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Comment by valine | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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'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.

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