Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Leaving the Mac App Store

blog.sketchapp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 424 posts

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#151

Post by mrec »

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…

I use and generally like Steam, but I'd never call its discovery "good". Users are drowning in the number of titles, the recommendation engine is pretty poor, and there's no support for filtering.

I'll never buy an RTS or a multiplayer-only game, stop showing them to me. I'll never buy an early-access game or a game with 3rd-party DRM, stop showing them to me. I could cull 90% of the stuff in my discovery queues, automatically, with 30 seconds of box-checking.

I'm also surprised that the desktop client has never implemented an "is this machine actually capable of running this game?" check. Non-trivial to implement, sure, but really useful.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#152

Post by jonknee »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #144
jonknee wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How viable would it be for a third-party alternative to act as a 'broker' between customer and developer, just to handle those aspects you mention?

Steam has done well with that model for games, but being Mac only would be a tough sell. Apple's big advantage was instantly getting the App Store on every Mac.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#153

Post by wtallis »

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…

If you don't let Steam run in the background, then of course it's not going to be able to update games in the background. The delay in launching games is thus at least partly self-inflicted. And Steam certainly has justifications other than DRM for being strict about keeping games up to date: any networked game will probably need to match the version of the server, and in general it's good policy for Steam to trust developers have good reasons for pushing out updates.

There are also Steam games that don't use Steam's DRM and can be run without Steam. It's up to the individual game developers whether to include the DRM.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#154

Post by the_af »

mrec wrote: post #151
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…

I use and generally like Steam, but I'd never call its discovery "good". Users are drowning in the number of titles, the recommendation engine is pretty poor, and there's no support for filtering . I'll never buy an RTS or a multiplayer-only game, stop showing them to me. I'll never buy an early-access game or a game with 3rd-party DRM, stop showing them to me. I could cull 90% of the stuff in my discovery queues, au…

Same here. I like and use Steam, but its UI for casually browsing games (aka "casual shopping") isn't very good. For example, when you are browsing a list of games, if you click on one to see additional details and then try going back, you lose your place in the list. This is infuriating for long lists. It kills the browse & shop experience.

The web interface for Steam is better than the app's. Then again, this is what web browsers are there for...

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#155

Post by zwetan »

kremdela wrote: post #60

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.

As a user/consumer I consider the search or discovery of new apps on the MAS quite horrible, the features you mention are nice but IMHO they come "after you found the app".

IMHO an app dev is better off implementing the payment system and update than using MAS, for ex in my case there is no way I would wait 7 days to have an update out of the door (eg. I don't automate everything to get blocked on the last step).

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#156

Post by pkamb »

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…

> but also encourages "pump-and-dump" development

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

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#157

Post by mrec »

the_af wrote: post #154
mrec wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use and generally like Steam, but I'd never call its discovery "good". Users are drowning in the number of titles, the recommendation engine is pretty poor, and there's no support for filtering . I'll never buy an RTS or a multiplayer-only game, stop showing them to me. I'll never buy an early-access game or a game with 3rd-party DRM, stop showing them to me. I could cull 90% of the stuff in my discovery queues, au…

Same here. I like and use Steam, but its UI for casually browsing games (aka "casual shopping") isn't very good. For example, when you are browsing a list of games, if you click on one to see additional details and then try going back, you lose your place in the list. This is infuriating for long lists. It kills the browse & shop experience. The web interface for Steam is better than the app's. Then again, this is wh…

Yes! Forgot to mention that, but it drives me nuts too.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#158

Post by henriks »

bomberstudios wrote: post #53
__m wrote: post #43

Well the new sketch crashes instantly, i hope it doesn't take them a week to release an update

If you used The Unarchiver, Pathfinder or Keka to unzip it, try using OSX's Archive Utility

Surprisingly this turned out to be the issue; The Unarchiver messed up some file attributes it seems. Thanks.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#159

Post by zanedeg »

Jasber wrote: post #108

Two years ago I released a Mac app ( https://heyfocus.com/ ) that couldn't be in the MAS due to sandbox restrictions (tried 3 times—frustrating experience). I sat on it for an entire year because I was convinced nobody buys stuff outside of the AppStore anymore. A year ago, the project still had really good traction, so I decided to try to sell it directly as a test (using Paddle.com). Boy, was I wrong! TONS of peopl…

I use focus everyday, thanks for the great app!

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#160

Post by SneakerXZ »

eveningcoffee wrote: post #82
tomphoolery wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Apple ever decided to change mac os x to no longer allow external applications, I would switch to Linux right away. Even if that did happen, which it wouldn't, what would stop you from compiling the application yourself, theoretically? If Apple computers allow for compilation of their own software, which they probably always will given that a Mac is the only way you can make OS X or iOS apps at this time, then O…

What if they restrict running compilers? Edit: I see from down votes that people disagree with this idea (no problem with that). Still, why not? You need a developer licence for iOS that effectively means that you are restricted to run compilers on iOS. Why not extend it to OSX?

Because you would lose your customers. If my operating system limits me from doing things that I can do on other platforms and I want to do them, I will simply not use the system.

Are you realizing Mac is used also by creative people that use Adobe tools, tools for 3D and so on and if everything was sandboxed you couldn't do it anymore.

Post reply on HN