
What happens when you dump the App Store? - ColanR
https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/13/what-happens-when-you-dump-the-app-store/
======
spott
The value-add of the mac store is just not very good anymore.

There are only three reasons people might buy something from the mac store vs.
from the developer directly:

1\. To keep it getting updates through the app store vs. having to download
from the developer when a new update comes out. 2\. They found it in the mac
store, and thus purchased it in the mac store. 3\. They trust apple to reduce
the risk of malware when using the mac store vs. a developers web page.

The mac store is getting really hard to navigate, and it doesn't give any
useful search functionality, so #2 is disappearing as a reason people are
buying from the apple store. #1 is nice, but with auto updates, it is
disappearing as well. #3 isn't generally an issue for developers or "power
users", so it is gone as well.

Honestly, I can't think of a reasonable reason to put something in the mac
store that is oriented towards developers or power users. The hit in revenue
just isn't worth the benefits. Though I would love to hear from someone who
came to a different conclusion.

~~~
tiglionabbit
My #1 reason to use it is that it puts the purchase on my record so I can
easily re-download it if I happen to lose it somehow. No more searching
through ancient emails for activation codes.

~~~
jedberg
But if an app is not available on the app store, does that stop you from
getting it? That's a consumer benefit but it has no corresponding benefit to
the developer, so it's unlikely to be a good argument for a developer to stick
with the app store.

~~~
cstejerean
If it's a well known application I will go out of my way and buy it outside
the store if that's the only way to get it. But for some random app that I
just found I have to wonder if it's worth getting it from outside the store
(and frequently the answer is no). I need to a) give my credit card to a
random website that will probably get hacked in the next 12 months, b) start
getting unsolicited email campaigns in about 18 months when someone hires a
growth hacker, c) remember how to install the damn thing when I upgrade my
laptop, d) deal with the reduced security guarantees of an app that did not go
through the Apple review process and is not subject to the sandboxing of the
App Store.

For many apps where I wouldn't mind spending $10 to $20 in the App Store, I am
probably not going to deal with all of the above to buy it directly from the
developer.

~~~
kalleboo
> give my credit card to a random website that will probably get hacked in the
> next 12 months

Pretty much everyone takes PayPal which shields you from this

~~~
dcosson
Or uses stripe which hides your real card number from the merchant. The
annoyance of adding a card is one thing but fear of an app developer getting
hacked and exposing your card doesn't strike me as a very strong reason.

~~~
eonw
they shouldnt be storing it anyways. thats not PCI compliant.

------
zitterbewegung
Should be macOS App Store title seems to imply the iOS one .

~~~
huangc10
Agreed. Title is misleading and is clearly clickbait. Please admin switch
this.

~~~
DanBC
You need to email them.

~~~
eriknstr
Shouldn't flagging it be sufficient?

~~~
grzm
Flagging generally means the submission is inappropriate for HN. It affects
ranking and, if flagged heavily enough, will kill the submission. Flagging
isn't a "call" button for mods. I don't think they generally review a
submission just because it's been flagged by a user.

------
ThomPete
I pulled my mac app [http://www.ghostnoteapp.com](http://www.ghostnoteapp.com)
from the appstore back in '15 only 5 months after launching it and haven't
looked back since.

It's still a pretty profitable app for me and I actually enjoy the freedom of
not having to have it go through review process.

For most mac apps people are googling rather than browsing the app store
anyway.

~~~
huangc10
It's smart of you to still use the App Store logo though. ;) I'll give you
that.

~~~
ThomPete
Interesting never thought about it like that.

To me the icon indicating it's app store is this:
[https://developer.apple.com/app-
store/marketing/guidelines/#...](https://developer.apple.com/app-
store/marketing/guidelines/#downloadOnAppstore)

But now you actually got me wondering if I should change it.

~~~
dantiberian
Yeah, that's not the app store icon, it's the generic Apple icon for an
application. I would leave it, it indicates a Mac app, but not a MAS app.

~~~
wingerlang
I think when coupled like this, "[logo] buy" it gives the impression of
"something apple".

Personally I thought that it would either open the app store, or that is was
something related to Apple pay (although that one needs "[logo] Pay").

It felt a bit misleading.

~~~
ThomPete
I think you are talking about the top right not the button?

