Why aren't the most useful Mac apps on the App Store? | Hacker News Reader

Why aren't the most useful Mac apps on the App Store?

alinpanaitiu.com

73 pointsstalfosknight30 comments

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Not directly a comment on the article, but the author’s app Lunar looks very impressive:

https://lunar.fyi/

I love the ability to add an external light sensor to provide adaptive brightness to external displays!

The name is a bit unfortunate. I assume it’s no relation to “Luna Display” but has some scope for confusion there…

https://github.com/MonitorControl/MonitorControl

This is an alternative which is more macOS like design wise. I first used lunar but I find the design horrible.

Ah yes, I’ve used MonitorControl and it’s excellent.

Apple should give the author a chunk of cash and build it into macOS.

If they wanted they would get an intern to rebuild it. They did similar with the Apple Watch keyboard

Oh man.. I wasn’t aware the design is that bad.

When I launched M1 support in Lunar, István Tóth which was using Lunar at the moment, dedicated a lot of his time to port Lunar’s solution into MonitorControl.

He also created the Big Sur-esque native redesign that’s currently present in MC. I loved it and was kinda envious on it, Lunar’s QuickActions menu was always kinda useless.

I tried to adapt István’s UI choices to Lunar’s style in Lunar 5 but I’m still not getting close to a native design. I’ll keep this for now as a lot of people liked it and bought a license because of it.

I guess it's a good thing to have options especially in terms of design, since it's a taste after all.

Yes, it’s unfortunate. I wasn’t aware of Luna Display when I launched Lunar in 2017.

I still get emails from people calling my app Luna Display, although they clearly use and have an issue with Lunar.

It's because the developers don't want to deal with apples b****.

30% is a lot out of your bottom line.

I really can't figure out where all the App Store money are going.

I'm selling Lunar on Paddle and the average transaction there is $19.21 (from the $23 baseline price). So they're taking on average 16.47% and that's including VAT, sales tax, credit card royalties and service fee.

On the App Store, even with the Small Business program where the tax is only 15%, I'm losing about 25.63% from the sales each month (still including VAT, currency exchange losses, store fee etc.)

Oh and I also have to pay taxes for this income to my country's government. That's another 10% off the year's income + 15% mandatory health insurance and 15% pension fund.

> I really can't figure out where all the App Store money are going.

The money is going towards profits. Apple's App Store profit margin is ~80% and it increases every year[1]:

> Barnes calculated that the App Store had hefty profit margins, which increased to 78% in 2019, up from 75% in 2018, and generated $22 billion in commissions for Apple last year.

[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-profitable-is-apples-a...

It's the same "licensing" business model as video game consoles, with similar commissions to Nintendo's eShop, etc..

Unsurprisingly, the bulk of App Store revenue is from games.

I don't see Nintendo (or Apple) authorizing alternative game stores on their handhelds any time soon.

Even Nintendo allows you to buy Nintendo games at a store not owned by Nintendo. I'm not sure how the commissions break down but you can still buy digital Nintendo games at other stores like Amazon, Humble Bundle, Wal-mart etc. And of course physical options are still a thing and Nintendo doesn't see a dime if I buy game off some dude on Craigslist. I can't get anything off the Apple App Store without going through Apple.

Apple doesn't make most of their revenue from selling games. It's selling microtransactions in games. They are basically skimming off a few thousand digital casinos at this point.

What makes this even more egregious is that it isn't 30% of profits that Apple seeks as rent, but 30% of all revenue. A 15% to 30% rent on all revenue automatically makes many businesses completely infeasible, especially those with low margins. The end result is that market innovation and efficiency are suppressed so that Apple can turn an ~80% profit margin[1] via the App Store at the expense of new and small businesses.

[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-profitable-is-apples-a...

purely anecdotal but i've never been able to code any mac apps because i refuse to create an icloud account (which means i can't access the mac app store to download xcode to work on obj-c).

its not just an apple thing. never been able to program c# for the same reason. any time there's some sort of account signup or license needed to code something, i refuse to participate.

python, golang, rust, etc. don't have any stupid hurdles to overcome so those are technologies i use.

I played around with the login flow of Visual Studio some time ago and it didnt seem to pin certificates so a simple mitmproxy plugin should help avoid logging in.

Never got around to making it though so there might be some pitfalls.

