way to do it). If it's a cross-platform app, you pay the same price but lose the ability to ever run it on Windows in the future if you buy it from the app store. If it's one of the few AAA games that support MacOS at all, if you buy on Steam you usually get a cross-platform license and there will often be a bunch of bundles that include extra DLC packs at a discounted price. Once a game is a few years old it will start going on sale all the time on Steam. The mac app store version usually won't go on the same sales and usually doesn't have any bundles available either. If you have multiple user accounts created on a computer, you can't even upgrade a free app that a different user installed via the Mac App store, even if your user also has admin privileges. Only the same user that originally installed it can upgrade the app even though the app is available to every user on the machine. There's really no reason to ever install anything from the Mac App Store, other than first-party Apple apps where you have no other choice (like XCode, Garage Band, Keynote, Final Cut, etc.)
- makecheck 5y ago
  And it’s such an incredibly good example of why anti-steering rules should be illegal. Apple basically refuses to let apps even tell the user that such alternate licenses are available! I hate anti-steering so much that I hope any future legislation against it also enforces retroactive refunds for a significant period of time. Whatever money they have made is basically entirely due to pulling wool over users’ eyes, and they need to be losing millions from this as a punishment.
neonbones 5y ago
Sound reasonable, and I see additional payment systems as improvement mostly. But I have concerns about additional stores, not about entropy and all the multistore problem from a UX perspective, but as a privacy threat. I like the current Apple politics "we are a hardware company, not another user data selling platform," and they do great things in that way. But what happens, if Facebook move their apps to their store without any restrictions on privacy? So they can do anything they want, and not only they. If now App Store got strict rules about privacy, what will happen in that situation? It's not so unbelievable that Facebook will try to get back their "data profit" from Apple users.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  In the Tim Cook era they are now (or are now transitioning into) a services company. Steve would have murdered anyone who proposed putting a 90 day Apple TV+ upsell in Settings on a new phone. Out the airlock. Instantly. They’re moving to selling subscriptions and data is critical to that. Strict rules would actually give them a huge edge over their other services competitors on platform and if they could couch it in anti-trust, that would be quite a coup.
  - orhmeh09 5y ago
    Do you remember MobileMe? Jobs was in charge when its 60-day demo shipped with OS X: https://www.dummies.com/computers/macs/how-to-decide-whether-to-join-apples-mobileme/ https://www.dummies.com/computers/macs/how-to-decide-whether...
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      I actually have a .Mac account from back in the day - only one I missed was iTools. That IIRC was embedded in the MobileMe settings pane, the AppleTV+ ad is top level of Settings. Between your face and software update haha. Not anywhere even close to an AppleTV settings pane. At least they kept it out of Buddy this time haha.
true_religion 5y ago
Their store is basically unusable for me because it’s an app. I can’t save links to anything or open multiple tabs to compare products. It’s fine if I already know what I want but in terms of search, I think being able to run Google queries would be better. At the very least Apple should improve the store to make it Amazon level in feature set. But it feels like they abandoned it.
croes 5y ago
This law is not about another app store but about other payment methods. You still have only the AppStore on iOS.

Reason077 5y ago

This is about allowing alternative payment systems for purchases made in-app. Not necessarily alternative app stores / install mechanisms, which is a separate issue.

ezekg 5y ago
But they are tightly related. Russia just issued a similar warning concerning iOS app distribution.
- jonny_eh 5y ago
  I don't see how they're related at all, at least beyond them being about the App Store.
  - jacobr1 5y ago
    While they aren't _necessarily_ coupled, the bundling of an app-store and cloud services such as payments, notifications, and more, along with vetting (for security issues) does seem of value. One can certainly imagine third-party app stores including similar requires to apple. I can imagine a Yandex store, Tencent store, that both require you to use their payment platform if you want to host an app in their store. In fact, being integrated into a cloud-service-vendor's ecosystem might a reason to chose a particular store in the same way the Play and Apple are part of the decision today.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    Alternative in-app payments is about third-party developers receiving money in apps without the manufacturer getting a cut; alternative app stores is about third-party developers receiving money for apps without the manufacturer getting a cut. Seems very related.
davidjytang 5y ago
Yes. And which Apple is already supporting for their current definition of "Reader" apps.

