[VeryVito]

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 not intentionally) discouraged from updating their apps once they launch.

It's designed to be the "anti-professional" means of app distribution, and it never reaches any higher.

[cmdkeen]

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 scope in the SME market in terms of rolling up licencing and deployment. Hell there's even a use case for families.

[mrec]

I use and generally like Steam, but I'd never call its discovery "good". Users are drowning in the number of titles, the recommendation engine is pretty poor, and there's no support for filtering.

I'll never buy an RTS or a multiplayer-only game, stop showing them to me. I'll never buy an early-access game or a game with 3rd-party DRM, stop showing them to me. I could cull 90% of the stuff in my discovery queues, automatically, with 30 seconds of box-checking.

I'm also surprised that the desktop client has never implemented an "is this machine actually capable of running this game?" check. Non-trivial to implement, sure, but really useful.

[the_af]

Same here. I like and use Steam, but its UI for casually browsing games (aka "casual shopping") isn't very good. For example, when you are browsing a list of games, if you click on one to see additional details and then try going back, you lose your place in the list. This is infuriating for long lists. It kills the browse & shop experience.

The web interface for Steam is better than the app's. Then again, this is what web browsers are there for...

[simcop2387]

Yea that's the exact reason that I end up using the web interface for browsing games. The fact I can browse and open up 30 tabs of games and then look at them one by one without losing my place anywhere is so much nicer.

[robwilliams]

Middle clicking works in the Steam desktop app, at least on Windows. It opens the clicked link in a new window in the foreground.

[mrec]

Yes! Forgot to mention that, but it drives me nuts too.

[Orva]

Funny enough, when looking at Steam processes tree (and if I recall correctly, also licenses), client is done with Chromium Embedded Framework.

[toyg]

Which is probably why it still looks like shit on Retina screens. Oh, how I love HTML apps...

[greggman]

What does that have to do with HTML5 apps? In the browser, when HD-DPI support was added every page started using HD-DPI font rendering, HD-DPI CSS, HD-DPI SVG, only image were still lo-res

Conversely I still have native apps that are low-res only because updating them to HD-DPI meant shipping a new app.

[janfoeh]

This is my pet peeve with Steam, too, especially because it seems to be so easy to fix. If only I had the ability to communicate my dislikes to Steam by blacklisting certain tags, the recommendation system would instantly become an order of magnitude more helpful.

Most tags actually seem to be spot-on and quite helpful, so the data is already there.

> I'm also surprised that the desktop client has never implemented an "is this machine actually capable of running this game?" check. Non-trivial to implement, sure, but really useful.

I've wondered that as well. A bit of data munching together with user feedback, in a similar manner to online fashion stores ("I found these size 11 boots a bit on the small side") would be quite helpful.

[simoncion]

> I'm also surprised that the desktop client has never implemented an "is this machine actually capable of running this game?" check.

The problem with that is that dev's stated minimum system requirements are -frequently enough to cause trouble with such a check- either substantially too high, or quite a bit too low. After all, not every studio has enough cash to discover what is actually the lowest-powered machine that one can play the game on.

[ingenieros]

Are you currently following any curators? This usually helps me find games that I wouldn't have found out about otherwise.

[chc]

Some people, when they have a problem finding good games, think "I know, I'll find a curator." Now they have two problems.

[coldtea]

Besides the chance of a word-play on the famous quote, is there any substance behind this at all?

What would be the problem with finding a curator? It's not unlike how music industry has always worked -- from the era of finding a radio producer you like to the era of following a playlist on Spotify on some genre you like.

[chc]

I have the same trouble finding good curators as I do finding good games. I don't know what curators are good just like I don't know what games are good. I'll look at someone and I'll think, "Is this person really any better than filtering by genre and then randomly buying games?" And I don't feel confident the answer is yes a lot of the time. I feel like I need a meta-curator.

I agree that this is not a particularly novel problem, though.

[janfoeh]

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 complicated, if not more so.

[camperman]

Thank you for the coffee out of the nose :)

[vacri]

> I could cull 90% of the stuff in my discovery queues

The whole point of the discovery queue is to expose you to a variety of options. If you want to search just those things you want, there are already filters you can manually use. These filters don't have all the options (please, no 'early access', I agree), but they give you the filtered lists that it sounds like you want.