I'm not sure if this still works with newer VS versions, but for VS 2017 I stumbled across somebody explaining how the 30 days trial period was stored in the registry and wrote a little program for that process.

lol thats nice. Another thing I experimented with is downloading one of their dev VMs that supposed to expire but lie about the system clock and never connect it to the internet. It's tedious but works

Regarding C#, anyone can just download VS Code [0] without any login/signup. But you don’t even need that…

The .NET SDK is readily available as a standalone download for almost all platforms now [1] which you can use to just compile on the command line and use any editor you like.

JetBrains Rider EAP is free to use I believe if you want a full IDE without needing to login (edit: it seems the EAP program is opened and closed at specific times [3])

I can’t remember if Visual Studio Community edition requires a login or not, but frankly even as a full time .NET developer I barely go near Visual Studio these days.

Overall the ecosystem is a little more open and dare I say “friendly” than Apple’s!

[0] https://code.visualstudio.com/download

[1] https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download

[3] https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/nextversion/

brew install dotnet-sdk

Install Vs Code and the C# plugin and you're in the game.

As long as you have an Apple ID (developer account), you can download Xcode from developer.apple.com (no store), though it is a few clicks to find where they bury release-quality app downloads.

You can pull the .NET Core libs and SDK from your favorite Linux package managers. .NET Core will still phone home[1], though. There's also the free and open source Mono runtime for C#.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/64570141

Just a minor aside but

> Doing this reminded me of the days I worked with Rust, and how wonderfully impossible a task like this would be. I don’t think I’m touching it again, I like my global atomic booleans.

Global atomics are perfectly possible in Rust.

  static R_CMD: AtomicBool = AtomicBool::new(false);

Yes I haven’t touched Rust in a while. When I was working on an embedded project with it, Atomic Booleans weren’t so easily available from what I remember.

Because distributing software on the App Store is a raw deal.

All the points are good, but I think the key one is that Mac apps don’t need to be distributed through the store. MacOS is inherently less secure than ios due to it being much less locked down, but for app devs that does mean they can use cheaper payment processors - which is essentially what the Mac App Store is.

The article talks a lot about the difficulty in sandboxing utility class applications but there are issues with other apps as well. Afaik the Mac App Store matches the iOS App Store in not allow xpc services which means even if you do want to sandbox, you have to have a single executable with every necessary entitlement. You can’t for instance have a separate networking service that is the only piece with network entitlements, etc.

So sandboxing hurts in both ways. What fun :)

Remember just a couple of years ago when you could get root access on a locked device without any kind of password [1]

Honestly I’m not that convinced iOS is that much better. It’s reputation is so much better than it should be. The number of emergency patches I’ve seen out of them the past few years for many many trivial bugs is amazing.

Just this morning I was reading a post from a Chrome engineer talking about how the fundamental architecture of their security is built around a decision that nobody else has thought of as a good time for many years. [2] It’s only going to get worse over time.

Then to make matters worse they have managed to get an absolutely horrible relationship with the security community [3] who now seem to have zero interest in helping them meaning that the main external groups left looking at their security are those who are going to put them on the black market.

Prior to that researchers were finding so many bugs that the legit market rate for 0days fell well below Android. [4]

I ditched my Mac in 2020 and I’m currently waiting for my current iPhone to no longer be up to the task and I’m officially done with Apple after 10 years of nothing but.

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/information-tec...

[2] https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/09/apple-b...

[4] https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/information-tec...

I wish there was a Swift framework that would implement all the App Store goodies, so I wouldn’t have had to write this article in the first place.

The framework could be configured using Paddle vendor/product IDs, Sentry DSN, Sparkle appcast and would provide the following:

    * Free trials and a one time purchase for a license using Paddle
    * Error reporting using Sentry
    * Auto updating using Sparkle

But now you also need a website to host the appcast, presentation page and DMG downloads, and a custom process for signing the binaries and generating the appcast.

I guess you could forget about the ratings and reviews since they’re mostly just an annoyance for both the user and the developer. Analytics could be useful but maybe not worth the effort.

Although it’s now starting to sound more like we need an external App Store instead of a simple framework.

Setapp is promising but I couldn’t get a response when I contacted them about publishing rcmd, and they simply refused Lunar but accepted a cheaper competitor called DisplayBuddy a few weeks later.

I’m not sure anymore how a good solution should look like, but it would clearly be a godsend for macOS devs since so many good features are impossible in the sandbox.

This blog post reads a lot like the lunar app. Overly complicated but very pretty.

Thanks for the compliment, I guess :)

I wish I could have kept the simplicity of Lunar 1.0 (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/lunar-5) but the monitor controlling domain is full of edge cases.

When you also add some automation like brightness syncing and support for external light sensors, you get what Lunar is at the moment.

oh well, at least it’s pretty

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