Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Mac App Store’s future of irrelevance

marco.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 249 posts

Re: The Mac App Store’s future of irrelevance

#211

Post by seanalltogether »

cletus wrote: post #120

There are two issues that are coming up here: sandboxing and paid upgrades. They are quite different. As a consumer I am completely for sandboxing for myself and for other consumers. In a world where malware is increasingly a problem sandboxed apps will become the norm. That's the reality we live in. Sandboxing being a requirement means that I can fairly safely install anything from the (future) Mac App Store. The OP…

I think we need to be separating the concept of sandboxing from Apple implementation of "Entitlements". From a technical and user perspective, sandboxing is a good thing, it keeps the app from doing what it's not supposed to be doing. However, Apple entitlements are a laughable hand-me-down subset of sandboxing. If Apple expanded their list of entitlements and simply required justification for use of those expanded entitlements during the review phase, they could still keep things safe for end users.

Re: The Mac App Store’s future of irrelevance

#212

Post by r00fus »

pnathan wrote: post #162
cletus wrote: post #120

There are two issues that are coming up here: sandboxing and paid upgrades. They are quite different. As a consumer I am completely for sandboxing for myself and for other consumers. In a world where malware is increasingly a problem sandboxed apps will become the norm. That's the reality we live in. Sandboxing being a requirement means that I can fairly safely install anything from the (future) Mac App Store. The OP…

As a consumer, I only buy from the App Store when it's absolutely required. I vastly prefer to live outside the App store and the Sandbox. I haven't gotten malware in years, and I don't particularly expect I'll get it in years to come; if I do, it'll probably be a zero-day in Flash, OpenSSH or HTML5. So, anecdotally, as one consumer, if you have a program in the Mac App Store, I really won't be buying it unless its a…

Don't understand this.

MAS has a killer feature (as with iOS App Store) - one purchase for multiple users or machines with one credential set to manage purchase and upgrade.

Handling multiple software instances and licenses is a HUGE pain point for the customer - it gets exponential if you're forced to manage licenses across machines and/or users (thus site-licenses for businesses). It is tough enough even for a power user with license management software, but literally a nightmare for the un-initiated.

Re: The Mac App Store’s future of irrelevance

#213

Post by illumin8 »

spaghetti wrote: post #152
illumin8 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers could very well re-architect their application so that when you download the update to v2, you have to unlock the new features with an in-app purchase, but to be honest, it's a lot of extra work for the developer, and there is no way to make it less painful for the users, who will feel like they are getting nickel and dimed by the developer. Also, for those users that are brand new on the v2 version, it's…

Why lower the price of the initial purchase? Just keep it simple: basic app is $10 forever. The basic version of the app comes with some basic useful features. Premium features become available via in-app-purchase as the developer makes them. Users can choose to use the premium features or not. Bug-fix updates are just free as they should be IMO. Using a theoretical video editor as an example: $10 gets you basic clip…

It creates a lot of ill-will from customers which translates into bad reviews:

"I bought this app for $9.99 and then I found out that all of the good features require in-app purchases - 1 star for you!"

Re: The Mac App Store’s future of irrelevance

#214

Post by ChuckMcM »

cletus wrote: post #120

There are two issues that are coming up here: sandboxing and paid upgrades. They are quite different. As a consumer I am completely for sandboxing for myself and for other consumers. In a world where malware is increasingly a problem sandboxed apps will become the norm. That's the reality we live in. Sandboxing being a requirement means that I can fairly safely install anything from the (future) Mac App Store. The OP…

There may be a deeper issue here. That being the difference between owning a computer which can do what ever you tell it, and owning a tool which only does the things you bought it to do.

It used to be pretty clear that your phone wasn't a 'computer' in the sense that it had to offer up generalized support for doing development. So pre-packaged 'apps' were the norm, and the model of privilege constraint made a lot of sense.

If my laptop is simply a web browsing/mail reading/status posting machine with a bigger screen, then it has a similar requirement set.

But laptops have evolved from desktops which evolved from personal computers, which evolved from computers in general and the flexibility knob was historically turned to 11.

I'll reiterate my surprise that Apple doesn't (yet?) have two 'loads' for the Macbook, one which is a general purpose OS (MacOS) and one which is an application hosting OS (iOS).

Re: The Mac App Store’s future of irrelevance

#215

Post by msbarnett »

megablast wrote: post #134
modernerd wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New users who purchase the updated app would have to pay again to get the latest features.

Nope, you can get around that. Store the version of the app that is first run. Those that have the new version as the first run get the new additions.

How would this work? I mean, even assuming Apple let you get away with it:

If you store the version on the device, the user would simply have to delete the app (which wipes all data the app has stored on the device) and re-download from the app store (which is free) to get the latest version. It's not going to take long for users to notice that and then you'll never sell an upgrade again.