[overgard]

A machine requirements check would be useful, but I can't think of many companies that would implement something that results in less sales. What's the upside? Maybe some good will? I'm not saying valve wants people to buy games they can't run or anything like that, but it would be an expensive ongoing effort to make less money.

[greggman]

How would that generate less sales? Isn't the whole point that since the recommendations are irrelevant they're getting less sales not more?

[toyg]

>"is this machine actually capable of running this game?" check. Non-trivial to implement, sure,

Quite trivial, actually. They already do the necessary data-gathering at your end (i.e. their periodic automated survey), the only "hard" bit is data-gathering at the other end (when a game is listed).

It's so trivial to implement, in fact, that one has to wonder whether there are commercial considerations overriding the technical aspect. Maybe they don't want to piss off hardware and game vendors, maybe Valve would rather have you buy their console to bypass these considerations altogether... who knows.

[logfromblammo]

This immediately calls to mind Grim Fandango Remastered which "requires" OpenGL 3.3 .

It doesn't, really. It has the ability to run the game at its original (1998) level of quality. But the developers chose not to enable this as a fallback. You have to rely on some guy on the Internet that figured out how to hack it so that it would work.

It'd be great if I could, for instance, filter out everything that won't run with the Intel HD3000 graphics unit on my cheapo laptop.

[djsumdog]

Not to mention it crashes all the damn time. Your store shouldn't crash when you full-screen a trailer!

I always buy games on Hubble if they're available on both. Sure my save games don't get backed up, but they are drm free. I'll even pay more if the humble price is higher for drm free.

[ChuckMcM]

I love when the top two comments on a story really nail it. In this case I think the parent comment combined with the GP comment capture the issue, when the App Store concept is implemented poorly, it negatively effects user experience, vendor experience, and customer satisfaction. When it is done well, it enhances those things.

The key is that Apple has not pulled off a successful App Store concept for MacOS yet, and worse they haven't really internalized some of the things that make App Stores "good" or "bad". As a result, people are leaving.

The response though will be even more interesting, either Apple can give application delivery the focus it needs and become the best in class example, or they can continue to languish, or worse they mandate by fiat use of feature which negatively impacts the brand.

App Stores try to be too many things at once. They started off as discovery, distribution, and payment processors. They have evolved into sort of microservice delivery applications. When the sandbox + App starts looking like a container instance running a unikernel, you've really supplanted the OS entirely. But that model doesn't work well for what many people think of as "productivity" apps.

I hope Apple chooses to give this problem the focus it needs. I could easily see this as the "feature" on which a lot of OS seats are sold.

[pkamb]

> Apple has not pulled off a successful App Store concept for MacOS yet

They really did, for the first year or two of the Mac App Store's existence. It was great. All of the "$10 utility apps" would be there today if not for Sandboxing.

Maybe this wouldn't have included the apps where the 30% or poor support for upgrades/subscriptions would really impact sales (Adobe, Microsoft, perhaps, interestingly, Sketch...), but sandboxing is the only outstanding issue that prevents you from shipping an app to the Mac App Store.

[dreen]

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 still better than Mac App Store, but I wish they just let me run a the game without running Steam.

[gknoy]

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 fresh machine, install the Steam app, and then install (mac versions of) games I bought in pc-version, or for which I no longer can find the media.

Between Steam's library sharing, access to cross-platform versions of games, and the fact that I can install it from scratch anywhere I have an internet connection, I don't want to buy games any other way. There are many ways to improve, but that ease of recovery and reinstallation (not to mention that it saves my save-games in the cloud for some RPGs) has been well worth any performance hits.

The "whole app" is tiny, and I need to update it maybe once a month. It's not worth complaining about.

[prewett]

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

[kogepathic]

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.

[simoncion]

> Honestly the frequency with which companies are only offering stub installers bothers me.

In general, I heartily agree with you. However, because Steam's primary purpose is to download and install huge gobs of data from Valve's servers, I feel that Valve's decision to ship just a stub installer is totally justified.

MSFT's stub Office installer, or Google's stub Chrome installer? Inexcusable.

