App Store for Mac OS X to come? | Hacker News Reader

App Store for Mac OS X to come?

rixstep.com

13 pointsphilf14 comments

I wonder how many of the people that are upset here, own an iPhone. My guess would be, a lot. Why do people think it's ok on the iPhone (which i assume they think, because they bought it in the first place), but are upset when such things would come to OS X?

I think, this blog entry is not based on real information, but i think it would be in the spirit of Steve Jobs. So, i'd not be as surprised as most people, i guess.

All hail to more censorship, closed systems and external control!

I think an App Store for OS X would be an excellent idea. One of the main reasons I used to port my games to OS X was that promotion on Apple's website would bring in $20k+, well worth the cost of a port. An App Store would only increase the incentive develop for OS X.

A mandatory App Store, like this article suggests? Like younata said, that would be insane.

A mandatory app store for OSX would be a slap in the face for Valve's Steam platform. I'm not so sure Apple would be ok with Valve being the major supplier of games on the OSX in the near future (which could very well happen).

I'd actually like to see desktop app stores become popular. We've had them in the Linux world for years, though there's no mechanism for payment. Ninite gets us partway there on Windows, but it's still crude compared to apt.

I can't imagine any desktop OS vendor locking down the system though.

Actually Ubuntu already has features for installing third-party packages that could be easily monetised (currently packages have to handle their own licensing sales) the problem there is that it would run into some cultural opposition.

In fact looking at http://www.ubuntu.com/partners/ISV it appears as though it's already possible for commercial software to be distributed and updated through Software Update; the only thing that's missing is to add a payment method so that sales could be done that way as well.

It's not all that far fetched in one form or another. If we started to see a significant amount of malware for OSX I bet Apple would strongly consider it. I look at the issue with Mcaffee last week, and the Microsoft BSOD inducing update on infected machines earlier this year, as an untenable situation. Computers can't just stop working randomly or become exploited this easily. I would hope we could find a better solution but if open platforms continue to be plagued by these problems it's almost inevitable we'll see a shift towards locked down platforms in the future. We've already seen Microsoft move in this direction carefully with WHQL certified drivers. Who knows? In 5-10 years Linux might be the only open platform left. It's only going to take one major catastrophe to put the pressure on Microsoft, Apple, etc to lock down. Add in some government saber rattling and fear over "cyber warfare" and it's a done deal.

iPad/iPhone/iPod touch are mainly content consumption devices, that is why Apple locks them down. So even the most technologically ignorant person can use them worry free and not end up with all the issues like they've had with Windows and even sometimes OSX machines.

OSX machines are REAL computers that let you do whatever you want. And OSX is mature, you won't be seeing many changes to it besides those that trickle up from kernel optimizations that occur on the iPhoneOS platform (Apple has moved many devs over from OSX to iPhoneOS).

An app store may be in the cards for OSX, but app lock out (locking out anything except app store apps) is not going to happen. If Apple did something like this, it would kill a large portion of their creative, scientific and development market. It will just be an easy application distribution system for those who want to a more convenient way to buy software (and for developers who are willing to give Apple a cut for this convenience).

As long as they don't lock things just like the iPhone, and I'm sure it's quite impossible. Because we can run official developer tools on the Mac.

Mac is the only device left that we could tinker without paying contracts, etc.

No software will be able to run on Mac OS X 10.7 without being approved and signed by Apple, Inc.

Remember when we used to own our computers?

Time to sell my Apple stock and donate the money to a Linux distro.

Well, it might work for them if the admission rules were less strict than in the mobile App Store.

And the mobile App Store turned out to be very profitable.

Apple realizes that if that were to happen, osx would die. It's probably FUD purported by the anti-apple campaign.

I really hope so. Over the years I got to really like the combination of really nice hardware, friendly GUI, staying-out-of the way system combined with a real Unix in the backend. I wouldn't know what to go to if Apple really were this crazy.

Linux comes to mind, but then I would still have to move away from the slick hardware (that just works as opposed to a lot of not-quite-working PC hardware I came accross over time).

Please, Apple, don't go there.

> Linux comes to mind, but then I would still have to move away from the slick hardware

Linux works pretty well on most Macs, so you could have both. ;-) The main problem is that most Linux GUIs aren't designed for a one-button mouse. You can avoid that somewhat if you map some sort of keystroke to right-click (for some reason, f12 is common), or use a more text-heavy environment.

Yeah, I realize it'd be weird to buy a MacBook just to run xmonad on it, but they really are nice physical machines, as far as laptops go.

The funny part are the comments already posted that actually take this satirical article seriously.

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