Hacker News Reader

Comment by king_magic | Hacker News Reader

IMHO, the Mac App Store is good for one thing, and one thing only: Apple's Mac apps.

Without trial versions / paid upgrades / all of the other things we've been asking for, it's just not a distribution system I would seriously consider using.

If I was building an OS X app, I would rather go out of my way to support auto-update, custom licensing, etc, than deal with the limitations of the Mac App Store.

View on HN

And it's not all that bad.

* For updates, use Sparkle framework. [1]

* For licensing, use CocoaFob [2] or write your own.

* For payments, use FastSpring like most other indie shops. [3]

Only other detail is having to write a EULA yourself.

[1] http://sparkle-project.org/

[2] https://github.com/glebd/cocoafob

[3] http://fastspring.com/

It may not be “that bad”, but it’s still enough to be daunting if you’ve been in full-swing development mode and would rather focus on your application’s key features instead of licensing and distribution.

That said, I have apps on the Mac App Store and though it’s effortless, there are absolutely points of frustration. Most notably, there’s no way to refund or interact with unhappy users or users with questions. Additionally, OS X's sandboxing implementation is still buggy in some areas (mostly involving file dialogs and persistence of user-selected file URLs) which makes writing and usage of applications that frequently work with files in arbitrary user-selected files and folders in the user’s filesystem far more frustrating and failure-prone than it needs to be.

As such, I’m looking into moving into self-managed licensing, with a setup like you’ve mentioned (Sparkle/CocoaFob/etc) but rather than using Fastspring, I’ll probably use a personally maintained branch of Potion Store that supports Stripe instead. I’ve never been a fan of in-betweens like Fastspring as a developer or as a user; as a developer, I dislike the lack of control I have and as a user encounters with Fastspring and the likes feels janky, unpolished, and unprofessional.

I'm with you on the sandboxing issues and lack of means to contact users.

FWIW, Fastspring is fairly customizable! The value over Stripe is that you don't have to deal with PCI details or worrying about fraud. Also, taxes/VAT in various jurisdictions. (Disclaimer: current customer)

One minor con is that until your store is "vetted" (something like a few months of successful transactions), your checkout form will include mailing address and phone number fields for additional fraud screening.

It's great to have more options of course. I figure I will "graduate" to Stripe if my operation gets to the point where I want even more control.

> One minor con is that until your store is "vetted" (something like a few months of successful transactions), your checkout form will include mailing address and phone number fields for additional fraud screening.

The seller's phone? Or my customers must enter their phones?

For refunds you can redirect your users to https://reportaproblem.apple.com where they can request a refund pretty painlessly. Apple usually will issue an refund.

Someone in a podcast I listen to, perhaps Siracusa or Arment on ATP, distilled this perfectly. "There will be paid upgrades in the Mac app store when Apple needs it for their apps."

Considering they seem to be moving towards giving everything away I wonder how likely this is....

Maybe more likely than you think. They are, as you say, making more things free (or, rather, "included"). I could see that moving toward giving you a free home version of Final Cut Pro, for example, and then offering a paid upgrade to the real deal with extra features and so on.

I would say it's extremely unlikely, software is a complimentary product to their hardware, it's in their interest to keep the price as low as possible.

Final Cut Pro costs $299.99. Logic costs $199.99. We've all read that Spolsky article, I get it, but that doesn't mean it is wise or inevitable for Apple to make all their software free. Offering limited versions of FCP and Logic for free gives users software that compliments their hardware, but also gives Apple another user in the ecosystem who might step up to the real thing because they're already comfortable with the workflow.

Even that may not be true. Apple things in the app store don't have to follow the app store rules that external developers have to (e.g. Xcode is not subject to sandboxing), so it's entirely possible that only Apple things could have paid upgrades.

There are definitely limitations, but many developers are willing to trade those for access to an extremely high-profile app marketplace rather than hoping their apps will be found through other channels. Tech is only one piece of the 'successful app' puzzle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com