Edit: Ugh. I should caffeinate. Steam's primary purpose is to let you play video games. However, the way it does that is by downloading gobs of data & etc.

[robotresearcher]

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.

[simoncion]

So, you can do a couple of things:

* Start Steam when you log in to your computer, but have yourself signed out of Friends so you don't get friend activity notifications.

* If you're concerned about data usage, or don't want all of your games to update when you launch Steam, set your games to only update when you launch them. [0] Sadly, there's no way that I can see to make this the default update strategy, so you have to do this for every game in your library that has annoyingly frequent updates. :( Also note that you can configure Steam to not download updates when a game is running [1] and that Steam makes the update game you're trying to launch the highest-priority download.

* Run Steam in Offline mode (assuming you're not playing multiplayer games ;) ) : https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=3160-AGC...

Sadly, I don't see any way to run some sort of "Steam client and game updating" service that runs in the background and just keeps the client and your games updated even while you're not logged in to either Steam or your Windows account.

[0] Right-click on the game->Properties->Updates, change the value of the "Automatic updates" dropdown menu to "Only update this game when I launch it".

[1] IIRC, this is the default setting.

[robotresearcher]

Thanks, friend. I appreciate the help, and I'm sure others will too. I reboot my MacBook Pro into Windows for gaming only, but I'll take advantage of your advice when I can.

[outworlder]

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

[Splines]

It does do automatic updates as long as it's running.

[huac]

it does...

if you don't want steam to be a distraction but still install updates, run it and put yourself in offline mode. the footprint is pretty small, except when it's actually installing.

[dreen]

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.

[simoncion]

> Yes but all of that is achievable without a bloated hog that steam interface is.

Steam uses ~120 MB of RAM on my system. Google Chrome uses 300+ MB of RAM with just the Google home page loaded.

> ...with a task manager icon as only UI,

You can configure Steam to only display a system tray icon when you don't have the Steam window open.

[wtallis]

If you don't let Steam run in the background, then of course it's not going to be able to update games in the background. The delay in launching games is thus at least partly self-inflicted. And Steam certainly has justifications other than DRM for being strict about keeping games up to date: any networked game will probably need to match the version of the server, and in general it's good policy for Steam to trust developers have good reasons for pushing out updates.

There are also Steam games that don't use Steam's DRM and can be run without Steam. It's up to the individual game developers whether to include the DRM.

[simoncion]

> [Steam] has a slow load time.

Odd. On my six-year-old potato PC, Steam takes 10 seconds from the time I click on the Steam icon until the time the UI is up and I can interact with it.

> ...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?

Probably in the name of downloading and applying the most recent game patch. On the off-chance that you weren't talking about patch downloading, I started a game in my library that was installed, but that I hadn't played in over a year. It loaded just as quickly as any other game in my library.

If patching bothers you, run Steam in Offline Mode.

> ...I wish they just let me run a the game without running Steam.

If you want to go that route, you can probably find any number of methods to spoof the Steam DRM.

[justinclift]

You can launch your games in Offline mode, which stops the need for having to go online/update/contact-the-Steam-servers-before-launch.

It's not totally straight forward though. You need to unplug your network device (or turn off wifi, etc) so the initial startup times out, and gives you the option to use Offline mode.

There might be a command line switch way to do that too, but I've never looked. ;)

[mastax]

There's also a menu option for 'Go Offline...'

[justinclift]

Yeah, but you need to be connected online first for that. eg go through the whole "Steam starts, updates itself, etc". :)

[chipperyman573]

Once you launch a game once through steam you can just run the launcher file.

[dreen]

I'm pretty sure That still launches steam app and updates it before launching the game.

[squeaky-clean]

That's up to the game/publisher. With Bastion for example, you can copy the game directory to another PC and it will still work. But most games will require Steam to run first.

[teen]

this isn't true- you don't have to update games. it's up to each individual game to decide.

[chongli]

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.

[cpcallen]

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.

[aeontech]

Just want to point out that you could upgrade the base OS to latest, and run 10.6.8 in a VM for any older apps that do break in new versions.

[brazzledazzle]

Also 10.6 isn't getting much in the way of security updates anymore...

