Yes, everything installed differently, updated differently, and maintaining currency across a large application set was unreasonable without third party subscriptions like “Mac Update”! It was crazy.
And yet, it seems majority of HN wants to rewind from the App Store which was created as to assist users and devs with that problem.
App Store is fine, as long as it's not the only way to the platform. If it's a curated catalog of apps + a hosting service + payment processing for those developers who want it, there's no problem with it existing. There is, however, a problem with how Apple keeps tightening its grip lately, and how current versions of macOS with default settings treat apps that haven't been vetted by Apple as if they're radioactive. That's still better than iOS, which outright refuses to run anything that isn't signed by Apple, but this overall direction is still troubling.
I deal with this with several dozen other tools on the Mac each using random store and key schemes. Lately I throw in the towel and switch to inferior tools in the app store if I can’t dig up the secret codes to the legacy hoops their devs want me to jump through. Charge me 30% more, no problem, just stop making me waste my time for things that are now solved problems.
This overall simplification and end-to-end trusted curation direction is a minority but well heeled part of the market (happy to spend money on apps if it doesn’t waste their time), and a sort of grand experiment in what users want. If users want a free for all, the majority of the market is still buying those handsets. If not, the option to have a handheld appliance should be available to those who want it.
Seems a shame to appeal to regulation to stomp on user choice where customers speak with their wallets that “please don’t make me think”.
Imagine if windows (or MacOS) had a control panel where you could paste "Update subscription URLs", and uses crypto to verify licenses (optionally), and implemented binary diffs and what not, and provided a standard operating system component for navigating, purchasing, and installing/updating software?
They were SO CLOSE with add/remove Programs, and it never went all the way.
IIRC there is the Install-Package Powershell commandlet that might almost be that? But, I think it's still locked to Microsoft's store.
I imagine that being completely unusable for a lot of people, and a total disaster of social engineering and malware exploitation.
The real win is empowering developers to reliably communicate these updates to users, and make it simple to update, w/o inundating the user's system tray with 5 different bespoke updaters that act out in different ways.
It’s trivial to suggest a mechanism for consolidating update notifications. That’s a solved problem.
On its own, it does nothing to solve the trust problem.
I don't know much about the money/license part UX because I've never paid for software myself. But developers probably won't want to delegate licensing to the OS because this would make it all too easy to crack — it would only take one very simple patch to disable license checks altogether system-wide.
edit: Sparkle already uses a standardized feed format (https://sparkle-project.org/documentation/publishing/). So basically the only thing that's left is to move the update checking and installation logic to the OS as opposed to every app containing a copy of it.
Make that API call pop up a dialog or something to ask the user for consent.
It's like governments. It can be a surveillance state ruled by a dictator where everything is regulated and everyone is spied on for the sake of "safety". Or it can be something that offers all the freedom you could possibly want, including the freedom to shoot yourself into the foot, both literally and metaphorically.
When I was younger, I would probably have loved an Android phone but my 2 attempts with Android phones (like the Nexus) recently were terrible compared to my iPhone. I was constantly messing with things to try and get them working, I had to stop tasks and apps constantly in the app manager (and even had to download a different app manager), and was constantly waiting for things. Now, I care more about just being able to pick up my phone and know that it works to do what I want to do at any given point. I'm done messing with things.
I'm a strong believer, however, in making sure the user has visibility and control into it, so both methods (manually add/remote/check status & API) ought to be available.
I suspect the reason something like this hasn't been done is that it's actually a heck of a lot harder than you think.
And given Microsoft's Monopoly nonsense in the 90's they probably did not have the stomach to wipe all the bespoke installer generator products off the map in one stroke.
The difficulty isn't technical, it's social, if you build a third party store you have something like Homebrew or Cocoa. It works, but it's never going to be used by the majority of users.
Also the Mac App Store updating system is just damned terrible compared to the Sparkle updater. The only advantage it has is that it is centralized, but I have found it to be one of the slowest and buggiest parts of using the Mac App Store.
Best of all, when you purchased software it went directly to the developer instead of a rent-seeking middle-man like Apple or Google. Even security was better, because you weren’t forced to connect your computer to the Internet to use it. Yes, I’d say those days were an improvement over what we have now!
Well, to be fair the App Store isn’t really a viable solution to these problems to a fair bit of applications. The sandbox requirement makes a large portion of ‘useful’ apps unable in the App Store.
Looks like most non-App Store apps use Sparkle[0] these days though, so it’s much better than before.
Sherlock, Sparkle, Growl, if you demonstrate a gap in what should be built in, Apple will admit it and fill it in.
This used to be true, but every new release adds mechanisms to securely enable more capabilities.
What examples are you thinking of that still can’t be done?
> The sandbox requirement makes a large portion of ‘useful’ apps unable in the App Store.
I don’t think this is true any longer.
It’s definitely not the majority of HN.
You’ll notice sentiment varies a lot from thread to thread.