51–60 of 249 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you tried purchasing the "latest" version of World of Warcraft? You can't. There is no standalone "latest version". You have to purchase the original, and each version since, and finally the current version. Correlate those game content / game mechanics updates with In-App Purchases, and it's clear how someone could offer "major upgrades" if they stop thinking in terms of version numbers and start thinking in te…
Think the problem is policing it. Apple doesn't want it to become the standard that people are being charged for bug fixes every version.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
By default Mountain Lion can only run software from the App Store or by developers Apple has specifically certified. You can tune this restriction both up ("App Store only") and down ("any software can run").
By default, you can right click anything from anywhere and choose "Open". It will install/run, and you will never be asked about that program again. But you have to make a conscious decision to run it.
Gatekeeper was on for appstore and signed applications and I had to disable it to install something I downloaded (ironically because OS X told me to - X11).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you tried purchasing the "latest" version of World of Warcraft? You can't. There is no standalone "latest version". You have to purchase the original, and each version since, and finally the current version. Correlate those game content / game mechanics updates with In-App Purchases, and it's clear how someone could offer "major upgrades" if they stop thinking in terms of version numbers and start thinking in te…
The problem is getting customers of version 1 onto version 2. There is no way to do this with MAS. I have a mechanism built into Shave so I can push "news", but it's annoying and bad user experience.
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.
Marco is accusing Apple of having made a critical strategic error. Where are all the people who call him a member of the Apple cult and all that crap? Funny how they disappear when it comes time to talk about what Apple is doing wrong.
To me the tone of the article is that he is worried that Apple is missing chances of further enhancing lock-in to the Apple brand, specifically on the Mac OS desktop platform. The guy re-purchased apps he already had so that he could help with that lock-in. I see the rationale for doing that but when you start throwing free cash on duplicate app purchases to enhance lock-in I don't know what could be more cult-like.
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.
I'm pulling my video editor Shave ( http://shavevideo.com ) out of the Mac App Store for these reasons, though most specifically the lack of paid upgrades. For a $10 video editor that, quite frankly, beats the pants off a lot of crap out there for day to day editing tasks, I can't afford to devote the time and resources it requires to maintain it without it having a baseline level of income. Not having an upgrade pat…
Have you tried purchasing the "latest" version of World of Warcraft? You can't. There is no standalone "latest version". You have to purchase the original, and each version since, and finally the current version. Correlate those game content / game mechanics updates with In-App Purchases, and it's clear how someone could offer "major upgrades" if they stop thinking in terms of version numbers and start thinking in te…
Also, for those users that are brand new on the v2 version, it's a very bad experience when they have to immediately buy an in-app purchase just to unlock functionality that should be included. If you drop the price of the v2 version to accomodate this, then your original v1 userbase will complain that they paid twice as much.
Here's an example:
v1.0 of App X sells for $9.99 on the app store. Users buy it and are happy.
v2.0 of App X comes out and to unlock the new features, you must pay $4.99 in-app purchase. Developer drops the price of the app to $4.99 so that new users don't have to pay $14.99 to get all the features.
New users now complain that they have to immediately make an in-app purchase just to unlock the software - they don't notice that it's half price now because they never bought it previously.
Existing users complain that they paid $9.99 and are now being nickel and dimed for updates, when the price is cut in half now.
You can't win. Unfortunately, Apple has create a model that makes a lot of profit for them, and makes it relatively painless for the end user, but it's a model where the developers suffer and can't really support the large applications that receive many new features every year.
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.