[forrestthewoods]

Automatic updates is great. The lack of ability to easily rollback is not. GOG's Galaxy has rollback built in. I feel like Steam will add it eventually.

[philwelch]

Many Steam games can be rolled back to previous versions using the "betas" feature.

[delecti]

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

[jdmichal]

They already are:

http://store.steampowered.com/software/

[rcthompson]

I think games are much easier to sandbox than general desktop applications. Games mostly just need access to input devices, output devices, hardware acceleration, and disk access in their own private folder, all things that are relatively easy to provide in a sandbox.

[heartbreak]

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?

[vitd]

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 not update. If I quit and immediately relaunch, it says it's updating and starts downloading stuff. WTF?

3) It shows me ads. Note - it's not like the App store which opens to a list of "what's hot/what's new/what's promoted". It launches, I go to click on something and an ad for a game pops up in a separate window blocking the interface.

4) It shows me ads for games that don't work on any system I've ever used Steam on.

5) Support from Valve is non-existent. If you try to get support for a game, they will by default tell you it's the game vendor's fault, even before figuring out what the problem is. If you try to use their support forums, you are required to use a different login and password than the one you use for the store. WTF? Why would they ever do that?

The list goes on. It's just a terrible app. In my opinion the Mac App Store is lightyears ahead of it in just about every dimension I care about. I no longer use Steam when there's any other option available.

[squeaky-clean]

> 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...

[vacri]

I always liked how when you buy a game, the app freezes, and you get the "thanks for purchasing" email before the app unfreezes.

I don't think it's a terrible app given everything it's trying to do (and primarily that it's a retail outlet, not a social network), but it can definitely do with a bit more polish.

[darryl42]

They did, but most of them seem like toy apps or old versions of an application, old version on steam new version direct from vendor.

[staticelf]

After Steam, Windows Store is definately the best app store I've used. Normally a Linux fan, but I'm really impressed by Microsofts products lately.

[pkamb]

> but also encourages "pump-and-dump" development

Not only encourages, but forces. Any non-sandboxed apps that were released in the App Store prior to the sandbox mandate can be updated for "bug fixes", but any new features can explicitly not be included.

[jonknee]

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).

[jasonbarone]

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.

[oneeyedpigeon]

How viable would it be for a third-party alternative to act as a 'broker' between customer and developer, just to handle those aspects you mention?

[jonknee]

Steam has done well with that model for games, but being Mac only would be a tough sell. Apple's big advantage was instantly getting the App Store on every Mac.

[s73v3r]

Who says they have to be Mac only? It'd probably work out better to be on all major platforms, that way you can sell the feature of buy once, run on all platforms the software runs on. You also could allow single platform things onto your store too, like Sketch.

[jonknee]

Because the vast vast vast majority of apps aren't cross platform?

[s73v3r]

So what? Steam sells plenty of games that are Windows only. Doesn't stop them from being available on other platforms.

[s73v3r]

Not very unless you set yourself up as a store, in which case you've got the problem of trust, both on the developer side (why should we deploy to yet another store), and the customer side (why should we trust your fly by night store).

[api]

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 full Darwin installs that could run homebrew, etc.

It could be done, even without sacrificing ordinary user experience -- just hide the advanced stuff from regular users and require a little magic incantation to unlock it. But it would run counter to the padded room you-don't-own-your-device philosophy of mobile so I can't see the iOS team going that way without being pushed from above.

Of course they have been updating OS X fairly well, so maybe not. Maybe the poor App Store experience is just like the poor Podcast app and other things -- an internal problem with motivation, direction, and focus in certain areas. Organizations can easily forget about things that are important but not 'hot'.

[kps]

  > I keep wondering if Apple wants to kill OSX and take everything toward iOS

Tim Cook: “iPad is the clearest expression of our vision of the future of personal computing.” The writing is on the wall, assuming you count U+1F4A9 as writing.

[z1mm32m4n]

> 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.

[api]

It feels a little bit like it's being pushed. The reality I think is that it's being pushed a little and pulled a lot by the mainstream of the market.

