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Comment by anon1385 | Hacker News Reader

The MAS model means you are getting crippled applications with vastly reduced capability. The article talks about things like uTorrent and VLC. These kinds of apps are impossible in the MAS.

MAS apps can also stop running at any time if the DRM checks suddenly fail (e.g. if a certificate expires).

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You're correct about MAS apps stopping when the certificate expires. Several of my purchased MAS apps were broken to the point of being unusable when Apple's MAS certificate expired [1]. It happened in mid November 2015, but Apple didn't completely fix it until the end of January 2016 [2].

[1] http://www.macrumors.com/2015/11/12/mac-app-store-apps-damag...

[2] https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT205702

You're right. When we found out the potential for this we removed all the checks and our apps are effectively free to download. We only make money through in-app purchases and advertising. it would be a piss-poor user experience if the app would suddenly crash upon launch because some certificate expired.

But aren't you still using the certificate to validate the receipt to find out which in-app purchases have been made?

If so, wouldn't you have to validate receipts against a new certificate once the old one expires?

Once the receipts for in-app purchases are validated, they don't need to be validated again every time. It's true that people wouldn't be able to make new in-app purchases (unless we have another payment processor as a backup). But at least their app will WORK! And we'll be able to communicate to them how to refresh the certificate and be able to make in-app purchases.

uTorrent and VLC could definitely be MAS apps... the limitation of MAS are not significant for uTorrent or VLC. Application that need elevated privileges, or that needs to access/"pilot" other apps or needs to write everywhere in the filesystem (without user selecting the directory) are...

I don't think any of those apply to VLC or uTorrent... The main problem of MAS (for app that don't need what above) is the app store app in itself (it's garbage) and the review time (that hit back anytime you need to patch something fast)... otherwise the model it's not bad per se...

VLC does all sorts of things that are prohibited by the MAS. For a start you wouldn't be able to open a video file and have VLC automatically pick up an adjacent subtitles file.

A lead VLC dev listed a bunch of the issues here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7039737

I agree about the store app itself being awful

Even for a simple text editor, AFAIK you can't continually monitor a directory for changes (FSEvents), so it's hopeless.

How does Xcode work to manage its unadorned project folders, anyway? (I mean, I know it offers you that component that elevates and escapes the sandbox and sprays stuff into /Developer, but Xcode still works if you decline to install that.)

Setting Xcode aside, though, the idiomatic "modern OSX" model seems to be one where GUI apps have to own all the files they interact with, usually clumping them together into media-typed document bundle folders. (Xcode's mechanism wouldn't be nearly as inexplicable if the rest of the files lived inside the .xcodeproj.)

An idiomatic OSX text editor app would thus, naively, probably have to be quite crippled: the GUI app would have to simply copy your repo into a project document, and make all its edits in there. No ability to watch for git-initiated changes to the source dir or anything.

But I think there is still a way to idiomatically support the Unix philosophy of "small components, working together against shared files" in modern OSX. You just can't rely solely on GUI apps to enable it. Instead, you need a separate CLI component that "lives in" the un-sandboxed Unix world to be the manager of the Unix-style integration.

Imagine the text editor working on its project bundle, and then a separate CLI component sitting there and just monitoring both the project bundle, and the git working directory—and bidirectionally syncing between them. The sandboxed app still gets to be a sandboxed app, and "works" on its own when the component isn't installed. The component—brought in from outside the MAS, maybe through e.g. Homebrew—just makes extra magic happen.

I'm unsure why more MAS apps aren't designed like this, honestly. It's perfectly sensible for Development apps, at the very least; we all install Homebrew anyway.

Xcode doesn't follow the rules that 3rd party apps must follow. It's not possible for a 3rd party to distribute an app like Xcode through the app store.

Technical limitations aside, uTorrent can never be a MAS app because Apple would never approve it.

The parent was speaking of software that does fit within the MAS model. It seems disingenuous to start talking about software that doesn't as a counterpoint.

OP said "these apps" in reply to an article that mostly talks about apps that aren't possible (or would become extremely clumsy to use) through the MAS (VLC[0], uTorrent[1], Hopper, Sequel Pro, Sketch[1])

A lot of apps violate the MAS limitations in ways people don't realise. There are people in this thread claiming that VLC would fit within the MAS model even though it can't (at least not without ditching a lot of features).

Even if an app fits inside the limitations today, it may not in the future, and migrating away from the MAS is a huge hassle. It's also possible for the limitations to change so apps that are allowed now may not be in the future meaning those apps can't be updated at all, which is something that has already happened.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7039737

[1] as far as I know torrent apps are banned from the store

[2] http://blog.sketchapp.com/post/134322691555/leaving-the-mac-...

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