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Apple brings App Store to Mac OS X

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Re: Apple brings App Store to Mac OS X

#161

Post by slantyyz »

stevenbedrick wrote: post #153
slantyyz wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see some potential negatives for developers (arguably positive for consumers). 1 - Price deflation. There is a bit of a connotation that App Store means lots of 99 cents apps. Yes, it's not the same platform as the iPhone, but people jumping from the iPhone App Store are going to have some preconceived expectations. 2 - Family licensing. You normally pay a premium for family licensing of a lot of Mac software. This…

Re. point #2: IIRC, in the talk today, Jobs mentioned that apps installed via the mac app store will work on all your personal macs.

That was my point. As a developer, you lose that tier of licensing revenue.

* edit : Example, 1password is normally 39.95, 5 user family pack is 69.95. How would it be priced on the App store?

Re: Apple brings App Store to Mac OS X

#162

Post by GHFigs »

mkramlich wrote: post #135
YooLi wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't censoring Mac apps, they are choosing what gets sold in their Mac software store. Same way Best Buy isn't censoring porn by not stocking it on the shelves of their stores. If you are tin-foil-hatting this and thinking soon the Mac App Store will be the only way to get software on the Mac, then guess what, you can use Linux or Windows. If they do something stupid the market will let them know about it by l…

Censorship is censorship even if it's possible to get a thing through some other means. For example, if a library banned books by Mark Twain, yet you could get it from another library or from Amazon, or in another country, most reasonable people would still call that censorship. If all the governments on Earth got together and outlawed Mark Twain, that would be censorship even if in theory you could fly to Mars, and…

A store is not a public library. Apple is not the government.

Re: Apple brings App Store to Mac OS X

#163

Post by cookiecaper »

protomyth wrote: post #18
bconway wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger question I have is: why would you/anyone move them at all? If you're already selling for OS X and have an avenue for updating your app, are you really going to give up 30% of your revenue to Apple for the same-old? This only works on the iPhone because it's the only way to get software on the device. Unless that's the next step...

I think the savings in dealing with credit card processing / paypal along with not having to maintain my own updates. Bandwidth / Hosting is not a small issue.

It's not such a huge issue either. Most vendors figured it out a long time ago. Why should they give money to Apple for it?

Re: Apple brings App Store to Mac OS X

#164

Post by roc »

mkramlich wrote: post #96
slantyyz wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a little too much FUD. With the phone, it was a new device, and in many ways, it makes sense to lock it down. The Mac has a 25 year legacy, and if they were to take away that choice, so many people would leave the platform. Apple might be jerks a lot of the time, but they're hardly stupid.

Disagree it's FUD. It's an intelligent observation or prediction of what this might be the first step towards. It's called the slippery slope phenomenon. It happens.

> "It happens."

Absolutely. It's happened (and happening) to Android. Carriers block rooting. Carriers block sideloading. Carriers add apps that can't be removed. They swap search engines and remove the settings. Each time a change flies in the marketplace, they get emboldened.

Today, experiencing the "choice" Android promised is contingent on flawless and thorough research, with tomorrow looking increasingly worse.

But where's the earnest geek concern about the slippery slope when we talk about Android fragmentation? That ball is busily picking up speed, but we don't talk about it.

We talk about how fragmentation isn't real or isn't a big deal. Even while every tom, dick and harry lets loose their plans of an Android future that doesn't include Google's marketplace, likely won't include side-loading, rooting or half the "choice" we like to pretend separates Android from iOS.

Yet in the context of Apple --where this change would require Apple reversing momentum, against developer wishes, after having quite publicly reversed the scope-creep of 3.3.1 after developer backlash-- we seem to be unable to talk about anything else.

So while an Apple U-turn is a legitimate concern, it's still FUD to put this big a spotlight onto it for those two big reasons:

1. Recent evidence suggests, if anything, it's less-likely than ever.

2. The focus is completely out of proportion with what the issue receives in other contexts.

Re: Apple brings App Store to Mac OS X

#165

Post by d_r »

sshumaker wrote: post #61

There seems like there's one serious flaw in this idea. What's to prevent people from inserting malware into their applications? Unlike the iPhone, OSX isn't sandboxed. And there's no way Apple's approval process can possibly check for possible badness hiding in the compiled code. Unless, of course, they are building a special sandbox for these OSX apps as well. Which means that you'll have to write apps specifically…

I'm surprised this is not getting more discussion. Are these apps going to be iOS-based or genuine OS X applications? (I think the latter.)

