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The Mac App Store Won’t Make You Rich

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Re: The Mac App Store Won’t Make You Rich

#81

Post by ThomPete »

simonh wrote: post #77
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> top 5 in productivity apps. Mobile purchasing is ruled by iOS in the states, at least. Desktop purchasing, especially in regards to productivity, is ruled by Windows. Those fancy macs you see everywhere are little more than dedicated facebook machines. Those people are interested in your product, generally. Or if they are, it'll be for their work computer and paid for by the IT department. Do you have a windows ver…

>Those fancy macs you see everywhere are little more than dedicated facebook machines People have been saying things like that about apple since forever, yet even NextStep was able to maintain a viable community of full time software developers and companies that exclusively published for the platform. Some of them are still around. Just look at OmniGroup. Do you think they're likely to be doing better nowaday, or wo…

Exactly. Which is why google ranking is more important than Mac apps store ranking.

Re: The Mac App Store Won’t Make You Rich

#82

Post by outworlder »

ThomPete wrote: post #80
outworlder wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ghostnote surely looks interesting. Probably the reason you are doing well is that it seems new and fresh. Didn't the sandbox give you trouble, though? I thought it wouldn't be possible for a sandboxed app to get the user's context like that.

It gave us a lot of problems. We basically had to white label the apps we want document support for and we have to have the user to install document support manually too. But we did make it so that people who know a little applescript can add their own apps and in general add all sorts of scripts to their apps. You can see how here http://www.ghostnoteapp.com/blog/how-to-manually-add-new-doc...

Oh, that's ingenious.

I was putting off developing an app for the store because of the whole sandbox app whitelist issue. I should have done more homework.

Thank you!

Re: The Mac App Store Won’t Make You Rich

#83

Post by saturdaysaint »

vitd wrote: post #61
saturdaysaint wrote: post #47

As a user, I'm glad it's there as an easy updating mechanism for Apple apps and a store for handy utility apps, but there's not much of a place for a centralized app store on the desktop. Steam poaches the most lucrative category and makers of prominent professional apps don't need any help with digital distribution... what's left? I'd imagine that this hollowing out makes it advantageous for software that might bene…

I couldn't agree less. The MacOS app store has made it so much easier for me as a user. Apple might not be perfect, but to compare them to Steam? Just last week I had a problem with a Steam app and getting it resolved was farcical. Not to mention that literally every other time I launch Steam, it fails to see the network (even though all my other network apps are working just fine), and I have to quit and restart it.…

I wish games would move from Steam to the App Store, but it's not gonna happen. Valve has way more skin in that game and Apple have repeatedly shown that they're not going to compete over a medium dominated by expensive exclusive hits - as we watch Sony and Microsoft fight eachother into irrelevancy, this looks like a wiser and wiser strategy. They'll take their iOS game monopoly, but that's it.

The shareware spam site days are long gone. Numerous companies (including Apple) have been working to make checkout easy to implement on your own website. It's easier than ever to make and distribute a demo video/ad. It's easier than ever to target users (Google, Facebook). It's cheaper and easier than ever to make a simple product site. For a simple app, that might constitute a crippling amount of overhead, but if you anticipate making more than $10,000 in revenue (and thus risk sacrificing $3,000 to the Apple cut), it's probably worth investing a few hours in.

Re: The Mac App Store Won’t Make You Rich

#84

Post by ThomPete »

outworlder wrote: post #82
ThomPete wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gave us a lot of problems. We basically had to white label the apps we want document support for and we have to have the user to install document support manually too. But we did make it so that people who know a little applescript can add their own apps and in general add all sorts of scripts to their apps. You can see how here http://www.ghostnoteapp.com/blog/how-to-manually-add-new-doc...

Oh, that's ingenious. I was putting off developing an app for the store because of the whole sandbox app whitelist issue. I should have done more homework. Thank you!

You are welcome and thanks.

My advice is that you think about the app store as a distribution channel and use something like Paddle to sell online so you aren't only relying on the mac app store.

Re: The Mac App Store Won’t Make You Rich

#85

Post by jawngee »

I had a video editing app in the Mac App store since the MAS launched. It made high five figures for the first two years and then trailed off, mostly due to me neglecting it for more lucrative (and time consuming) consulting work. Also, it was heavily based on the deprecated QuickTime API, so it had a definite shelf life and upgrading it for each new iteration of OS X was fraught with all sorts of woes. Not to mention being trapped in 32-bits due to QuickTime being a 32-bit only framework (not QTKit).