~~~
wingerlang
Oh, yeah that's right.

------
BoorishBears
*What happens when you pull a well established app with an extremely well established (and very tech savvy) user base from the macOS App Store in a public fashion.

~~~
dirtae
Piezo, Rogue Amoeba's app, was removed from the Mac App Store with "minimal
publicity", according to their blog post:

[https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2017/02/10/piezos-life-
outsid...](https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2017/02/10/piezos-life-outside-the-
app-store/)

~~~
paulkafasis
That is quite correct. When we removed Piezo from the Mac App Store a year
ago, we didn't send out a press release, nor seek publicity over this move in
any way. We simply removed it and explained why on our blog
([https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2016/02/12/piezo-1-5-arrives-...](https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2016/02/12/piezo-1-5-arrives-
piezo-exits-the-mac-app-store/)). That was it.

We can certainly debate how well-established or tech-savvy our users are
(though I will note that Piezo is by far our simplest application, and used by
the least technically savvy among our user base). But to say that we did this
in a “public fashion” is just false.

~~~
zepto
True, but your own brand and storefront is very well established and respected
for more than a decade. This makes the story entirely unrepresentative of what
happens when developers in general quit the Mac App Store.

~~~
ivm
We started outside of the App Store because of its sandboxing restriction.

It's still 2nd to 3rd page of search results despite having some reviews and
only a couple of competitors. So a considerable investment in SEO is required.

------
i336_
To mods: I flagged this to bring attention to the clickbait title: this is NOT
referring to iOS.

The post title here is the same as the article title but I would still
recommend changing it, even if just to " _macOS_ App Store".

~~~
i336_
Small edit - I just realized " _Mac_ App Store" could work as well, that's
what I understand it's usually called.

------
awalton
I wonder if articles like this will hasten non-app-store-apps' demise. Apple
has already appeared to be quite itchy to lock down everything and weld the
hood shut, throwing vendor kexts out of the kernel left and right and
introducing ChromeOS-like OS verification steps, making users jump through
several hoops to run downloaded executables... Apple's going to eventually
want to stem the outgoing tide before too many apps flee the walled sandbox
and have a voice loud enough that they can't simply ignore. (It's only a
matter of "when" really; they made the OS free because they fully intend to
get their 30% cut on every app sold, moving the iOS model to the Desktop.)

~~~
api
If/when they do this, I'm gone from OSX.

This can fly on mobile because ultimately mobile devices are just dumb terms
for accessing the cloud. I don't think it'll fly on real computers, especially
for the pro market and developers.

------
exabrial
I greatly dislike the osx app store. It's intrusive, slow (even over Google
fiber), has an awful UI, and is generally annoying.

~~~
bsaul
Evey single thing of those apple store is a gigantic shame.

Interface for browsing content ( itunes) : sucks, absolute disaster.

Interface for publishing content ( itunesconnect) : feels like the work of an
intern

Review process : lottery. Never know for sure if your business isn't going to
get killed by an eula update.

Development tools ( xcode ) : so bad it becomes embarrassing.

Commission : 30% is a total ripoff. Should be half of it, max.

Content indexing / discoverability : nonexistant. So bad they had to force
developpers to remove working but non updated apps.

And I could go on and on, but really, the only reason it remains this bad is
because apple is in a de facto monopoly position on everything related to
their products.

------
arielm
I think that without knowing the y-axis of that chart it's hard to judge
whether it's really not worth it to even be listed.

Mac apps are more niche than their mobile counterparts. Why is a discussion
for a different time, but _selling_ niche products is very different than
freemium or even paid mobile apps.

If sales are low on a daily basis I'd say the downloads came from users who
knew what they wanted and just needed a way to get it, which is what I suspect
is happening.

I'm not trying to defend the Mac App Store here, obviously it leaves a lot to
be desired as it related to discovery. I'm not sure if we can blame Apple for
that or not though. Desktop app stores never really took off with steam being
the only exception. And steam isn't for apps.

The only real advantage I see the MAS could have is credibility when it gets
to subscriptions. Let's see how Apple will handle that.

~~~
fpgeek
> Desktop app stores never really took off with steam being the only
> exception. And steam isn't for apps.

