- Apple does not disclose to you who bought your app.
- There is no mechanism to make paid updates possible. If you want to release a big update and get paid you need to release a new app. There is no way to contact current users and offer them an inexpensive update.
Are these two issues still true of the MacOS App Store?
Protecting purchasers privacy is a great customer benefit, which also helps increase developer sales. For example, App Store customers never have to worry about being spammed by some developer they bought an app from.
You can still find out who is using your apps, just ask them within the app. They may not tell you, but again that’s a happy customers right.
If only Amazon was like this. I get inundated with emails from sellers on AMZN asking/suggesting/begging for me to review their product. This continues for months after purchase.
>You can still find out who is using your apps, just ask them within the app.
This is also annoying AF. "Please rate our app on the app store" right the middle of me trying to do something. If they timed it for right at launch before starting anything, maybe I'd be less irritated, but probably not. Trust me, my talking to my acquaintances carries a lot more weight than a review from some random person on the internet. I blame the review gaming system from Amazon/Yelp type of places that make reviews an no-go for me.
You buy generic of a well-sold product id and sell it at a discount. Your inventory goes to the top of the stack and sells through.
You get the full name address and contact info of everyone interested. This can be combined with data broker info to assemble galaxies around these individuals who can then be remarketed to in uncountable ways.
This is against the terms of service of course, but so was keeping Facebook user profile data of people who installed your apps back in the day.
There’s no way to police the behavior and it’s open season.
You can do this on just about any product and if you go into weird niches you can find very particular types of folks.
Unfortunately, without asking for reviews, an app won't get many, and reviews on the app store make a way bigger difference to sales than you'd think. Most developers I know don't want to nag people for a review, but incentives are such that it's important to their bottom line to do so.
The good news is that they can be disabled altogether for apps using the system API. Open the Mac App Store app, go to Preferences, and there's an "In-App Ratings & Reviews" box you can uncheck. There's a similar option on iOS somewhere too.
You can ask people for their email, name, etc. within the App itself without simultaneously begging for ratings on the app store.
App registration is what people used to do in the era of shrink-wrap software, bought in brick and mortar stores.
If you stop paying the Apple developer fee, maybe because you're not generating any revenue anymore or you switched to some other distribution system, users who have paid your app won't be able to download it again. The app won't be uninstalled from their machines but it will completely disappear from the MAS and the list of purchased apps.
There's nothing you can do to help them because you won't be able to know which users have already bought your app. What if you wanted to help your users switch to your new distribution system, or give them a discount for the new version (distributed outside the MAS)?
This is true, but if you make a backup of the app while you still have it and then put it on a new machine, Apple will continue to authorize the app.
I just got a new M1 machine and moved my Mac App Store version of Paw over to it. Paw removed themselves from the App Store 5 or 6 years ago (?), yet I continue to use it and put it on my new computers.
There doesn't seem to be a difference between this and a developer removing a product from their own website and declaring it EOL. Or not declaring EOL, just removing it.
If you downloaded it, you can keep installing it. But maybe the developer found that there were significant bugs that they didn't want to or couldn't fix. Or that the App Store wasn't a profitable delivery mechanism for them.
Maybe you're missing that the customer didn't buy the app from the developer, it bought it from Apple.
If you buy an LG TV from Best Buy and then LG decides to stop selling to them, does that mean Best Buy stops having any responsibilities towards its customer (you)?
> There doesn't seem to be a difference between this and a developer removing a product from their own website and declaring it EOL. Or not declaring EOL, just removing it.
That's exactly the problem.
Moving your product to a different distribution system is not declaring it EOL.
> If a developer chooses to remove their product from the App Store, what is Apple supposed to do about it?
This is a bullshit statement that people have been making for years.
They've been slowly making it more and more difficult for people to install apps outside of the app store on the macOS. The latest version of macOS has already crippled application firewalls, allowing Apple authorised code special privileges to bypass any firewall / VPN to access the internet, even if the user wants to block them. Apple ARM processors further limit what OS you can run on it, even with virtualisation, without needing Apple's permission.
All these criticisms of losing more and more control of your mac are genuine and valid - and is indicative of their aims to turn the macOS platform into a more closed system like ios. (You have to be a really naive Apple fan boi to believe that they do not want to increase their billion dollar+ profit margin by converting the macOS to a closed system like ios. And yes, the app store only works because ios is a closed system with Apple dictating how - and what - you can install on it).
If you can't pay that because of low revenue, then there's no reason to go chasing/helping customers who bought via the app store since the never generated enough revenue in the first place.
Now if you're just about to switch to a new distribution system, not because of revenue issues, then you maintain your developer fee and publish one last update which allows paid users to register their versions in the new system.
How does that follow? An individual customer is not responsible for the commercial viability of the app, in order to continue to receive a service they have already paid for. In this case the service is permanent access to the last version of the app, even if the developer is no longer able to support it.
What's being discussed is that you have to maintain your app-store presence in order to help them migrate to your new distribution system.
If you're doing that because of low revenue.... just abandon the low revenue customers.
I understood the pragmatism of the advice. I'm just saying there is an ethical obligation to users, which really should be on Apple to continue to allow users to download the version of the app they have bought.
Apple should allow it, especially since they're the ones who jostled to become a middleman to 'protect' their users.
This is a feature.
The paid update thing is a bit of a challenge on both sides; it does seem like someone should have come up with a better way to do this.
So no, this isn't a feasible solution, unfortunately.
I use Feedly as the source and read with NetNewsWire on my iPad. There's a NetNewsWire client for the Mac that now supports Feedly but it doesn't support vi commands for quickly paging through articles. I don't use a keyboard on my iPad so it's fine that it's different than the Mac.
I discovered someone had implemented a nice workaround for this. Pixelmator IIRC.
They offered the old and new releases as a bundle, so anyone who had already purchased the old version could finish the bundle for a lower price.
Steve Jobs, for all his failings, made for an excellent voice of the customer. He had a keen sense for what made a good consumer product, and I wonder whether Apple would benefit an executive ombudsman role like that to help inform strategic resource decisions.
As a user, I am happy when I can avoid leaving PII in a developper’s database. It might suck for those who are honest and take security seriously, but there have been just too many data breaches.
Can’t argue with your other point.
Why should they?
That's sort of their whole deal lately: to prevent third-parties from snooping anything about users unless the users choose to divulge any information.
Or do "In App Purchases" not really allow for deploying new code and features?
This is really something the store should handle.
I think I've seen a workaround of offering the old and new versions as a bundle? That's pretty ugly, though.
Any architectural refactorings aren't compatible with that model, so you'd have to launch MyApp2019 and MyApp2020, and hope Apple lets you do that.
What legitimate interest do you have in processing that information? Apple needs it for billing and to know who owns which apps.
As you would no longer need it for those reasons, for which reasons do you need it?
GDPR requires that you have a legitimate interest before collecting PII so this is an important question.
Maybe because it's none of your business?
Sure there is! Quite a few apps are delivered as separate numbered versions, like Acorn 4, Acorn 5, Acorn 6, Textual 7 etc.
That's how software used to work a millenia ago. Yearly updates that you would buy separately should you chose to.
Most of the time I can still download older versions even if they're not listed on the App Store.