By mainstream I mean non-tech-savvy users, non-hackers. That's most people. I can completely understand how wonderful a "managed platform" like iOS is to a non-technical user. No malware! (Or at least greatly reduced risk of it.) No OS rot! No IT! No complicated system administration! It's like replacing a hand-cranked car by one with electronic ignition and an engine that doesn't constantly need retuning.

For most people "freedom" means the freedom to get crapware and malware, spend hours that you can't spare futzing with your computer and getting nothing done, and have to reinstall your OS every year because it gets borked. Non-hackers hate platforms like that with a passion that it's difficult to understand. I often try to communicate it by comparing it to cars: how would you feel if you had to tune your engine every week, manually inspect every tank of gas for adulterants, and periodically stop your car to perform an inspection as you drive down the highway?

At the same time, the car analogy is deeply imperfect. In the computing world when you trade Windows or OS X for iOS you're giving up a lot of capability and a lot of freedom. Tech-savvy and professional users either don't want to give that up or as is the case with developers can't give it up.

But the problem is that non-tech-savvy users are most of the market, especially as computing becomes more and more mainstream, and most of the market is the market for a large company like Apple. Edges of markets don't matter. As such, I see the majority opinion of the market pulling things away from open platforms and rich capability and toward a managed, simplified, jailed, iOS-like future.

I think there's a real risk that the professional will be left with a choice between the awful UX offered by pure OSS and being forced to adapt to iOS or similar platforms.

Hey, maybe it'll prod the OSS folks into really taking UX seriously.

Yeah.

I'm not encouraged by what I see there nor by the combative/ultra-defensive attitude you get in those circles if you bring up this topic. One camp will insist that the latest Linux desktop or Ubuntu phone or whatever is great and is totally comparable to iOS and OSX and call you an idiot (and worse) for daring to think otherwise, and the other camp will just call you an idiot for "needing" UX or even a GUI at all because "real men" blah blah blah and why don't you read e-mail in emacs? I used to wade into those debates from time to time, but I stopped after I wrote a blog post (years ago) about Linux usability with some ideas about how to improve UI/UX development on Linux and the responses were full of insults I hadn't heard since Jr. High... not to mention one DDOS attack against the server.

[hapless]

Emacs provides really a very nice UI for working with email.

[ascagnel_]

It won't happen. Too much development work is done on OSX; specifically, iOS development _requires_ OSX. Until they start putting out an XCode environment on iOS that improves on what's available on OSX, they won't be killing OSX or Macs.

[rmc]

> Unlike its iOS counterpart, which is great in many ways

I think the fact that it's mandatory has something to do with why people don't leave the iOS App Store.

[dperfect]

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 is somehow worse. From Apple's perspective, the sandbox limits are arguably justified by a desire to provide greater security and privacy controls. The review process is basically a consequence of that same goal - though of course, review time could be greatly reduced.

It sounds like the core issue for people is sandboxing. But what specifically about sandboxing is the issue? Are the sandbox limits really too restrictive for most apps (I guess new APIs/permissions could improve that with time), or are there just a lot of developers who prefer not to rework their apps to deal with the sandbox restrictions? Or is the very idea of sandboxing the problem (or perhaps the default security setting for allowed app installation)?

As long as apps can be distributed outside the MAS, I guess I don't really understand the problem. The MAS adds a lot of convenience, but as usual, the convenience comes at a cost, and thankfully users and developers can take it or leave it.

[greggman]

No non-free upgrades. To release version 2 of your app with a fee you have to release a new app. There's no connection between the two and AFAIK no way to provide a discount for existing users.

As for the MAS harming devs it's the "official store of OSX" so users are arguably being trained to look there and only there for apps. So sure you can look elsewhere but Apple is fighting against you.

30% cut is very high as well. I think existing payment systems for shareware apps were 5% or less. What do you get for your 30%? Support? No. Discovery? Not really. File Hosting? Ok, maybe but is that worth 30%? Easy upgrade and install. That's about it but usually that would be mostly handled by a free library.

[setpatchaddress]

The other things, yes, but 30% cut isn't a real problem. Have some perspective. You used to pay a lot more than that for packaging and distribution as a software developer, when software was still physical goods. (Yes, shareware, sure, but the number of developers who made a living out of shareware was extremely small.)

