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Leaving the Mac App Store

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Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#121

Post by jasonbarone »

jonknee wrote: post #85
VeryVito wrote: post #46

I'm glad to see successful apps exiting The Mac App Store, and I hope others will follow. Unlike its iOS counterpart, which is great in many ways (new app discovery not being one of them), the MAS has unfortunately done more harm than good to the once-thriving indy Mac app-development scene. It offers a low cost of entry, but also encourages "pump-and-dump" development, in which developers are actively (though surely…

Which is a real shame because it's great to not worry about billing information, key management and pushing out updates (for both users and developers).

This is the part I wish could be solved. I hate having to input billing into various websites and apps and not being able to track licenses unless I do myself.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#122

Post by ksk »

I've always seen all app stores as a blatant money grab. A digital storefront like that does not require that much money to run (no comparison with supermarkets and the like which have heavy operational costs). I mean the search barely works, discoverability sucks. One of the primary drivers for app revenue is handpicked winners and losers via their own app lists, and some of the stores are so amateurish that you have to re-download the entire app to update it. Of the ones that we have, Steam is probably the least grubby.

I would much rather they charge a flat review/update/host fee per app with maybe tiered hosting pricing for multi-GB apps (which apart from steam games, I'm pretty sure few people download anyway). It's hard enough trying to run a successful software business and then these companies go out and beat their chest with "WE paid developers billions this year" rather than "we took away 30% revenue from developers".

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#123

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

relaxatorium wrote: post #81

The thing that's craziest about the MAS to me is how bad the actual application is. It's super slow, constantly hangs, and is just such a bad experience from the consumer side that it undermines the (very real) benefits of having a centralized store of applications you've purchased and installed. It'd be one thing (and a fairly standard Apple move) if the customer experience was good and they didn't care about trampl…

Great point. The "updates" tab is a complete mindfk, you can't filter by OS version (which the app presumably knows, yet chooses to ignore) so you can spend lots of time investigating an app, only to find out at the last moment that you can't actually run it, and - a personal bugbear of mine - none of the text is proper selectable text, so it can't be copied.

And tell me I'm not the only person in the world who has to manage several Apple IDs ...

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#125

Post by delecti »

cmdkeen wrote: post #114
VeryVito wrote: post #46

I'm glad to see successful apps exiting The Mac App Store, and I hope others will follow. Unlike its iOS counterpart, which is great in many ways (new app discovery not being one of them), the MAS has unfortunately done more harm than good to the once-thriving indy Mac app-development scene. It offers a low cost of entry, but also encourages "pump-and-dump" development, in which developers are actively (though surely…

Which is ridiculous when Steam is there as a shining example of what a store could be. Not having to worry about keys and updates is fantastic for me, plus good discovery and upselling opportunities for developers. Someone is going to crack desktop app stores one day and do very well. The cost of entry is high (not necessarily in cash, more in reputation) but there are plenty of players who could do it. There's even…

I would argue that Steam itself is excellently poised to do so, if they wanted to.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#126

Post by heartbreak »

cmdkeen wrote: post #114
VeryVito wrote: post #46

I'm glad to see successful apps exiting The Mac App Store, and I hope others will follow. Unlike its iOS counterpart, which is great in many ways (new app discovery not being one of them), the MAS has unfortunately done more harm than good to the once-thriving indy Mac app-development scene. It offers a low cost of entry, but also encourages "pump-and-dump" development, in which developers are actively (though surely…

Which is ridiculous when Steam is there as a shining example of what a store could be. Not having to worry about keys and updates is fantastic for me, plus good discovery and upselling opportunities for developers. Someone is going to crack desktop app stores one day and do very well. The cost of entry is high (not necessarily in cash, more in reputation) but there are plenty of players who could do it. There's even…

Where would you say that Steam currently falls short as a desktop app store? Didn't they roll out general purpose apps for Windows a while back?

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#127

Post by URSpider94 »

optimuspaul wrote: post #94

I pretty much only use the Mac App Store anymore. There are maybe 2 apps I use that I get outside of it. I have a bunch that I are woefully out of date because their developers abandoned me. It's too bad that rather than trying to push to make it a better place developers are just leaving.

How exactly do developers "push to make it a better place?" It's owned by Apple, nobody else has a voice, and Apple must be 100% clear on the perceived shortcomings seen by developers. It's not like there's a quarterly App Store Community Meeting where people can go and complain ...

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#128

Post by chipuni »

greggarious wrote: post #49
song wrote: post #3

I avoid buying from the mac app store as much as possible. If Apple ever decided to change mac os x to no longer allow external applications, I would switch to Linux right away. I don't want to do that because I do like the os X better a GUI... But there's no way I'd stay on a system that wouldn't allow me to do what I want with it.

I would switch if I could find a good open source RAW image editor to rival Photoshop.

I've been using RawTherapee for a few months. It doesn't rival Photoshop, but it is useful.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#129

Post by 91bananas »

seivan wrote: post #93
91bananas wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam all day, especially after this disaster of expired certificates this year [0]. I had a copy of a game from 2007 that will probably never be touched by the developers again, which leaves me $20 in the hole with a broken game. I bought it again from Steam, works better than the App Store version ever did. [0]: http://www.macrumors.com/2015/11/17/apple-responds-mac-app-s...

I am sorry to hear you had such a bad experience. This game, was it a OSX/iOS exclusive or cross-platform AAA game?

AAA, Call of Duty 4

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#130

Post by cpcallen »

chongli wrote: post #116
cmdkeen wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is ridiculous when Steam is there as a shining example of what a store could be. Not having to worry about keys and updates is fantastic for me, plus good discovery and upselling opportunities for developers. Someone is going to crack desktop app stores one day and do very well. The cost of entry is high (not necessarily in cash, more in reputation) but there are plenty of players who could do it. There's even…

Not having to worry about keys and updates is fantastic for me, plus good discovery and upselling opportunities for developers. It's not that great for me. I've had a bunch of my Steam games put out breaking updates and there's nothing I can do about it but wait for subsequent rollbacks. It's a major flaw in the system that a breaking update can be forced down users' throats.

This includes breaking updates to the Steam client itself - which stopped working on 10.6.8 in November. I can roll back to an earlier version, but it immediately auto-updates to the latest version.

So now I can't update any of the games I've bought through Steam, or reinstall any I've removed.

Obviously I can't buy any new ones, either - but, even if I eventually update OS X (breaking many older Apps I depend on for work) and am able to run the Steam client again, there's no way in hell I'll ever buy a game through Steam again.

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