realusername 5y ago

Maybe that's just a proof that there's not much value created by the app store if they can't convince developers to use it if they had a choice.

webmobdev 5y ago
Exactly - I've always pointed out that developers for the Apple's ecosystem are being dumbasses. Why would you willingly pay Apple money annually (and then a percentage of your profit too) to develop on their platform when you actually add value to it!? Platforms struggle and / or fail to be successful in the market when developers don't support them. (You just have to look at MS Windows Mobile, Samsung's Tizen OS, LG webOS, Jolla Sailfish OS etc. to realise this). (I was one of these dumbass too once and bought a mac and other apple devices to create apps on Apple's platform before I realised that I was being a dumbass).
- megablast 5y ago
  Monthly fee??

barredo 5y ago

> The Mac App Store gives a hint at what would happen if there was any choice. There's a choice of app store in Android and almost nobody uses Amazon App Store, F-Droid, Samsung App Store and so on. It's great that they can exist, but I don't think the Mac App Store (which has been neglected since day 1) offers any guidance. People mostly use what they know or are giving by default. In desktop, be it Windows, Linux or macOS, people aren't used to app stores.

jandrese 5y ago
The Amazon store used to have a killer feature where they gave away "bullshit excised" versions of apps (the "Actually Free" program), but sadly that has been discontinued and now the Amazon Store is a completely pointless cut down version of the Play Store. It's a shame because the old Fire tablets were pretty good for kids, but now the malignant ad and micropayment cancer has returned so it's no good anymore.
nephanth 5y ago
Well on Linux people are used to repos, which work like app stores. Ubuntu users even have an actual app store
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
The problem with alternate app stores on Android is that before Android 12 (which is still only in beta), other stores couldn't update the apps they install, which is kind of fatal. You also can't install the various alternate stores themselves through Google Play and Google purposely makes installing APKs a pain for regular people. And then it's "see, nobody wants them" after they purposely put a wall in front of them which most people can't get past. So developers still need to be in Google Play to get all the users who can't figure it out, but if everything is in Google Play then even the customers who could figure it out have no incentive to go through the trouble.

ComputerGuru 5y ago

The Mac App Store came after there was a thriving ecosystem for Mac apps online/organically and without a middle man, and it provided close to zero value for developers on top of that. I don’t think it’s a fair comparison.

grishka 5y ago
I believe there are many iOS apps that have never seen the light of day simply because it wasn't at all possible to make them compliant with the "review guidelines".
- jandrese 5y ago
  There are entire categories of apps that aren't allowed by the rules (although you do occasionally find some examples in the store somehow). Emulators that can run ROM files are a good example. You won't find MAME in the app store except occasionally when someone at AppleHQ makes a mistake. Even then it quickly disappears.
giobox 5y ago
I think there is still value in the comparison, but you are absolutely correct. Any comparison must include this huge caveat - the Mac had a third party software ecosystem for over 20 years, well before OS X or a Mac App Store came along. There simply was far, far less historical incentive to adopt the macOS App Store than there was on iOS, which of course mandated the App Store from the beginning. As a thought experiment: how many companies would leave the official iOS App Store if offered a choice tomorrow? Epic Im sure... but the experience on Android suggests to me not that many. As with Android, I think a lot will still want a presence on the default/"official" store regardless of the 30 percent take. Don't forget Apple have also done the hard part of getting a customer to enter their CC number to their iCloud account for their store, removing an enormous amount of friction in the sales process too.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  On the other side, as a customer I'm not exactly happy with the prior ecosystem either: - every app has their own licensing system - I have to keep track of emails, license key files, logins and other bullshit manually instead of having it synchronized automatically at application install. Not to mention I have a boatload of shop accounts that have collected my payment and other personal data (e.g. postal address) and whom I have to trust now that they keep their data secure enough to not have it stolen. - for subscription stuff, I have to update payment details for an awful lot of individual shops instead of having one single place - refund policies vary wildly, as is tax compliance for foreign companies I agree that Apple and Google must be reined in - 30% cut are absurd rip-offs, and the fact that stores can censor legal content (e.g. anything marijuana/tobacco/drug related or adult content) is troubling - but the central store model does have advantages.

