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Leaving the Mac App Store

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Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#171

Post by api »

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…

I keep wondering if Apple wants to kill OSX and take everything toward iOS, totally jailed everything, and the cloud.

I know if they did they'd lose me as a customer for anything other that (maybe) phones, but maybe they don't care about that market.

The only way they wouldn't would be if they grew up iOS into something you can do real work with -- allowed end user app installation, emulators and VMs, containers with full Darwin installs that could run homebrew, etc.

It could be done, even without sacrificing ordinary user experience -- just hide the advanced stuff from regular users and require a little magic incantation to unlock it. But it would run counter to the padded room you-don't-own-your-device philosophy of mobile so I can't see the iOS team going that way without being pushed from above.

Of course they have been updating OS X fairly well, so maybe not. Maybe the poor App Store experience is just like the poor Podcast app and other things -- an internal problem with motivation, direction, and focus in certain areas. Organizations can easily forget about things that are important but not 'hot'.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#172

Post by gknoy »

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…

All of the things you say are true, and I also agree on the "self-inflicted" delays a sibling poster mentions.

All of these mattered very little to me when I went to reinstall a game I hadn't played in two years, after a move and a computer crash. I have games on physical media that I can no longer install, or that I can't find the discs for. Fantastic games like Bioware RPGs, or Borderlands.

With Steam, I can open a fresh machine, install the Steam app, and then install (mac versions of) games I bought in pc-version, or for which I no longer can find the media.

Between Steam's library sharing, access to cross-platform versions of games, and the fact that I can install it from scratch anywhere I have an internet connection, I don't want to buy games any other way. There are many ways to improve, but that ease of recovery and reinstallation (not to mention that it saves my save-games in the cloud for some RPGs) has been well worth any performance hits.

The "whole app" is tiny, and I need to update it maybe once a month. It's not worth complaining about.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#173

Post by jonnynezbo »

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…

Two things:

- I use Focus, and it's awesome

- I prefer to buy outside of the MAS, and always check to see if the developer sells directly before buying there

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#174

Post by jawngee »

mosburger wrote: post #104

What are the alternatives to MAS? I've been considering distributing a small OSX app at a fairly low price based on its value. Are there any good ways to sell low-priced licensed software that support pushing updates to users easily? Edit: I should mention that in my particular case, the app is an Electron (formerly Atom Shell) app, so a solution that involves an ObjC library might be a bit difficult to implement.

http://paddle.com

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#175

Post by vbezhenar »

IMO sandboxing on desktop is failed attempt. Browser is a sandbox platform. Nobody will download some shady application and run it, even if it's sandboxed (but a lot of people don't really mind to visit a shady website).

If an application is in AppStore, it means that Apple got some legal documents from developer, it means that Apple performed some automated scans on application binaries. For me it's enough to have some trust. Sandboxing is not needed and it actually making some apps unusable or even impossible to implement.

Desktop apps always were in control of the entire computer. And they are now, unless you are downloading them from the AppStore. That's why a PC is much more useful than an iPad or iPhone for power users.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#176

Post by coldtea »

chc wrote: post #169
ingenieros wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you currently following any curators? This usually helps me find games that I wouldn't have found out about otherwise.

Some people, when they have a problem finding good games, think "I know, I'll find a curator." Now they have two problems.

Besides the chance of a word-play on the famous quote, is there any substance behind this at all?

What would be the problem with finding a curator? It's not unlike how music industry has always worked -- from the era of finding a radio producer you like to the era of following a playlist on Spotify on some genre you like.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#177

Post by aeontech »

cpcallen wrote: post #130
chongli wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This includes breaking updates to the Steam client itself - which stopped working on 10.6.8 in November. I can roll back to an earlier version, but it immediately auto-updates to the latest version. So now I can't update any of the games I've bought through Steam, or reinstall any I've removed. Obviously I can't buy any new ones, either - but, even if I eventually update OS X (breaking many older Apps I depend on for…

Just want to point out that you could upgrade the base OS to latest, and run 10.6.8 in a VM for any older apps that do break in new versions.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#178

Post by metasean »

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…

Tangent: From Firefox, if I increase the font n https://heyfocus.com/ (for accessibility reasons) the buttons _come apart_ (specifically the right sides overlap the lower center of their button). Even with that font size increase, the text under the buttons is still extremely hard to read!

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#179

Post by pietro »

ThomPete wrote: post #52

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 lo…

How is Paddle working for you?

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#180

Post by djloche »

SneakerXZ wrote: post #160
eveningcoffee wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple's core customers are iPhone and iPad customers now. They realized that catering to consumer electronics customers is far more profitable than catering to pc power users, and adjusted everything to fit the profit model that makes them the most money. At times, I wish they had spun off Apple Computer as a separate entity with OS X so that the computer division wouldn't have to sit and play fourth seat to the rest of the business.
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