Leaving the Mac App Store • Hacker News Board

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#131

Post by forrestthewoods » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 5:24 PM UTC

chongli wrote: post #116

cmdkeen wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not having to worry about keys and updates is fantastic for me, plus good discovery and upselling opportunities for developers. It's not that great for me. I've had a bunch of my Steam games put out breaking updates and there's nothing I can do about it but wait for subsequent rollbacks. It's a major flaw in the system that a breaking update can be forced down users' throats.

Automatic updates is great. The lack of ability to easily rollback is not. GOG's Galaxy has rollback built in. I feel like Steam will add it eventually.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#132

Post by stevetrewick » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 5:24 PM UTC

aerialcombat wrote: post #95

They should seriously do something about the review times. I'm sure they can come up with a plenty of good solutions if they wanted to. I suggest maybe giving developers a bank of a set number of expedited review passes per year or so, so they can use it when they really need it. Damn it.

It actually works like this in theory. You can get a couple of expedited reviews for critical or urgent fixes [0], but Apples definition of 'critical' and 'urgent' don't typically include having just shipped a crash bug that will effect your entire user base unless you are Rovio are a similarly large actor.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/support/app-review/

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#133

Post by dreen » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 5:27 PM UTC

cmdkeen wrote: post #114

VeryVito wrote: post #46

I'm glad to see successful apps exiting The Mac App Store, and I hope others will follow. Unlike its iOS counterpart, which is great in many ways (new app discovery not being one of them), the MAS has unfortunately done more harm than good to the once-thriving indy Mac app-development scene. It offers a low cost of entry, but also encourages "pump-and-dump" development, in which developers are actively (though surely…

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

Steam is terrible. It requires the whole app to be running and fully up to date before you can launch a game. It has a slow load time. Even on a decent machine, if you haven't played a steam game in a while and you want to run one, you might be looking at a good few minutes before the game even starts to load. In the name of what, stopping piracy? AFAIK most pirated games come from steam anyway.

I realise this is still better than Mac App Store, but I wish they just let me run a the game without running Steam.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#134

Post by mingus68040 » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 5:27 PM UTC

dkonofalski wrote: post #69

X-Istence wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what Apple's scheme does, except that Apple's root certificate expired... There is no communication between you and Apple when you launch applications.

That's not true. Apple issued a new root certificate using the latest OpenSSL standard. The apps that "expired" were using an out-of-date version. They technically shouldn't have worked in the first place, but Apple kept renewing the old SHA-1 certificate alongside the current one which allowed these apps to validate, despite using a cert that was obsolete since 2005.

>Apple issued a new root certificate using the latest OpenSSL standard. The apps that "expired" were using an out-of-date version

And they were simply following Apple's recommendation to statically link OpenSSL. An app which hasn't been updated in a year or two could easily fall into this trap.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#135

Post by acchan » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 5:27 PM UTC

song wrote: post #3

I avoid buying from the mac app store as much as possible. If Apple ever decided to change mac os x to no longer allow external applications, I would switch to Linux right away. I don't want to do that because I do like the os X better a GUI... But there's no way I'd stay on a system that wouldn't allow me to do what I want with it.

If you like the OS X user interface, you'll feel right at home with https://elementary.io

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#136

Post by darryl42 » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 5:29 PM UTC

heartbreak wrote: post #126

cmdkeen wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Where would you say that Steam currently falls short as a desktop app store? Didn't they roll out general purpose apps for Windows a while back?

They did, but most of them seem like toy apps or old versions of an application, old version on steam new version direct from vendor.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#137

Post by chipperyman573 » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 5:31 PM UTC

dreen wrote: post #133

cmdkeen wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Steam is terrible. It requires the whole app to be running and fully up to date before you can launch a game. It has a slow load time. Even on a decent machine, if you haven't played a steam game in a while and you want to run one, you might be looking at a good few minutes before the game even starts to load. In the name of what, stopping piracy? AFAIK most pirated games come from steam anyway. I realise this is sti…

Once you launch a game once through steam you can just run the launcher file.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#138

Post by sosborn » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 5:31 PM UTC

to3m wrote: post #102

relaxatorium wrote: post #81

The thing that's craziest about the MAS to me is how bad the actual application is. It's super slow, constantly hangs, and is just such a bad experience from the consumer side that it undermines the (very real) benefits of having a centralized store of applications you've purchased and installed. It'd be one thing (and a fairly standard Apple move) if the customer experience was good and they didn't care about trampl…

I dread ever having to run the Mac App Store to get an upgrade. (Luckily, I only have to do it for Xcode and OS X.) It asks for my password literally every 15-20 seconds. Once I tell it to upgrade everything, it selects only one upgrade, and keeps telling me there are upgrades. While the upgrades are going, it keeps asking me for my password. At that point I go off and watch TV. When I come back, it's actually downlo…

> It asks for my password literally every 15-20 seconds.

This hasn't been my experience at all. I wonder what's going on because that sounds super annoying.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#139

Post by asd » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 5:33 PM UTC

relaxatorium wrote: post #81

The thing that's craziest about the MAS to me is how bad the actual application is. It's super slow, constantly hangs, and is just such a bad experience from the consumer side that it undermines the (very real) benefits of having a centralized store of applications you've purchased and installed. It'd be one thing (and a fairly standard Apple move) if the customer experience was good and they didn't care about trampl…

The MAS is excruciatingly slow. Switching to each tab takes 7-10 seconds for me on my late '13 Macbook Pro Retina with a very fast internet connection. The tabs seem to work in a similar way in iTunes. You would think they could precache the other tabs after the current tab loads. Nope.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#140

Post by oneeyedpigeon » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 5:33 PM UTC

SyneRyder wrote: post #84

X-Istence wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they don't contact the app store to approve each launch. Apple has a root CA that expired, during this "event" apps wouldn't launch because they couldn't verify the code signing certificate. Apple updated their certificate, and all apps started working again. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10560634

Not all apps, some older apps (e.g. Tweetbot 1.xx) stopped working permanently & can't be fixed, because Apple doesn't allow old versions to be re-downloaded from the Mac App Store. It's convinced me to stop using the MAS and I've been re-buying my MAS apps direct from the developer wherever possible. I commented more fully over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10562030

Thanks for this info. I don't think I fully appreciated this aspect of the MAS before, although I'm sure all the pieces were lodged in the back of my mind, nagging away. I'm not going to buy any software from the MAS ever again.