391–400 of 424 posts
Sketch team. I am a Mac user and heard thing about your product but haven't yet checked it out. This blog post is the first time I've visited your website. Can you answer one thing for me? Why don't you have a link to sketch.com from blog.sketch.com?
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Just to play devil's advocate: what specific things about the MAS "[do] more harm than good" or encourage "pump-and-dump" development as you say? I'm not trying to defend the MAS, and I think it definitely needs improvement, but are we really worse off for it? The two things mentioned by the Sketch developers are app review time and sandbox limits. Those same things exist on iOS, but I keep hearing people say the MAS…
No non-free upgrades. To release version 2 of your app with a fee you have to release a new app. There's no connection between the two and AFAIK no way to provide a discount for existing users. As for the MAS harming devs it's the "official store of OSX" so users are arguably being trained to look there and only there for apps. So sure you can look elsewhere but Apple is fighting against you. 30% cut is very high as…
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>That must be the most frustrating/annoying thing in the world. Yes, and sometimes it gets even more frustrating when you get rejected for some minor issue like "the app name in the help menu is mis-spelled". An issue that takes you 3 minutes to fix and re-upload. And then you need to wait another 7 days. (If you're unlucky they find something else for 7 days more of waiting time).
If they're doing that level of scrutiny a million times, they should have released a tool (or even built it into Xcode); something like "Consistency Checker". It's silly of them to reject apps entirely over checks that anyone could do in advance, if only they knew what to look for.
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You're probably right. I would still agree with the parent in that they feel like a badly done webview wrapper, because the symptoms are so similar. iTunes Store, App Store, MAS, Apple Music — there is definitely a pattern there, at least on the desktop. I find them all similarly clunky, slow, ugly and unpleasant to use. Apple almost seems to be inherently incapable of creating a decent store front, and I am curious…
The pattern is because they're the exact same app. All of those are just the iTunes Store, which is a web page on every platform. The iTunes Store is a little clunky but it works fine. Apple also have the Apple Store, which is a separate thing that's a website - I believe it's a WebObjects app and the iTunes Store is as well.
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No non-free upgrades. To release version 2 of your app with a fee you have to release a new app. There's no connection between the two and AFAIK no way to provide a discount for existing users. As for the MAS harming devs it's the "official store of OSX" so users are arguably being trained to look there and only there for apps. So sure you can look elsewhere but Apple is fighting against you. 30% cut is very high as…
The other things, yes, but 30% cut isn't a real problem. Have some perspective. You used to pay a lot more than that for packaging and distribution as a software developer, when software was still physical goods. (Yes, shareware, sure, but the number of developers who made a living out of shareware was extremely small.)
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I'm not really an OSX developer, but shouldn't it be possible to bypass the sandbox in a way by offering the user to install an unsandboxed auxiliary application via a download from your website which then communicates with the main sandboxed App Store application using some protocol and performs any actions which the MAS version would be otherwise unable to? For example, perhaps the auxiliary application runs a loca…
Against Apple Terms I believe. They will ban you if they find out. I was talking with apple support and they basically said that if we even offered some extra component to get rid of the spinning gear we would most likely be banned.
Citation of the specific term needed. It isn’t against any of them and plenty of apps do it (Things, Boom or Monity come to mind). Apple requires that the app is functional without extra downloads and the app itself must not download the extra executables. But it’s OK to use them for extended functionality (Things: system-wide popup; Monity: extra sensors) as long as you only point the user to where to download the extra helper and they do it themselves (see e.g. http://www.monityapp.com/helper/ for one such helper download page, linked from in app).
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…
Does the Paddle checkout use Stripe?
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As far as I can tell, it's not universal, but still somewhat common. (My computer has always done it ever since I bought it new in April.) It is a bit annoying. But since I use the MAS so irregularly, I can get by. I do wonder what the cause is, though. I'm less certain I'd like to know how Apple have so far failed to get to the bottom of it.
Do you know for certain that they know about it? You can file bugs here: http://bugreport.apple.com/ .
If the reason Apple haven't fixed this is that I personally didn't sign on to Radar and log it as a bug, I can live with that.
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Which is probably why it still looks like shit on Retina screens. Oh, how I love HTML apps...
What does that have to do with HTML5 apps? In the browser, when HD-DPI support was added every page started using HD-DPI font rendering, HD-DPI CSS, HD-DPI SVG, only image were still lo-res Conversely I still have native apps that are low-res only because updating them to HD-DPI meant shipping a new app.
Indeed. Except that, to get it, you-developer actually had to ship an updated browser with your "app" -- basically the same as any native app, except that instead of being "just turn on this setting in a plist and recompile", it means refreshing your little in-house fork of a massive browser project that barely anyone understands. Clearly Valve cannot be arsed to do that, so Steam keeps looking like shit more than 3 years after these screens appeared.
The universal toolkit is not so universal if every app ships its own custom version.
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Which is probably why it still looks like shit on Retina screens. Oh, how I love HTML apps...
What does that have to do with HTML5 apps? In the browser, when HD-DPI support was added every page started using HD-DPI font rendering, HD-DPI CSS, HD-DPI SVG, only image were still lo-res Conversely I still have native apps that are low-res only because updating them to HD-DPI meant shipping a new app.