Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else reluctant to buy through the Mac App store because of the perceived lack of uptake? For example, I've been a longtime owner of a Transmit license...it's worked for years now. If I don't keep up with OS X releases, I can still download past binaries and use the key (within a limit...for example, Transmit 3 owners were required to upgrade to 4.x). But what if the developer decides that it's not worth maintaining the binary on Transmit? Do you get a license key for the App store purchase? From my perception, once you buy into the App store, you're bound to its limited upgrade routine. This has bitten me plenty of times on iOS, where the developer doesn't feel like keeping up with iOS upgrades, leaving you with broken apps with no ability to get them working again. I'm not talking about fly-by-night developers, but AAA developers like Capcom.

The publisher of Transmit will likely do the right thing. See another title of theirs, Coda:

http://www.panic.com/blog/introducing-coda-2-5/

Other publishers have done the same thing. (with regard to upgrade pricing, usually, but I'd assume a similar approach to avoid backlash if they left the MAS) However, your concern still stands, as not everyone will do that.

nah, I figure it's not going anywhere, and a lot of the software I bought using homegrown licensing schemes I ended up not using, since it's just too much of a pain in the ass to try to hunt up the licenses and restore everything on a new computer.

edit: i do wish apple would relax the sandbox strictness a bit and other editor review criteria so it was a more attractive alternative to self-publishing.

I think Apple just needs to review their policy and add another entitlement "Entire Current User Folder ~/" to allow apps that traditionally cannot be sandboxed. I am sure they want us to re-imagine a way for FTP apps to work, but I don't want to change my workflow. I want to be able to browse any folder on my Mac on the left pane. So I won't buy the Mac App Store version. I fully agree with Panic and why they bailed out.

sounds v. reasonable to me. if you don't have devs like panic onboard, you've got a problem, imo.

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