Mobile app stores aren't for apps (or at least paid apps) either. If you
filter out all the games, the frontends for external services and all the
other free apps, how much is left? How significant is it?

------
murukesh_s
Apple should lower the fees for desktop apps. The developer license, while
only 100$, is still a factor that prevents indie developers from considering
the App Store. Perhaps make it free for free and open source apps. And only
take a commission for paid apps. The mobile app store was different because
that was the only option for developers at that time. Apple would ideally like
to make it that way even on the desktops eventually, but that would suck.

------
mmjaa
home-brew is my App Store these days. I only go to the 'official' Mac App
Store out of curiosity to see new releases - and then I wait until they show
up in 'brew cask'. If they don't: meh. I don't care. If they do, then I
happily use home-brew to install new apps.

The reason? home-brew is just such an elegant way of administering installed
Apps without doing the 'download, mount, drag to ~/Applications, etc.' dance
..

------
bsaul
Wonder if any of those three giant stores ( google, apple and especially
amazon) aren't going to be facing the next wave of anti-trust lawsuits in
tech.

------
beezischillin
From a user's point of view the App Store (on every Apple platform, from tvOS
to the Watch) is an incredibly bad deal, with awesome offerings.

* The centralised payment really incentivises users to buy apps (myself included, I find myself thinking about buying something a lot less when only having to trust one source with my information, and that source ensures that their system works well for me).

* iCloud Sync is a really big bonus for most of the work-related apps I bought and it's painfully missing when you read that devs pulled their software from the store and you cannot access it anymore.

* The fact that I can comfortably download all the software I bought without keeping track of it is a bonus - if I ever have to reset a device, it's a giant bonus.

And the negatives:

* It stifles innovation -- content discovery is almost impossible! Within two clicks you can arrive at endless lists of shovel-ware - the top lists are almost completely unusable in my region as a way to find new and interesting apps. Same goes for categories (on stores that even have a somewhat OK system of categories). The Watch / TV stores are horrible! For some reason I always seem to run out of content to browse, even tho there are (possibly) hundreds of thousands of apps on that platform. The only half-acceptable way I found to look for new stuff is to browse Apple's curated collections (which almost always are very samey). Now I wouldn't say this is worse than Google Play, for example, I recently browsed through it and had a similar experience, however that should be enough to call attention to the issue, since the Apple app store is usually considered more sophisticated

* Search: it's not very good, from the App Store to Apple Music tolerance on misspelling names or searching for approximates is bad.

* You're forced to only use their system of delivery, unless you're on macOS (which's future is looking dubious on that front as well), so you're inherently forced to deal with the negatives, without having a choice of other ecosystems.

I love my Apple products, I've almost completely switched to their ecosystem
within the last two years, but I am really hoping to see as much work on these
issues as on the pull-up music player menu on the Control Center. Just because
the competition is not on another, better level, it does not mean that having
to constantly Google to discover great new apps is acceptable.

------
erikb
We should make a clear difference here between any App Store and a computer
App store. Sure, people will not care much when it's a computer app store,
since they have long experience in installing programs without it. But when it
comes to smartphone/tablet app stores, not being in one of them means your
program is dead.

------
seanalltogether
I really really really wish amazon would just develop a vendor neutral app
store already. Valve seems unwilling to branch into apps outside the sphere of
the gaming community. Apple and Microsoft seem to not care about the features
that would make their stores more attractive to both buyers and sellers.

~~~
lmm
They have a store on android, but I don't get the impression it's been a
massive success.

~~~
fpgeek
It's been good enough to support their Kindle Fire ecosystem without using
Google Play (I don't think anyone else has succeeded with something like that
outside China), but they're still propping it up on non-Amazon devices by
tying Amazon Video to it, so...

------
amelius
If too many devs flee the app store, then chances are Apple makes the app-
store mandatory for installing new apps.

~~~
masklinn
Not really. This is about MAS not iOS appstore. There's no way Apple can
require MAS-install, everybody would up and leave the ecosystem entirely (too
many useful tools can't even fit in MAS's restrictions) and MAS has never had
much value-add for the constraints and cost.

------
eonw
as a mac user, i always prefer to download the dmg directly. i only use the
app store for OS updates, xcode and itunes updates.

