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Leaving the Mac App Store

blog.sketchapp.com

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Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#221

Post by squeaky-clean »

vitd wrote: post #212
heartbreak wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

1) It's buggy. Literally 50% of the time when I launch it, it says it can't reach the network. Meanwhile my browser and email are chugging along just fine. Another launch of Steam and suddenly it sees the network. No other app I run has any problem reaching the network ever. 2) Steam "updates" itself every time I launch. I see others saying it only happens once a month, but I literally cannot launch it and have it no…

> It launches, I go to click on something and an ad for a game pops up in a separate window blocking the interface

This is pretty easy to disable, there's an option within the Interface tab in the settings.[0]

[0] http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/28415/is-there-a-w...

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#222

Post by SneakerXZ »

eveningcoffee wrote: post #215
SneakerXZ wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, it is a horrible thing to happen. Just to give you some apps from my dock. Chrome, Spotify, Outlook, HipChat, Viber, Skype, SourceTree, Atom, Sketch, Dropbox. All these would be not be usable because they are not sandboxed. Basically I would have to install Windows on my Macbook and I would virtualize Mac OS X so I can use Xcode and I would use Windows for everything else. It would be suicide for Mac OS X…

SourceTree, Atom are not needed by an Apple usual user. Others are Apple competitors. It would be suicide for Mac OS X and if you think Apple is so stupid to do it, okay then... They dried to get rid of Google Maps on iOS.

What would they gain at the end? I would leave their system and also many others. Thinking people would switch just to Apple products is naive.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#223

Post by mosburger »

jawngee wrote: post #174
mosburger wrote: post #104

What are the alternatives to MAS? I've been considering distributing a small OSX app at a fairly low price based on its value. Are there any good ways to sell low-priced licensed software that support pushing updates to users easily? Edit: I should mention that in my particular case, the app is an Electron (formerly Atom Shell) app, so a solution that involves an ObjC library might be a bit difficult to implement.

http://paddle.com

Yeah, Paddle looks cool but I'm not sure how I'd integrate it w/ a "fake" faux-native app builder like Electron. Probably just ignorance on my part. :)

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#224

Post by outworlder »

robotresearcher wrote: post #200
gknoy wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the things you say are true, and I also agree on the "self-inflicted" delays a sibling poster mentions. All of these mattered very little to me when I went to reinstall a game I hadn't played in two years, after a move and a computer crash. I have games on physical media that I can no longer install, or that I can't find the discs for. Fantastic games like Bioware RPGs, or Borderlands. With Steam, I can open a…

I'm a parent of young kids, and fire up steam maybe once a month. Guess what happens to my precious game time nearly every single time.

Yeah, exactly the same thing happens every time. There isn't much of a way around it though, it should really do automatic updates.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#225

Post by jacalata »

dperfect wrote: post #208
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…

Just to play devil's advocate: what specific things about the MAS "[do] more harm than good" or encourage "pump-and-dump" development as you say? I'm not trying to defend the MAS, and I think it definitely needs improvement, but are we really worse off for it? The two things mentioned by the Sketch developers are app review time and sandbox limits. Those same things exist on iOS, but I keep hearing people say the MAS…

They pretty specifically said that the inability to charge for updates encourages pump and dump development.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#226

Post by masukomi »

dperfect wrote: post #208
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…

Just to play devil's advocate: what specific things about the MAS "[do] more harm than good" or encourage "pump-and-dump" development as you say? I'm not trying to defend the MAS, and I think it definitely needs improvement, but are we really worse off for it? The two things mentioned by the Sketch developers are app review time and sandbox limits. Those same things exist on iOS, but I keep hearing people say the MAS…

there is convenience in finding apps (single place to go instead of the entirety of google results for a word) and in getting updates as a user... there is a greater amount of INconvenience to developers. Also, inconvenience to users when the app needs to gasp interact with other parts of the filesystem as many of the apps do. Inconvenience to users when they need support. Inconvenience to developers when they want to give support. inconvenience when you want to refund a users purchase (can't do it). inconvenience when you want to convey information to your users. etc. etc. etc... the INconveniences SO outweigh the conveniences...

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#227

Post by eveningcoffee »

SneakerXZ wrote: post #222
eveningcoffee wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SourceTree, Atom are not needed by an Apple usual user. Others are Apple competitors. It would be suicide for Mac OS X and if you think Apple is so stupid to do it, okay then... They dried to get rid of Google Maps on iOS.

What would they gain at the end? I would leave their system and also many others. Thinking people would switch just to Apple products is naive.

What would they gain at the end?

Control and from there perhaps more money.

I would leave their system and also many others.

Yes, but what if there are only about 100k of such people?

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#228

Post by squeaky-clean »

mikeash wrote: post #92
tomphoolery wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Apple ever decided to change mac os x to no longer allow external applications, I would switch to Linux right away. Even if that did happen, which it wouldn't, what would stop you from compiling the application yourself, theoretically? If Apple computers allow for compilation of their own software, which they probably always will given that a Mac is the only way you can make OS X or iOS apps at this time, then O…

You can compile software for iOS too. If you consider this to be an adequate escape hatch for the Mac, then it must also be one for iOS. If OS X "will never get to a point like the iPad" then the iPad can't get to that point either!

But you can't compile software for iOS on iOS, can you? You'd need an iPad + Mac to compile the software. You don't need {{external machine with different OS}} + Mac to compile OSX software.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#229

Post by dangero »

xenadu02 wrote: post #204

The worst part about this is all the problems are easily solved if Apple simply put the resources into it. * The actual MAS store app itself is a horrible piece of garbage wrapping a bunch of web views. Just make it a real native app and rewrite it. * Sandboxing is great, but there will always be things that fall outside the sandbox. Have a "Power User / Developer Tools" category and associated checkbox in iTC that s…

"The actual MAS store app itself is a horrible piece of garbage wrapping a bunch of web views. Just make it a real native app and rewrite it."

Native app is not really a black and white concept when you're talking about an app that mainly just interprets and displays live data it receives. If it's not html, then it's going to be xml/json/some other markup with a custom presentation layer on top. Why would that be better? In this case I just don't think you can point the finger at webview vs native as a problem or a solution. Yes, the app may be crap, but that seems mostly unrelated to the technology used to build it. I'm guessing it's more a factor of lack of resources, team member quality, management, or inter-departmental communication issues in a large corporation.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#230

Post by acdha »

to3m wrote: post #183
sosborn wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It asks for my password literally every 15-20 seconds. This hasn't been my experience at all. I wonder what's going on because that sounds super annoying.

As far as I can tell, it's not universal, but still somewhat common. (My computer has always done it ever since I bought it new in April.) It is a bit annoying. But since I use the MAS so irregularly, I can get by. I do wonder what the cause is, though. I'm less certain I'd like to know how Apple have so far failed to get to the bottom of it.

On OS X and iOS Apple’s developers tend to treat every network error as a reason to nag you to reauthenticate. I have opened bugs for this in almost every app they make and it's like playing whack-a-mole where they'll fix one instance in one app and then it'll show up in the major release or a similar function somewhere else.
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