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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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