Leaving the Mac App Store

I used to have an app in the MAS but recently removed it and is using Paddle instead.

There are so many things wrong with the MAS.

Sandbox is the biggest complaint I have. I can understand it with the iOS to some degree. At least there they are constantly providing new features and hardware changes to help apps keep being innovative.

To give an example of the Sandbox issue.

We are using AppleScript for some of our logic in the background. Because of the Sandbox every time AS is used a little gear pops up in the top menu of OSX.

This started with Yosemite. But worse than that. The implimentation of this security measure was completely sloppy. The gear didn't just appear it also rearranged the top bar icons and I of course got a horde of users complaining. We tried many things to solve this but had to finally give up and just offer MAS users to switch to our non-MAS version.

You would think that at least people would be able to turn off such a thing with apps they knew were ok. But no.

Furthermore reviews can really make you or break you. For a long time we had good reviews because I spent a lot of time making sure people understood why the spinning gear was there. But after a while one star reviews started appearing and we had no way of mitigating that or contact the user and tell them they could switch to the non MAS app if they had that issue.

And so I finally realized that if you want to actually do any innovation with your apps and built a proper business MAS is not for you.

I am beginning to wonder if there is room for an alternate App Store based on the the Developer Certificate or some security setup open sourced.

Anyway. My next product wont even be going on the MAS. It's simply not worth it. It's just a distribution channel for Apple to show their latest features (the only way you get featured)

I would love to take Space Gremlin away from the mac app store. I've had to do some pretty wonky workarounds to offer people a "pro" version to escape the sandbox and it's a constant support headache. I'm just not sure if managing the payment network, licensing and distribution support is going to be even more of a headache.

I'm genuinely surprised that nobody as set up a 3rd party app store that can compete with apple and microsoft and offer a cross platform solution. Get a big company like Adobe to anchor it and I would jump over in a heartbeat.

I think one reason is that you use your Mac to create/develop, whereas you use your iPhone to consume (I'm obviously generalizing). You need more flexibility and control with tools that you use to create/develop.

The Mac app store is great for simple, do one thing apps. I purchased a little app that stitched panoramic photos together, and it worked great and cost next to nothing.

However I think it's a long way off working for every app and developer.

I'll just play devils advocate here. As a consumer, I really like buying from the Mac App store solely for the user experience of, when I eventually new a new Macbook Pro, I can easily sync all of my purchases, rather than having to retrieve the licenses and go download the latest version of each piece of software I've purchased. As a developer, I've heard countless horror stories and totally understand.