But, in its hey day, it did really well. It even beat iMovie for a few weeks. Though now I am sitting here almost five years later and I have no idea who my customers are, beyond the handful that went out of their way to contact me.

I had some down time this past spring, so I rewrote the entire thing from the ground up using AVFoundation. I haven't launched this new version yet because I'm waiting to finish the iOS version to launch both within the same time frame. However, I won't be putting the OS X version on the Mac App Store for a few reasons:

- I want to know who my customers are

- I want to be able to contact my customers

- Sandboxing restrictions are workable, but not a good customer experience imho.

- Lack of paid upgrades isn't viable for an app not everyone needs

- MAS seems way neglected

So now I'm going to be going with Paddle (http://paddle.com) since it sort of replicates that experience really well and the guys there are super responsive. Maybe I'll change my mind down the road, but not likely.

Re: The Mac App Store Won’t Make You Rich

#86

Post by kranner »

outworlder wrote: post #75
kranner wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article also refers to Macs as PCs!

Mac PCs, can be translated to "Mac Personal Computers", as opposed to IBM-PCs.

I'm aware that PC is used to refer to desktop computers here. But as I understand it the convention is that "PC" by itself means a Windows computer.

Re: The Mac App Store Won’t Make You Rich

#87

Post by kapeli »

b0sk wrote: post #59
usaphp wrote: post #40

"dash" app developer says he made $188k+ last year just from App Store alone: https://blog.kapeli.com/my-year-in-review-2014

But it seems he also includes iOS App Store figures. The original article is about Mac App Stores.

The Mac App Store is my main revenue source. I released my iOS app in November 2014. The revenue from it wasn't worth mentioning separately in last year's report.

This year, the revenue from iOS is around 10% of the Mac app.

Re: The Mac App Store Won’t Make You Rich

#88

Post by emsy »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #52
mickanio wrote: post #41

Great, you're #8 on the App Store for an app that allows you to blur photos... you're so excited that you're going to get rich... Leaves me thinking: Who cares what rank you are on the App Store, making an app that does basically very little (though useful) should NOT make you rich. I just think of something like Monument Valley - not a throwaway - tons of work - and it DID make them rich. Rightfully so. I guess I'd…

It's not that you should get rich from such an investment. It's that basically no one is getting rich from the Mac App Store. The desktop app store is a failure in many respects. It did not take off the same way mobile app stores have. As for Monument Valley, that's a pretty poor example. They invested 1.5m and made 5.8m. For a core team of 8 people it's not fuck you money. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/527b…

I've read the second article and I think you should take it with a grain of salt. I don't want to elaborate much but I think it's targeted at the "quantity developers" which pump out low to mid quality games, hoping for a hit. On the other end of the spectrum you have quality developers like ustwo who don't need to finance 9 unsucessful games. Of course in reality it's much more complex than that but I don't think that "you need to make 10x your investment" is a hard rule to measure success.

Re: The Mac App Store Won’t Make You Rich

#89

Post by igrekel »

suby wrote: post #17
bdcravens wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seriously doubt you could design, develop, prep, submit app, and market for 30 hours and have anything that anyone would download for free, let alone pay $5 for. The sheer volume of users doesn't obviate the fact that there's a minimum level of quality for discoverability to kick in.

30 hours is the amount of time the author of Redacted claims to have spent developing the app.

Plus the amount of time it took to master the language, the framework, the platform etc. before even starting to develop the app.

Re: The Mac App Store Won’t Make You Rich

#90

Post by forrestthewoods »

emsy wrote: post #88
forrestthewoods wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that you should get rich from such an investment. It's that basically no one is getting rich from the Mac App Store. The desktop app store is a failure in many respects. It did not take off the same way mobile app stores have. As for Monument Valley, that's a pretty poor example. They invested 1.5m and made 5.8m. For a core team of 8 people it's not fuck you money. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/527b…

I've read the second article and I think you should take it with a grain of salt. I don't want to elaborate much but I think it's targeted at the "quantity developers" which pump out low to mid quality games, hoping for a hit. On the other end of the spectrum you have quality developers like ustwo who don't need to finance 9 unsucessful games. Of course in reality it's much more complex than that but I don't think th…

The designer who wrote that article is behind the wildly popular Triple Town. It speaks to the reality of development for small development teams.
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