In the days when I used Windows, I naturally only downloaded "official" apps and avoided any sort of non-famous/non-open source shareware for years -- the spyware/toolbars/etc. are just too rampant. I have an Android phone that I use for development, and there, I too am incredibly cautious about what I download. The "open" Android platform actually prevents me from discovering potentially amazing indie software because, well, I just can't trust it.

Re: Apple brings App Store to Mac OS X

#166

Post by blasdel »

fjarlq wrote: post #85
sshumaker wrote: post #61

There seems like there's one serious flaw in this idea. What's to prevent people from inserting malware into their applications? Unlike the iPhone, OSX isn't sandboxed. And there's no way Apple's approval process can possibly check for possible badness hiding in the compiled code. Unless, of course, they are building a special sandbox for these OSX apps as well. Which means that you'll have to write apps specifically…

OS X has a sandbox facility (also known as Seatbelt) that could be used. Chrome uses it: http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/sandbox/...

It embeds TinyLISP for the policy framework — check out the config files for the stock sandboxed daemons in /usr/share/sandbox/

Re: Apple brings App Store to Mac OS X

#167

Post by slantyyz »

jonhendry wrote: post #150
slantyyz wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple actually lowered the barriers to entry on Mac devs. They recently dropped the price to the premium developer access to $99, iirc.

But no hardware discounts.

Not sure how that is a big deal.

If any discounts amounted to more than the cost of the premium developer content (i.e., $99), non-developers would pay the fee just to get the discounts.

Re: Apple brings App Store to Mac OS X

#168

Post by ugh »

mkramlich wrote: post #135
YooLi wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't censoring Mac apps, they are choosing what gets sold in their Mac software store. Same way Best Buy isn't censoring porn by not stocking it on the shelves of their stores. If you are tin-foil-hatting this and thinking soon the Mac App Store will be the only way to get software on the Mac, then guess what, you can use Linux or Windows. If they do something stupid the market will let them know about it by l…

Censorship is censorship even if it's possible to get a thing through some other means. For example, if a library banned books by Mark Twain, yet you could get it from another library or from Amazon, or in another country, most reasonable people would still call that censorship. If all the governments on Earth got together and outlawed Mark Twain, that would be censorship even if in theory you could fly to Mars, and…

I would be careful applying a term like “censorship” to non-goverment actors like companies. It’s part of their freedom to “censor” – if you like that term – and I think that’s ok as long as they are not a monopoly.

Re: Apple brings App Store to Mac OS X

#169

Post by pluies »

jaaron wrote: post #24
gcv wrote: post #12

1. I hope I can still build my own custom Emacs.app from source and install it. 2. I hope App Store apps will be sandboxed and prevented from polluting the system. 3. I hope Adobe switches to the App Store model, and that it will mean that the behavior of the horrific Creative Suite installer will finally be reigned in (take a look in /Applications/.AdobePatchFiles and check how large it is).

Oh, please, please tell me Adobe will work with the OS X app store. Adobe's updater needs terminated with prejudice.

If it ever does, it's only going to be the updater. Adobe would never sell anything through that Mac App Store if it means giving a 30% cut to Apple.

Re: Apple brings App Store to Mac OS X

#170

Post by orangecat »

danilocampos wrote: post #105
tlrobinson wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so excited about this. Am I the only one who thinks this is Apple's first step in exerting more control over developers and users on the OS X platform like they do on iOS? EDIT: to all the replies about how you still have a choice of distribution on OS X: yes, you do right now, but who knows how long that will last? As I said, this might be the first step in locking down the platform. I don't believe this wil…

> I'm not so excited about this... this might be the first step in locking down the platform. Of course you're not excited about this. You're a brilliant nerd who founded a startup that invented a new programming language . This isn't for you. Or for me. Getting to be Nerd Jesus every time a computer runs into trouble is gratifying. We get to be important. We get to trick out our gear to do all kinds of goofy, custom…

I don't understand the geek self-flagellation that iOS has caused. It seems to have instigated the meme that if a platform appeals to geeks then it must necessarily be unfriendly to normal users, and I would think Mac OS X itself shows that to be false...

What the iPad, and the iPhone before it, has taught us is simple: people want a computer they understand. They want technology, but optimizing for Nerd Jesus has given them shit technology that doesn't respect them, so they're used to being defensive around it.

...except that so many Apple fans have also retroactively determined that OS X is actually completely unusable unless you're an uber-nerd.

And streamlining it so it's actually useful for everyone else who doesn't fetishize the Terminal, kernel extensions or compilers.

How does getting rid of the terminal improve the experience for the average user who has no idea it even exists?

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