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Comment by valine | Hacker News Reader

I guess it a good thing hardly anyone uses the Mac App Store.

I'm "hardly anyone". Despite some misgivings on security policies, it's extremely convenient to have a "Steam for apps". At the end of the day, homebrew is the same thing, except it uses the command line and it doesn't remunerate developers.

I have an issue with the concept of MAS as a monopoly (the same I've had with Windows Update), but MAS as a tool is undoubtedly a good thing.

It was a good thing, until it turned out that every app you get from it can simply expire with no warning.

I used the Mac App Store because it really is just very convenient. But I also thought it worked. Now I see that it doesn't, so I will not be obtaining software from it again.

Oh I wasn't questioning the value of the Mac App Store. As a tool for installing free apps it's fantastic. However as a developer if you want to make money off of an application the Mac App Store is all but useless. Even if your app makes it into the top charts your profits will be almost non existent. The user base for the store is simply far too small.

Source: http://www.macrumors.com/2015/05/07/redacted-mac-app-profits...

Wow, that's terrible. It's really too bad, because the idea of being able to just browse for cool apps is very appealing to me. I use the Mac App Store. I bought Pixelmator, Relax Melodies (2 versions), and a few other apps this way. Pixelmator was the only one that I would have bought anyway, so the App Store is definitely a way to earn extra revenue, if Apple could fix whatever it is that's keeping people from using it (perhaps just awareness?).

I believe that they have made attempts to increase its visibility. I don't recall when the change happened, but Apple routed all system updates through the Mac App Store, pretty much guaranteeing that every Mac user will have to open the store at some point.

Yes, and this is a major annoyance. It seems I get an update for 'Pages' every day, which is why I hate using it. I have to close the documents I have open, go to the store, install the update and re-open my documents. It makes me hate MAS even more

That's odd, given that Pages (and the rest of iWork) usually only updates every few months.

Developers are actively leaving the App Store - Panic pulled their popular Coda web development app & recommended customers switch to the version from their own site. The sandboxing requirements of the App Store made many of Coda's features impossible to implement in the App Store, plus Apple had to approve all updates & took a 30% cut (compared to about 2.6% for a direct credit card transaction).

They say after they left the App Store, their revenue went up 44%:

https://www.panic.com/blog/the-2014-panic-report/

"I was pretty nervous to be pulling Coda from the Mac App Store. But when we finally did it, I felt an incredible, almost indescribable sense of relief — mostly because as we began to wrap up bug fix releases, we were able to immediately post them to our customers within minutes of qualifying them. My god. That’s how it should be. There’s just no other way to put it — that’s how you treat your customers well, by reacting quickly and having total control over your destiny. To not be beholden to someone else to do our job feels just fantastic. (Also to not pay someone 30% in exchange for frequent stress is a fine deal.)"

But Coda is already popular among Mac developers. We can't say the same about less popular apps though.

That macrumors story is pretty misleading. Its true, you won't make a living selling gimmick apps on the Mac. But you can make a living selling actually useful software (at a higher price point). The top selling charts are irrelevant.

You missed the point. The point isn't that you can't make a living selling a gimmick app.

The point is that 94 units with $452 in sales makes you eighth top paid app.

So, unless you are top 10, as a developer you can expect a maximum revenue in a year of $120,000. IF you can make that EVERY DAY ... and you can stay in the Top 10 ... and you can't. And Apple takes $40K of it.

And most people will never break the top 10.

I knew things were bad, but that's disgustingly bad.

The top paid chart is irrelevant on the Mac App Store, because it's mostly filled with $.99 super-niche or throwaway apps. The bread and butter of the Mac App Store is low volume, higher cost apps. The dynamics are totally different compared to iOS/Android. At higher price points, say $19.99 or $29.99, 94 units per day is more than enough to make a living.

The problem is no-one is going to pay that much money for an app that lets you add black boxes to an image. You have to deliver real value worth paying for. Think apps like Day One, Transmit, DaisyDisk, 1Password, Reeder.

Moreover, your numbers are off, you don't need to be anywhere near the top 10 to make over $120,000/year. In fact, you can be well outside the top 100 if your per-unit price is high enough.

That's if you view the store as a marketing tool, and hope that Apple will push your app for you.

Oh the other hand, if you do your own marketing and use the app store as a distribution channel, you could probably do just as well (or better) as if your app wasn't in the store. Depends on whether the benefits of the store are worth the 30% cut they're keeping.

I didn't know you had to sign up for homebrew and provide all your personal info including an authorized credit card, and then you are forced to randomly re-authenticate with the central authority and verify that your credit card is still valid in order to continue using the apps. Also didn't know homebrew could remotely invalidate an app.

