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Leaving the Mac App Store

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Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#401

Post by greggman »

rarepostinlurkr wrote: post #388
greggman wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How are these issues any different than the iOS App Store? They both play by the same set of rules.

The difference is history and options. Computers have a 30 year history of apps and buying options. Smartphones don't. iOS has only one way to get an app on the phone. Computers don't

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#402

Post by thirdsun »

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…

That's basically my experience as well. Now imagine that your connection is rather slow, which forces you to start larger updates before going to bed - I can't count the number of times I woke up to a password entry dialog and no download progress at all. It takes me ages to upgrade anything there since I really hate opening that app. With 1 Mbit/s connection even process of searching for updates will take a good minute.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#403

Post by song »

robotcookies wrote: post #48
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.

I feel the same way. And it's funny how many people think along similar lines and then go straight to their iPhone without a second thought. It's as if because it's always been that way with the iPhone (no external apps) that it makes it ok.

I only have an iPhone because I need to have one for testing and developing. I've always kept my iphone jailbroken for this very reason.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#404

Post by ascagnel_ »

api wrote: post #171
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…

It won't happen. Too much development work is done on OSX; specifically, iOS development _requires_ OSX. Until they start putting out an XCode environment on iOS that improves on what's available on OSX, they won't be killing OSX or Macs.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#405

Post by thirdsun »

S_A_P wrote: post #7

That is my biggest complaint about the Mac App store. I think in general prices have been reduced for most apps. But upgrade pricing is a must for customer retention. If they try to sell me the next version of Logic for 199 Im not buying it. I spent 599 for logic 8 platinum, 129(I think) for logic 9 upgrade and then 199 for Logic pro X. Im not interested in giving them another couple of hundred dollars for a while.

You picked a bad example. Yes, you need to purchase Logix X for 199, but you probably won't need to pay for any Logic updates in the foreseeable future. While the lack of update pricing is a problem for many developers, it's also a feature of Apple's software. They usually simply don't do priced updates. As far as I remember the upgrade from Logic 9 to X was free on the App Store.

Furthermore the full price of 199 could very well be mistaken for an upgrade offer - it's a very reasonable price.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#406

Post by joeblau »

ThomPete wrote: post #361
joeblau wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know what you're doing(which Apple should since they created the constraint system), then it's not that hard especially with the current constraint structure. There really isn't any technical reason why they shouldn't be able to reimplement iTunes natively and use backend API's to just serve content.

I don't think it's as easy as you think. Having played around with apples layout and general UI related stuff myself quite a lot I can tell you that it's a lot harder than webviews. We are talking perhaps 50X for the kind of stuff like the App store.

  > I don't think it's as easy as you think.
I've been developing iOS and Mac apps for 8 years so my response is based on that experience.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#407

Post by robwilliams »

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…

Middle clicking works in the Steam desktop app, at least on Windows. It opens the clicked link in a new window in the foreground.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#408

Post by ThomPete »

jjoonathan wrote: post #385
alextgordon wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% with you. I love AppKit, but the amount of code required to make a simple custom button is insane. What is 5 seconds of CSS takes a good 30 minutes of wrangling with NSButton/NSButtonCell. The very existence of PaintCode is an indictment. It doesn't make sense to say that WebViews aren't "native". With a little effort they can be made to blend in perfectly. It's the same CoreGraphics.

> What is 5 seconds of CSS takes a good 30 minutes of wrangling with NSButton/NSButtonCell. The very existence of PaintCode is an indictment. Imperative graphics and view hierarchies certainly make simple things tedious, but they'll never match the DOM's ability to occasionally make simple things nigh-impossible either. I'm curious, if you call drawRect ugly then what do you call the menagerie of frameworks required…

The context is layout not logic. There is a world of difference between the flexibility and portability of web formatting and desktop formatting.

Apps like Uber, Instagram and others use the hybrid approach.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#409

Post by ThomPete »

joeblau wrote: post #406
ThomPete wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's as easy as you think. Having played around with apples layout and general UI related stuff myself quite a lot I can tell you that it's a lot harder than webviews. We are talking perhaps 50X for the kind of stuff like the App store.

> I don't think it's as easy as you think. I've been developing iOS and Mac apps for 8 years so my response is based on that experience.

Yeah. So don't know how much web you have done. But in my experience and many others i know who have done both. It really is much harder than web.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#410

Post by ThomPete »

vsl wrote: post #396
ThomPete wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Against Apple Terms I believe. 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 th…

Bypassing the Sandbox is not extending the capabilities.
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