[vsl]

Have some history. After the physical distribution are and before MAS, there was (and still is) a large number of indie OS X developers distributing digitally. For a long time, FastSpring was the de-facto standard and its rate is 8.9%. Add a CDN or DevMate and 10% seems reasonable. DevMate in particular makes the difference stark: more flexibility, more functionality, 20% less.

[rarepostinlurkr]

How are these issues any different than the iOS App Store? They both play by the same set of rules.

[greggman]

The difference is history and options. Computers have a 30 year history of apps and buying options. Smartphones don't. iOS has only one way to get an app on the phone. Computers don't

[masukomi]

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...

[dperfect]

Not everyone will agree, but 99% of the apps I use shouldn't need to interact with other parts of the filesystem. I'm not sure how the MAS prevents users from receiving support, or developers from giving support (or conveying information) as you suggest. If anything, it encourages those things; every app listing requires a developer link and a support link if I remember correctly, in addition to all the other customizable information, images, and links - not to mention almost unlimited support/information that can be provided within the app itself. And MAS support does give refunds, albeit at their discretion - but that's how much of the retail world already operates. Many developers would consider that an added convenience.

Again, my contention is not that the MAS is perfect, but to say that we're worse off for having it is hard to fathom. If the inconveniences really outweigh the conveniences, then distribute your app outside the MAS. Problem solved.

I can understand similar complaints about the iOS App Store since there are no alternatives (outside of jailbreaking) for native app distribution, but in this case it's just an option. Is the existence of the MAS really worse than not having it as an option (inferior as it may be, depending on your viewpoint)?

[pkamb]

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 exists on that OS.

> Are the sandbox limits really too restrictive for most apps (I guess new APIs/permissions could improve that with time)

The last 5 years have proven that Apple is not interested in granting exemptions to the Sandbox or new entitlements for, say, Accessibility apps.

[dperfect]

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.

[pkamb]

It's not the existence of the Mac App Store that hurts, it's the existance of this (theoretically) great marketplace that we can't use to distribute normal, useful OS X apps. Especially if you had a great little app going in the MAS, and now can't update it because it can't be sandboxed.

And hosting, key generation, payments, etc. are a fairly significant roadblock to shipping an app that the MAS formerly allowed you to completely ignore.

[jacalata]

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

[s73v3r]

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

[mcphage]

If you can't make any money for upgrades, and there isn't a new influx of users, then there's not much money to be made by updating your app after release—only the people who would buy it after the update, but wouldn't have bought without it. Everyone else either paid you all the money they could, or will buy it anyway.

[s73v3r]

I would say the sandbox limits on the MAS are worse, because they go against what a computer is supposed to do. Limits on the phone are considered ok, because first and foremost, the phone has to operate as a phone.

[rarepostinlurkr]

If I cannot use my computer to give a presentation because some "utility" app is crapping all over other apps because it has free reign of the system, isn't that going against what my computer is supposed to do for me?

The ability for any normal person to identify, understand and resolve issues caused by the wild west of "desktop computing" should be well understood at this point -- they cannot.

[agopaul]

Also, the problem of unmaintained paid apps should be addressed. Yes, you can rate 1 star the app, but wouldn't be better to quickly file a 'not working' ticket, and let an Apple employee check the app? I mean, Apple is getting a generous cut from the sell anyway.

[fuzzywalrus]

Sketch always seemed hampered by the Mac App store.

I'm really hoping this opens the door for more flexible licensing for Sketch. The Mac App store is a bit of a pain for multi-seat licensing and upgrade pricing.

[odbol]

Low cost of entry? It's actually quite high... my company still has to distribute instructions on how to disable Gatekeeper on your Mac so you can install our app. We don't have the resources to pay the $100/year "Apple tax" and also spend the 2-3 days developer time on figuring out how to sign our app and make it work with sandboxing.

For me, low cost of entry means "you put the app up for download, the user downloads it." Like the old days. No certificates, no Apple tax, no hoops to jump through.

[imron]

If $100/year is too high for your company, you quite probably have more serious problems than the App Store.

I don't distribute Mac apps through the app store, and signing a regular app (no need to worry about sandboxing) with your developer certificate so that it can run without disabling Gatekeeper literally involves clicking a single radio button in Xcode.