The Mac App Store’s future of irrelevance

#1

Post by rrreese » Thu, Jul 26, 2012, 2:44 PM UTC

The Mac App Store’s future of irrelevance
marco.org

Re: The Mac App Store’s future of irrelevance

#2

Post by grayprog » Thu, Jul 26, 2012, 2:52 PM UTC

As a Mac developer who's also affected by the mandatory sandboxing requirement, I fully agree. One of our applications, Trickster, doesn't work sandboxed (being a system utility) as is and we're in this situation where we have customers on the Mac App Store who can't receive updates anymore. Needless to say, neither us nor our customers (who'll mostly blame us) are happy about this.

Re: The Mac App Store’s future of irrelevance

#3

Post by smoody » Thu, Jul 26, 2012, 2:52 PM UTC

It seems to me that there's an opportunity for someone to create a knock-off of the Mac App Store without the restrictions. I'd be a customer.

Re: The Mac App Store’s future of irrelevance

#4

Post by cytzol » Thu, Jul 26, 2012, 2:54 PM UTC

smoody wrote: post #3

It seems to me that there's an opportunity for someone to create a knock-off of the Mac App Store without the restrictions . I'd be a customer.

With Mountain Lion and the iCloud feature only allowed on apps from the Mac App Store, this is a lot harder to do than it previously was.

Re: The Mac App Store’s future of irrelevance

#5

Post by m_st » Thu, Jul 26, 2012, 2:56 PM UTC

As a customer I totally agree. I wouldn't care about simple 5$ tools being removed. But if more expensive tools like PDFPen Pro (which I bought) get removed then I will certainly be very upset. And just because this danger is present I'm very careful and not buying any expensive software anymore from the Mac App Store whenever given the choice (except Apple software of course). That's a pity for both developers and customers.

Re: The Mac App Store’s future of irrelevance

#6

Post by grayprog » Thu, Jul 26, 2012, 2:58 PM UTC

smoody wrote: post #3

It seems to me that there's an opportunity for someone to create a knock-off of the Mac App Store without the restrictions . I'd be a customer.

There is already such an app, Bodega, which was launched before Mac App Store. There was (and probably is) another one from the developers of iusethis.com

Re: The Mac App Store’s future of irrelevance

#7

Post by Bobby_Tables » Thu, Jul 26, 2012, 3:01 PM UTC

The iOS App Store does the same thing with changing the rules in the middle of the game, but it is not subject to potential irrelevance because it is the only place to get software for iOS devices. So the obvious solution for Apple is to make the Mac App Store the only place to get software for MacOS.

I'm actually a little surprised this didn't happen in 10.8.

Re: The Mac App Store’s future of irrelevance

#8

Post by Aloisius » Thu, Jul 26, 2012, 3:03 PM UTC

What software besides Postbox has pulled out? The author makes it sound like there is a mass exodus.

I've bought most of my software outside the App Store, so I'm not tuned in.

Re: The Mac App Store’s future of irrelevance

#9

Post by tomflack » Thu, Jul 26, 2012, 3:03 PM UTC

I've nightmares about endless apps having their own updaters. Adobe/Microsoft updaters really are the culprits here. Its this that makes me wish the app store would drop these product-killing restrictions. I don't trust every app developer to do updaters.

Re: The Mac App Store’s future of irrelevance

#10

Post by mej10 » Thu, Jul 26, 2012, 3:04 PM UTC

I hope they will weaken this restriction, and will just not have non-sandboxed apps show up without searching for them, or without switching some "power user" option on.

Some types of applications simply cannot exist with these types of restrictions. They are removing entire classes (e.g. window managers, system utilities) of applications from the App Store with this.