I see you sell apps directly and from the AppStore. What do you think about mac AppStore? The word in the street is that it's not growing and users aren't using it and developers are hating it because it lacks [INSERT FEATURE]. Is that right?
I love the App Store product and what it offers, what I don’t like is the bureaucracy that grew around it.
Because Lunar uses lots of private and reverse engineered APIs, it isn’t allowed on the App Store, so I had to replicate a lot of the distribution myself:
- payments and refunds
- license activation
- anti cracking measures
- automatic (and rolling) updates
- making a website for the app
- SEO (the App Store is quite good at this)
- error reporting and crash data collection
- anonymous analytics
- making sure I’m not mishandling any user data
I mostly opt for the App Store nowadays because it saves me the hassle for all of the above, but it comes with a number of pains and disadvantages:
- no trial mode for one-time purchase apps
- the sandbox is very limiting: no private APIs, no full disk access, no Accessibility Permissions etc.
- the review process is more annoying than helpful
- the user ratings can hurt the business a lot when the product is harder to understand and users leave an angry review because they didn’t read the description before buying the app
For the trial thing I have my own solution where I publish a trial-only build on my website and a link to buying on the App Store when the trial ends.
The sandbox, well I found workarounds for most of my needs [1] but I still skip building some ideas because I know they would never be approved.
The reviews are as annoying as ever [2], I even got my name in a Wired article [3] because of that. They can be very discouraging.
- in-app purchases come with more disadvantages than a one-time purchase (harder to implement, more UI and explaining needed, restoring purchases is a confusing thing)
- I don't want ads in my products
- there's not much functionality to limit, since the apps are very focused on a single thing
- App Store reviewers don't approve apps that limit functionality too much
The App Store way of doing this is with an additional $0 in-app purchase named "7-day Trial", but I tried it and it creates an incredibly confusing experience for users.