> I have an issue with the concept of MAS as a monopoly (the same I've had with Windows Update)

What possible problem could you have with Windows Update? WU is Microsoft's platform for updating it's operating system, core software, and hardware drivers. It isn't a 3rd party app store and doesn't sell anything. In fact they'll host 3rd party drivers for Windows compatible hardware for free as long as the OEM or IHV goes through the proper certification process. It's not even a monopoly because you can disable it and use LanDesk or some other vendor's update platform.

Were you just trying to get a dig in at Microsoft because you don't like them?

It's more likely that parent was talking about Windows Store and just mixed up the names.

It's possible but I don't think so because he refers to his issues with MAS in the present tense and his issues with WU in the past tense. MAS is 2 years older than the Windows Store and WS is much more permissive in comparison so I find it hard to believe he's had issues with WS for longer than MAS.

Linux has had apt-get for what, 15 years? Microsoft steadfastly refused to implement anything like that for more than a decade, or to open WU in any shape or form to third-parties. All the while, you could get Office updates and IE updates conveniently through WU, but not for any other software, resulting in a proliferation of insecure tools. Whichever motivation they might have had to keep the situation as it was, it resulted in an obtuse and backward monopolistic setup.

Eventually they got around building an apt-get clone targeted at opensource developers, and an appstore for Metro apps nobody wants. In 15 years, that's not a great track record.

APT of 15 years ago is a pretty far cry from APT of today. In fact APT was abandoned by it's original maintainer and kinda sucked until something like 2007 or 2008 when someone else started working on it again. But you know rose colored lenses.

WU has never really been about software installation or upgrade, it's focus has always been about bug fixes and security patches. Silverlight and IE are the only apps that have ever been upgradable via WU and for IE that's been a relatively new occurrence primarily driven by getting users off of older insecure versions. So really Silverlight is only app ever distributed via WU.

You also have to consider that APT was a solution to the horrible experience of getting and installing Debian libraries and applications which still is a pain in the ass without APT. Windows never had the problem, apps that were available for download were easy to download and install.

Keep in mind that APT is for opensource software and doesn't have to deal with authentication and authorization of software licenses.

And since WU isn't a store front and most Windows software isn't free, opening up WU to 3rd party apps would probably have come with distribution costs that I would wager most app developers wouldn't pay.

So again not a very fair comparison.

Almost all OS X apps made by Apple are available exclusively through MAS. MAS distributes lots of very popular apps like Xcode, Keynote, Pages, Numbers. Imagine a non-techy user trying to open Pages and getting that error message.

Xcode you can download from the developer portal for Apple. It's definitely not exclusive to the AppStore.

Right, edited parent.

Or imagine any user, techie or not, trying to open Keynote to give a presentation and getting that error message.

It's completely ridiculous and has me vowing never to buy (or get for free) anything from the Mac App Store again. Unfortunately I have little choice on iOS.

This hit me yesterday, I use ScreenInk from the app store to draw on slides with my Wacom tablet. Five minutes before my lecture I get this error. Not amused!

Yeah, that's bad. It's one thing to put stupid DRM on your entertainment products. If a movie doesn't work, well, that's irritating but not a serious problem. Watch another one or read a book or, worst case, talk to your family. Definitely not something you want to happen, but I can deal with it. Software gets used for practical purposes, and spontaneous breakage causes real problems.

Better go uninstall Chrome and anything else that has started doing silent auto-updates in the background too then, because that has the potential for spontaneous breakage as well.

I also think you're perhaps extrapolating a bit too much from this incident. Did the MAS breakage really truly suck? Yes, it did. Was it really embarrassing for Apple? It probably was. Did it cause grief for a lot of people? Yes. But the big question is, does this mean we can't trust the MAS to not accidentally break all our apps again? No, I don't think this incident means that at all. I can't think of any other reason for all my MAS-installed apps to suddenly break besides an expired certificate, and Apple's now renewed the certificate. Worst-case, maybe it'll break again in a few years when that certificate expires, but I bet they're putting in place some procedure or mechanism to guarantee that this won't happen again.

All that said, there are certainly plenty of legitimate ongoing grievances with the MAS. I won't dispute any of that. But vowing to never again acquire any app from the MAS over this one incident seems somewhat absurd.

If I used and depended on Chrome, I would at least have the power to fix such a problem myself, by downloading an old version manually, or downloading Chromium instead. There's a qualitative difference here between spontaneous breakage I can fix myself, and spontaneous breakage where the only solution is to wait for others to fix.