So you'd need to move away from a straight app and also create a server component. But to store it on the server, you need something that uniquely identifies the user.

You can't get access to the UDID any more (and besides, people would catch on when upgrading their phone got them new version of everything for free).

You can't generate some kind of GUID, because that has the same problem as just tracking it on the device. Upgrades are just a reinstall away.

And you can't force them to sign up for your site on first launch: App Store reviewers won't approve apps that make users register solely to store information about them. So you'd need to push content through the site, at which point you've moved well beyond the purview of most apps, and you ought to just give up the game and sell access to the content itself.

Re: The Mac App Store’s future of irrelevance

#216

Post by gte910h »

jawngee wrote: post #26

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…

Check out Tweetie and Tweetie 2

Just make a new version, increment the version number, and be on your way.

FileEditor 2012, etc

Re: The Mac App Store’s future of irrelevance

#217

Post by olleicua »

I think the first sign that App Store wasn't trustworthy was Apple leaving gcc out of the free version of XCode. I never trusted App Store. I think without Steve Jobs Apple has lost it's ability to pretend it's a decent company. Why doesn't someone do what RedHat did except for for consumers.

Re: The Mac App Store’s future of irrelevance

#218

Post by ricardobeat »

jawngee wrote: post #200
ricardobeat wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shave does less than iMovie for $10 more. Maybe that's why it's not providing decent income? It's hard to compete with free, even more a good free app.

iMovie isn't free. It's $14.99. It's also slow as shit where Shave is fast as you know what - for a very specific type of editing. Trust me, I've done the comparison of same editing tasks in both and I can do in a minute in Shave what takes 20-30 minutes to do in iMovie. It's the reason I wrote it in the first place. And good luck opening a DiVX or another weird codec in iMovie. Or editing an Mpeg-2/4 movie without h…

iMovie comes bundled with any new mac for free.

So, your customers are users with very specific editing needs, willing to pay for something they already have (disregarding performance), and/or that need to edit DivX or weird codecs. That sounds like a pretty tiny market compared to users who want a step up from iMovie; building a quality app for your own needs doesn't guarantee a market for it. That's just my point of view, you have the numbers.

Re: The Mac App Store’s future of irrelevance

#219

Post by chc »

smackfu wrote: post #168
pgeorgi wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea to have new features exist as unlockable extras actually is an advantage to users: if they don't need it, they still get updates for the feature set they bought. So all that's missing is a way to give customers of "date X or later" unlockable features as part of the baseline sale.

For the developer, now they need to re-sell every single feature of their app. Why would anyone choose that over just bundling them together?

1. It's an easy way to charge for new development on platforms that don't have paid upgrades.

2. It can turn be much more profitable as long as you don't just take the price you'd charge for the upgrade and divide by the number of features. Games are leading the way with this business model.

For example, IIRC League of Legends is insanely popular right now. (I want to say it's the biggest game at the moment, but I could be misremembering. Anyway.) It's free to play, but unlike most games, you don't get any permanent characters or upgrades when you start. To unlock a character, you have to buy them. Buying all the characters with money would cost almost a thousand dollars. And if you want to customize your characters so they look cool – well, that can cost several times more. Suffice it to say, Riot Games is doing pretty well for itself by unbundling as much as humanly possible.

Re: The Mac App Store’s future of irrelevance

#220

Post by batista »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #133
bluesnowmonkey wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a world where malware is increasingly a problem I don't see that as the case. There is malware out there in torrent land, sure. But if you acquire software from reputable sources (like a paid app store, referral from a friend, heard about it on a forum like HN, package repository), malware just isn't a concern. If you put malware on an app store, the world will notice, its rating will tank, and people will stop…

It's funny , for years Apple were all like "Macs can't get viruses!" now they're saying "we need app store lock in too prevent malware!". I guess there's a distinction to be made between actual malware and software that co-installs crap (Ask toolbar etc) but often end users do not see that difference. Besides, if something has passed app store verification then surely Apple are happy that it is not malware? Therefor…

>It's funny , for years Apple were all like "Macs can't get viruses!" now they're saying "we need app store lock in too prevent malware!".

Yeah, it's funny because:

1) Apple never said that explicitly.

2) It was (and still is true), i.e not that Macs could not technically get viruses, but that they had got no viruses, with the exception of some lame trojans. In all, a minuscule number of OS X Macs were ever affected by anything in the last 12 years, and even those clicked and installed it themselves.

3) All other naysayers, ignoring the practical lack of any real viruses on the platform, pushed for more protection and security measures.

Post reply on HN