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Leaving the Mac App Store

blog.sketchapp.com

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Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#261

Post by z1mm32m4n »

api wrote: post #171
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…

I keep wondering if Apple wants to kill OSX and take everything toward iOS, totally jailed everything, and the cloud. I know if they did they'd lose me as a customer for anything other that (maybe) phones, but maybe they don't care about that market. The only way they wouldn't would be if they grew up iOS into something you can do real work with -- allowed end user app installation, emulators and VMs, containers with…

> I keep wondering if Apple wants to kill OSX and take everything toward iOS, totally jailed everything, and the cloud.

While the Surface and iPad Pro continue to improve, I have a really hard time seeing tablets "killing" laptops like, for example flash drives and cloud storage "killed" CDs.

I'm not quite sure this is a winning strategy for them. There has been hype for a while that tablets will replace laptops. But looking back, there was a huge backlash against Windows 8 and the touch elements of it. Android tablets continue to vie for a segment of the market that feels like they're competing with iPod Touch, iOS, like you mention is still locked down.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#262

Post by dreen »

gknoy wrote: post #172
dreen wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam is terrible. It requires the whole app to be running and fully up to date before you can launch a game. It has a slow load time. Even on a decent machine, if you haven't played a steam game in a while and you want to run one, you might be looking at a good few minutes before the game even starts to load. In the name of what, stopping piracy? AFAIK most pirated games come from steam anyway. I realise this is sti…

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…

Yes but all of that is achievable without a bloated hog that steam interface is. Just run a thin updater, with a task manager icon as only UI, and a separate app for the store and downloading/installing games. You can probably cram the rights management into the tiny app as well without making sacrificing too much.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#263

Post by dperfect »

pkamb wrote: post #253
dperfect wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Many OS X apps are utilities that help you work with other apps. Running all the time in the background, monitoring, looking at keyboard input, observing folders, etc. These types of apps are fundamentally at odds with the Sandbox. But they're used often by many/most OS X users, even the less technically inclined. Whereas the design and simplicity of iOS has ensured, from the start, that these types of apps cannot ex…

A good point about utility/accessibility apps. For most everything else though, I prefer not to inherently grant all those permissions to every app I install.

But again, Apple doesn't require distribution through the MAS (even if the majority of apps can work effectively within the restrictions), so how does the MAS's existence make the OS X ecosystem worse off overall?

If Apple is ignorant enough to leave money on the table by failing to provide a good marketplace/environment for a large number of apps (as may very well be the case), then non-MAS distribution will still flourish. Maybe they'll wise up and improve the situation in response. Maybe not, and we're back to the way things were before the MAS.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#264

Post by janfoeh »

coldtea wrote: post #256
janfoeh wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is, yes. For me, finding a person whose reviews I can trust takes a lot of time, so it's useless for answering the question "anything good here I would like to play right now?" I have been reading movie reviews for close to 20 years now; in all that time I have found just two people whose reviews I respect and whose taste mirrors mine so much that I can follow them blindly. With games it's just as compl…

> For me, finding a person whose reviews I can trust takes a lot of time, so it's useless for answering the question "anything good here I would like to play right now?" Of course. You first need to do some work (find a curator you trust), before you can check a game they suggest. But what would the alternative be? Either you ALWAYS search for yourself, or you search first for some curators and then follow their sugg…

I can say with a very high probability whether a game is worth a look, just by looking at its tags. Of course that doesn't tell me whether I will ultimately like it, but then again reviews cannot do that either.

The ability to simply blacklist one or two handful tags would make discovery dramatically easier for me. That's all it would take.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#265

Post by ThomPete »

rimantas wrote: post #259
ThomPete wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No but perhaps I wasn't being clear what I meant sorry. What I mean is that using web view make it way easier to layout out networked assets. At least thats my experience having worked with both.

You had some reaaaaally reallly weird experience then. I don't even understand what you mean by "laying out networked assets". With proper architecture your UI won't even know where assets come from.

What I mean is that laying out using xcode isn't as easy as using a web view for the kind of layout that are needed for something like the app store.

Not sure why this is such a crazy thing to say that I need to be down voted for it.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#266

Post by kogepathic »

prewett wrote: post #198
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…

Steam.app is small when you download it, but it seems to download hundreds of megabytes of something after you run it.

What you download is just a stub, when then pulls down the rest of the components required to run Steam. It's the same thing with their Linux installer.

Honestly the frequency with which companies are only offering stub installers bothers me. My company has an office in a country with terrible internet, and since Microsoft no longer offers an offline installer for Office (unless you have a volume license key, which we're too small to have), it's absolute hell to have our employees download and install office on their computers when they join the company.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#267

Post by Keats »

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.

Photoshop runs pretty well on virtualbox last time I tried it (~6 months ago). That was for very very basic projects though, not sure how it behaves in big ones

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#269

Post by ethbro »

janfoeh wrote: post #245
dangero wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 bet…

You're probably right. I would still agree with the parent in that they feel like a badly done webview wrapper, because the symptoms are so similar. iTunes Store, App Store, MAS, Apple Music — there is definitely a pattern there, at least on the desktop. I find them all similarly clunky, slow, ugly and unpleasant to use. Apple almost seems to be inherently incapable of creating a decent store front, and I am curious…

> Apple almost seems to be inherently incapable of creating a decent store front, and I am curious as to why they have that organizational blindspot.

Because when you have a captured userbase, there's no incentive to improve / innovate?

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#270

Post by s73v3r »

jacalata wrote: post #225
dperfect wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That doesn't explain how, nor really makes any sense.
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