Apple Promotes Jeff Williams to COO, Puts Phil Schiller in Charge of App Store
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Emphasis mine, this means there's now a visible figure responsible for the Mac App Store. I'm not in Mac development, but by many accounts it's been neglected to the point that the well known software is bailing. Most specific complaints center around the sandbox limitations, but there's also frustration with wondering what you're shelling out such a big chunk of your money for if the store hasn't improved in years.
Apple can get away with whatever they want on iOS because there are no other options. On Mac, they can't expect to charge 30% of revenue and have everyone stick around if the service isn't worth it.
Example, with many related links at the bottom: https://www.macstories.net/linked/sketch-is-leaving-the-mac-...
I don't know what they have planned to fix it, but the timing of this feels like at least a tacit acknowledgement that there's a problem.
It's a security feature of OSX. I would love if Windows has an application sandbox too and show file extension by default. A bad program can destroy everything incl encrypting all your data.
https://panic.com/blog/coda-2-5-and-the-mac-app-store/
https://panic.com/blog/coda-and-sandboxing/
If you wanted to (for example) distribute Sublime Text through the App Store, you'd run into the same sorts of problems. If it's a piece of software that I reasonably trust, do I want to make that trade? Eh. Maybe. Gain some protection against potential security bugs, lose some flexibility/productivity.
The Mac App Store is an awful program. It's incredibly slow. You make a great point- I'm glad there's now a public face and hope that it's a sign Apple is taking the issue seriously.
These sorts of things happen when you download your whole program's page layout off the internet. How idiotic would it look if you pulled up a playlist view in iTunes and everything turned into an unstyled HTML bulleted list?
Don't have the computer with that screenshot handy, but I can post it later.
cmd r usually does the trick (or store -> reload page in the menu).
If Apple rewrote Finder to display folder contents as a web view so that they could reuse a frontend between icloud.com and local file management, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised. Working in the Finder? iCloud Drive is a web view! Heck, let's use that to display the local filesystem too! Back it with a server on localhost that examines directory contents and generates a webpage to pass to the Finder! Code reuse! Efficient development! Future benefits from optimizations to webkit that will still be slower than the native software it replaced!
Even better, you can do away with all that WebDAV and SMB crap! When you want to browse files on another Mac, its filesystem webserver can generate the folder listings and serve them over HTTP with file downloads over WebRTC when you open something! It's the future! HFS2, all read/write actions to be handled with AJAX passing JSON objects back and forth.
Coming soon in OS 10.13, you saw it here first.
I might be slightly annoyed at the recent direction of "everything is webpages" software development. Ah well.
Only have the "Check for Updates" screen, but I have to assume the same can happen in any section of the store.
If this were built as a native app (or even cached the CSS for common pages), you'd at least get a usable layout, even if your connection sucks too much to get images or even download software.
It's a joke as-is. You get the "there are 5 updates" badge on your dock icon, the store app knows what the updates are, but can't display the list properly without a connection to the internet.
That's effectively the iTunes Music Store (well, and App Store and all the other stuff they sell). I have seen HTTP error codes instead of page listings and rendering issues.
What may seem insane to you may make perfect sense to someone else. Engineering is about tradeoffs after all. In this case I suppose they wanted the flexibility to vary the layout dynamically, although in this case for some reason it failed to load.
These are things that got ironed out years ago on iOS, but I've not seen major improvements to the Mac App Store app since it was released nearly five years ago. If anything, it's gotten worse with subsequent releases of OSX.
There's absolutely no defending how bad of an app the App Store is...
(Yes, not all of these things were invented there, but Apple became the steward of them.)
The Mac App Store is just a distribution channel and should not hold anyone back if they seriously think they have a product of value.
Even if they improve the Mac App store the rationale for even having it wont change much and so some of the same issues will still prevail IMO.
You will still only be featured if you either know someone or use some of their latest features/libraries.
You will still not be able to do a lot of things because of Sandbox.
You will not be able to reach the majority of target market (Google is your friend there)
And there are plenty of other great solutions for distribution out there.
Just my five cents.
P.S. If you are serious about developing for the Mac but don't have a project. Contact me I am expanding my product line and could use a good osx dev.
I still have a very popular OS X app and I don't distribute it through the App Store at all (primarily because it works on OS X, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD). This is a bit of freedom for me as I can do interesting things to gain functionality that the App Store would deny.
Optically, Cue has been peculiar in the last year. The night before the keynote introducing Apple Music, he was photographed at a basketball game. The keynote was a disaster: he was easily the least polished presenter; the segments didn't flow together; he stumbled a few times; he did awful dad dancing and cracked jokes which folks didn't laugh at; Drake (?) and Jimmy Iovine had clearly not told anyone what they were going to say.
The product has not been a smash hit success, either. There was so much heat over how bad it was that some of Apple's best-known cheerleaders in the press and blogs were battering it for being unusable and buggy.
This is a logical clipping of Cue's wings. Apple Music + Beats 1 are a significantly different challenge to iTunes which was buoyed by rapid expansion of a category (iPod -- which lest we forget forced Amazon to have a product page for "non-iPod MP3 players") and a low threshold to entry. Apple Music is a wartime product competing against Spotify's headstart.
Schiller has for years been better at courting developers. He's more at ease scaling from macro perspectives on Apple's philosophy down to nerding out over software.
He had negotiated some great deals back in the day, but the music world changed and he wasn't making progress at negotiating (partly due to his past success, labels didn't want Apple to continue to have so much power). Cue not being able to make a deal is why Apple bought Beats for $3B and gained access to its streaming deal. Tough spot to be in and I think it would have happened the same way regardless of who was negotiating (scrappy iPod era Apple and current iPhone behemoth Apple are radically different negotiating partners).
Apple's reliance on the iCloud infrastructure is increasing with every new product they roll out. And there is the recent purchase of FoundationDB to manage and integrate as well as dealing with the increasing scalability and stability issues. It does make sense to have some focus there.
Years ago I used to download new iOS apps all the time, I rarely do any more. Every time I go on the store all I see is junk apps loaded with in app purchase traps.