Afaik quite some of the major apps were leaving it in the last years (Sketch comes to mind), but might just be my filter bubble.. Would be interesting to hear from some Mac OS devs
It's just tricky because of the restrictions, and it's not just the restrictions themselves but the reality that you're limited to them in the future.
Even if your app can run in a sandbox today, are you willing to turn down any future feature requests that would make it so it won't?
We're putting an app on there, but our app is kind of an ideal use case because we don't expect to have to add features that can't work in the sandbox and our app is free. It's a tougher sell if you have to cut features to fit in the sandbox or hand off 30% of your sale to Apple.
Admittedly that 30% isn't unreasonable if you're really just starting out. That does include hosting, purchasing, and billing. But those things can be done at a much cheaper rate than 30% if you can set them up.
Panic is one of my favorite Mac app developers and (just checked) one of their apps (Coda) is distributed outside the App Store [1], while Transmit is distributed on both.
Even if your app can run in a sandbox today, are you willing to turn down any future feature requests that would make it so it won't?
We're putting an app on there, but our app is kind of an ideal use case because we don't expect to have to add features that can't work in the sandbox and our app is free. It's a tougher sell if you have to cut features to fit in the sandbox or hand off 30% of your sale to Apple.
Admittedly that 30% isn't unreasonable if you're really just starting out. That does include hosting, purchasing, and billing. But those things can be done at a much cheaper rate than 30% if you can set them up.
Panic is one of my favorite Mac app developers and (just checked) one of their apps (Coda) is distributed outside the App Store [1], while Transmit is distributed on both.
[1] https://panic.com/blog/coda-2-5-and-the-mac-app-store/