How are you providing 'App Store functionality' if there's no marketplace? Surely the most valuable thing the App Store provides is the distribution channel?
We're providing the equivalent functionality of payments, in-app purchases and updates to developers. As well as allowing them to use/ develop trial functionality, allowing them to distribute outside the MAS more effectively.
In most cases (from talking to developers) the distribution/ audience aspect isn't the #1 reason developers go down the MAS route. Lots of developers have their own audiences, or use sites like MacUpdate (or traditional marketing methods).
That said, we are working on functionality to help users discover applications. We currently have around 400k users (customers on the buy side) who have active accounts with us, and we're testing ways of recommending content to those users, in order to provide developers with that extra exposure/ sales volume on our platform. — Currently we're testing this via email receipts (for opted-in merchants) and via our web-based "locker" (where users who have purchased content can access their downloads/ license codes).
We've got a lot of work to do on the discovery side of things, and there are a lot of interesting things that we can do at scale, but discovery isn't our primary focus at the moment (building a great platform/ SDK for developers, and providing the foundation is our current focus).
In most cases (from talking to developers) the distribution/ audience aspect isn't the #1 reason developers go down the MAS route. Lots of developers have their own audiences, or use sites like MacUpdate (or traditional marketing methods).
That said, we are working on functionality to help users discover applications. We currently have around 400k users (customers on the buy side) who have active accounts with us, and we're testing ways of recommending content to those users, in order to provide developers with that extra exposure/ sales volume on our platform. — Currently we're testing this via email receipts (for opted-in merchants) and via our web-based "locker" (where users who have purchased content can access their downloads/ license codes).
We've got a lot of work to do on the discovery side of things, and there are a lot of interesting things that we can do at scale, but discovery isn't our primary focus at the moment (building a great platform/ SDK for developers, and providing the foundation is our current focus).