Joeri 5y ago

Sometimes I try to imagine what the app store rules would look like if apple had to abide by those same rules for all of their own apps. I imagine the rules would be much more lenient, app review a lot less error prone, and developers would be chafed far less by those golden handcuffs. Pretty sure apple’s developer documentation would still be bad though.

haswell 5y ago
I work on a platform that provides its subscribers with a store for 1st and 3rd party apps/solutions built on that platform. Every app delivered on this store must go through the same review process whether it's internally built or not. This has led to healthy innovation on the app store and deep empathy for the 3rd party developer. To be fair, it is possible to ship components that are part of the core platform outside of this mechanism, but I think just having one subset of internal development go through the same review/approval channels as 3rd party apps has been very positive for our developer community. I'd love to see the same thing here.
- novok 5y ago
  So what is the platform?
  - kernoble 5y ago
    If I had to guess it would be something like Slack, Shopify, Squarespace or some other SaaS platform that needs to meet the needs of a hugely diverse customer base.
    - haswell 5y ago
      I’d prefer not to name the specific platform to maintain anonymity, but you’re in the right ballpark.
  - frutiger 5y ago
    Somewhat obvious if you check their submission history.

kmonsen 5y ago

Isn't this mostly due to burdensome requirements which means most apps would have to remove features and the fact that they don't support upgrades? At least those are the arguments I have seen to not put the apps in the mac store.

dwaite 5y ago
For many apps the issue isn't feature removal but sandboxing. https://panic.com/blog/coda-2-5-and-the-mac-app-store/ https://panic.com/blog/coda-2-5-and-the-mac-app-store/ MAS requires sandboxing, distribution outside the store does not. That said, Apple turns the 'default sandboxing' screw another half turn with every release. In addition to subscription revenue, upgrades are possible by releasing a new product version (e.g. "OmniGraffle 7" in MAS) with a free tier ("read-only mode") and in-app purchases for new users as well as upgrades from OG 6. I believe you can read purchase receipts within your developer team to determine upgrades.
- greggman3 5y ago
  I see those 2 things are orthogonal. if it was up to me all apps, even apps not from the app store would be sandboxed by default (and if you wanted to you could give the permissions to un-sandbox them). ideally though they'd run in the sandbox.

mauricio 5y ago

I would disagree with the premise that the two stores are comparable. The alternative to not use the Mac App Store is not just financial, but also allows developers to bypass the sandbox requirements. Whether or not Apple permits alternative payment systems for iOS/iPadOS, all the apps will likely remain sandboxed.

judge2020 5y ago
Precisely: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/19/apples-head-of-software-says-current-level-of-mac-malware-is-not-acceptable.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/19/apples-head-of-software-says...
webmobdev 5y ago
Any OS feature should be in control of the user, not Apple who can sell access to these features to developers in the form of "entitlements".

FpUser 5y ago

>"many well-known apps are not there" Not Mac user but I guess it is the same as for Windows. I have some desktop products for Windows. The thought of releasing them to MS Store had never crossed my mind.

ipaddr 5y ago

You want Apple to pick 100 big apps and promote them? That would take away from the smaller person's chance. That list grows stale and complaints over who is on the list starts.

arthurcolle 5y ago
The arbitrary integer n = 100 is out of place, comparing your example with GP's comment. The commenter is totally right - the Mac App Store is just a gimmick in the same way that the iOS App Store is a total gimmick to accumulate fees from app developers. The fact that the review system is so broken is a pure indictment of the model itself.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Using reviews seems like the fairest idea 10 years ago. Society has changed. Couldn't they take reviews/rating on every app from the public, critics and other stats like downloads to create a scoring system like rotten tomatoes?
  - arthurcolle 5y ago
    I meant app reviews from apple itself before getting any new update approved for listing on the app store, not user reviews of the app utility
makecheck 5y ago
Well honestly they should just have links to all apps but that would require the search engine to not also suck (different discussion). It’s just surprising to me that Apple didn’t take such a basic step to do this, when it seems it would so clearly increase the value of the platform. It is why it is difficult to believe anything they say about how much they “love” the Mac...every single action they take to “help” the Mac platform is just baffling.