Before this incident happened, I thought that App Store apps which existed on your computer and had the proper credentials (verified by running the app successfully at least once) were permanently good to go. Verification happens offline, after all, so there's no room for error and no need to trust anybody.

Turns out, no, all of these apps come with a built-in expiration date, and you need Apple's cooperation to extend their life. They've fixed that. What else lurks in there? If they didn't actually intend to build a system which is once-and-done, then I really have no idea, and I can't trust that.

I don't see why it would be "absurd" to decide not to patronize a system which has demonstrated that it can't be trusted. I mean, what exactly am I losing by no longer buying there? Virtually all of the good apps are available outside of the store anyway. Used to be that I'd lean towards the App Store version because of convenience. Now I see that this is the wrong choice, so I won't do that anymore. So how is this "absurd"? Because it's not the choice you would make?

No, it's absurd because you're stating a very hard-line vow over a single incident. If you had said "I'm not going to buy from MAS when reasonable alternatives exist", that would be a reasonable stance to take. But instead you're saying "If an application is available only on the MAS, I will refuse to purchase it, no matter what the circumstances are". Even for applications that don't provide mission-critical functionality (e.g. that you can tolerate breaking for one day).

No mission-critical apps currently exist as App Store exclusives. An app can't become mission-critical unless I let it, so the possibility that a new one might show up as an exclusive doesn't make any sense.

So really, you're just upset about my wording. That is, to borrow a term, absurd.

There's a very significant difference in meaning between "I vow to never purchase anything (free or paid) from the MAS ever again", and "I will prefer to get things direct-sale when I can". And you must know that, or you wouldn't have chosen the more dramatic "vow" statement. If you really meant what you said when you used the word "vow", then stand by your statement. If you didn't, then admit that you actually meant something else. But dismissing my argument as a mere complaint over "wording" is disingenuous.

Where am I saying "when I can"? I'm not going to get apps from the Mac App Store again, period. It will not be very difficult to do this, because I don't need to.

But please, continue telling me how my statement about my own actions is "absurd" based on your opinion of the situation.

Can someone please explain why you're choosing to downvote me? I'm taking a very reasonable position here. My only real guess is mikeash fanboys (yes they exist) don't like to see anyone disagree with him, but I really hope that's not the case. If there's some actual problem with my comment besides the personage that I'm disagreeing with, I'd really like to know.

Just speculating here, maybe they don't like seeing sarcastic criticism of somebody's choice to give up a DRM-enabled distribution channel, or derailing the conversation by nitpicking little bits of wording.

Nah, can't be, it must be the fanboys who follow me around downvoting you.

My comment was not directed at you. I do not appreciate your continued ad hominem attacks. Unless you want to address my actual argument instead of whining that I'm being nitpicky (or apparently sarcastic?), then your reply is not welcome. This is why I stopped responding in the sibling thread too.

Ugh… yeah, this is exactly why I actively avoid any software with DRM (to the greatest practical extent that I can). Thankfully, there are OS X developers out there that actually do sell DRM-free software¹, and I support them wholeheartedly.

――――――

¹ — http://sites.fastspring.com/helftone/product/monodraw

I will not use iPreach for exactly this reason. Period. Which is sad, because Keynote is a very nice piece of software.

I had a combination of things happen where I installed an upgrade, and it effectively locked me out of my files. I had to pay for a new Keynote version to get around the problem (I no longer remember all the details ... I think it had something to do with an iLife subscription vs. standalone and auto-upgrading my data file version).

I was REALLY pissed off. And vowed I would never buy software again where I didn't control the physical copy.

Yep I try to use `brew cask` everywhere I can, but sometimes auto updates doesn't work when you haven't installed the app from the mac store. Or for example 1 password can't connect with it's Chrome's extension if it was not installed via AppStore.

That, and the settings syncing and licensing situation which I think is far more inconvenient than a quick removal and reinstall of cask apps.

I love Cask but I'll choose App Store apps over their counterpart until the app devs can improve licensing and settings syncing.

I'm not a Mac user anymore (keep waiting for my "perfect" macbook to jump back in, which is perpetually six months away), but this is genuinely news to me.

Is the Mac App Store really not popular? One of my reasons for wanting to get away from Windows again is that I miss my central package management from linux, which is what I kind of thought the App Store did (besides collecting Apple's cut).

I would say homebrew is closer to give you what you want than Mac AppStore is.

Good to know for the future, thanks.

There's Chocolatey on Windows. The best I can say about it is that.. erm.. their hearts are in the right place.

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