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago

Developers said no because the proposition was bad.

tsycho 5y ago

I don't think that follows, sadly. The evolutionary history matters a lot in these things, since they set the culture and precedent on the platform. Macs and desktops started (or at least, became popular) as an open environment where users obtained software directly from vendors. iOS and Android (with the caveat that it has always supported sideloading) started as closed systems, and the vast majority of customers are used to getting their software from the official app store. UPDATE: Fixed a typo

cactus2093 5y ago

Not only that, but if you ever have the option of buying a software license directly from the developer or through the Mac App Store, you usually get much worse terms from the Mac App Store. You'll pay the same price, but instead of getting a license you can run on unlimited of your own machines, or sometimes a fixed number like you can register it to 3 machines at a time, you can only install it on other computers that are managed by the same iCloud account. I've learned this the hard way with a bunch of productivity apps, if you want to use it on a personal machine and a work machine in the same way you can easily install all the free apps that you use on both machines, you're out of luck if you bought it on the Mac App Store. I've ended up re-buying a few different productivity tools over the years that I made the mistake of buying on the Mac App Store first, so that I actually had a portable license I could use that wasn't tightly coupled to making my personal text messages and iCloud files available on the same computer I want to use the license on. You also can't install mac app store apps via homebrew in a setup script or any kind of tooling you use to manage the computer (maybe this is getting better with shortcuts, but I'm not aware of a way to do it). If it's a cross-platform app, you pay the same price but lose the ability to ever run it on Windows in the future if you buy it from the app store. If it's one of the few AAA games that support MacOS at all, if you buy on Steam you usually get a cross-platform license and there will often be a bunch of bundles that include extra DLC packs at a discounted price. Once a game is a few years old it will start going on sale all the time on Steam. The mac app store version usually won't go on the same sales and usually doesn't have any bundles available either. If you have multiple user accounts created on a computer, you can't even upgrade a free app that a different user installed via the Mac App store, even if your user also has admin privileges. Only the same user that originally installed it can upgrade the app even though the app is available to every user on the machine. There's really no reason to ever install anything from the Mac App Store, other than first-party Apple apps where you have no other choice (like XCode, Garage Band, Keynote, Final Cut, etc.)

makecheck 5y ago
And it’s such an incredibly good example of why anti-steering rules should be illegal. Apple basically refuses to let apps even tell the user that such alternate licenses are available! I hate anti-steering so much that I hope any future legislation against it also enforces retroactive refunds for a significant period of time. Whatever money they have made is basically entirely due to pulling wool over users’ eyes, and they need to be losing millions from this as a punishment.

neonbones 5y ago

Sound reasonable, and I see additional payment systems as improvement mostly. But I have concerns about additional stores, not about entropy and all the multistore problem from a UX perspective, but as a privacy threat. I like the current Apple politics "we are a hardware company, not another user data selling platform," and they do great things in that way. But what happens, if Facebook move their apps to their store without any restrictions on privacy? So they can do anything they want, and not only they. If now App Store got strict rules about privacy, what will happen in that situation? It's not so unbelievable that Facebook will try to get back their "data profit" from Apple users.

arcticbull 5y ago
In the Tim Cook era they are now (or are now transitioning into) a services company. Steve would have murdered anyone who proposed putting a 90 day Apple TV+ upsell in Settings on a new phone. Out the airlock. Instantly. They’re moving to selling subscriptions and data is critical to that. Strict rules would actually give them a huge edge over their other services competitors on platform and if they could couch it in anti-trust, that would be quite a coup.
- orhmeh09 5y ago
  Do you remember MobileMe? Jobs was in charge when its 60-day demo shipped with OS X: https://www.dummies.com/computers/macs/how-to-decide-whether-to-join-apples-mobileme/ https://www.dummies.com/computers/macs/how-to-decide-whether...
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    I actually have a .Mac account from back in the day - only one I missed was iTools. That IIRC was embedded in the MobileMe settings pane, the AppleTV+ ad is top level of Settings. Between your face and software update haha. Not anywhere even close to an AppleTV settings pane. At least they kept it out of Buddy this time haha.

true_religion 5y ago

Their store is basically unusable for me because it’s an app. I can’t save links to anything or open multiple tabs to compare products. It’s fine if I already know what I want but in terms of search, I think being able to run Google queries would be better. At the very least Apple should improve the store to make it Amazon level in feature set. But it feels like they abandoned it.

croes 5y ago

This law is not about another app store but about other payment methods. You still have only the AppStore on iOS.