OP here, happy to answer any questions. I know Apple gets a lot of well-deserved flack, but for a small-time dev like me, them taking a 15% cut makes things a lot simpler for me.
I completely agree with your direction, having Apple take the responsibility to safeguard user data makes things much easier.
For better or worse Apple can do no wrong and the eyes of its customers, so even if they did somehow get hacked, you wouldn't have hundreds of angry emails headed your way.
I personally really do love the walled garden of owning a Mac, when I'm working on a song or music video, I just want it to work using final cut and logic. If I really feel like compiling the Linux kernel from scratch, I have a PC for that
It's about choice and loss of control / ownership of our device. Apple app store can exist. But they absolutely shouldn't FORCE us developers and users to use it.
It's OP's side project; its their decision as to how they choose to spend their time and energy, what trade-offs are involved with each option, and what's most important to them.
OP owes the world, outside of their paying customers, nothing.
Don't let the downvotes discourage you from speaking up again on this. OP is indeed being very shortsighted as a developer by supporting the app store.
It's demonstrative of the knee-jerk reactions from people who see the mere mention of the words 'Apple' or "App Store" and immediately come to piss all over everybody's cereal without actually knowing the full story.
All I see are baseless assumptions coupled with a condescending, know-it-all tone from those unwilling to engage with either OP's points, more prone to redefine the discussion to allow their soapboxing. Worse, it's delivered with a tone that screams "oh, the silly thing, why didn't they come to me first? I could have told them better!".
Pardon the rant but it gets tiresome in every damn thread about anything vaguely Apple-related.
If they'd open up their platforms, they'd get praised. Instead, they make everything worse.
They have tremendous influence and it strongly affects the world. Through that influence, they ruined the openess of mp3 players, GUIs, and then cellphones. Now the writing is on the wall: personal computers are next.
I'm happy for you to care about this as much as you want. It doesn't make the basically ignoring all the OP wrote in their article for the sake of soapboxing any more tolerable.
The criticism is well intentioned and you are ignoring that we all want it to continue to be that way!
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 are genuine and valid - that it aims to turn the macOS platform into a more closed system like ios.
On the consumer side I also would prefer 15% higher pricing than to have to deal with various different payment forms as well as the difficulty of keeping track of and canceling various subscriptions.
Yeah, same here. And even when it's a processor I know like Stripe, Square, or Shopify, I don't really trust those companies very much. I've gotten spam, other people's receipts, etc. from them and their tech support is horrible for the consumer. And if they aren't a name I know like one of the above, I'm really leery of giving them my email and credit card info!
Same here. The last time I bought software that wasn't thru a well known store or processor I ended up with some fraudulent purchases on my next credit card bill[0]. Since then, I'll never do that again.
[0] - Thankfully my bank handled this without issue.
While I am skeptical of cryptocurrencies, more and more often I catch myself thinking: I wish this seller just accepted bitcoin or something. I want to make a transaction and be done with it. I don’t want my email and credit card number end up anywhere long term.
There was a lunch place near my work that I frequented. They used Square POS terminal, once I noticed that it somehow linked my email to my credit card, I started using cash to pay. Cash is horribly inconvenient and gross to handle, but at least once you paid you don’t need to worry about it. You can’t be hit with some unexpected charges, wait to check the transaction when posted, no possibility of data leak, no privacy concerns, etc.
Wasn't ApplePay supposed to address this? Each transaction creates a one-time-use number which is the only number the seller receives. It would no longer be valid if evilHacker(TM) tries to use that number for a fraudulent charge later.
At least in the UK, Monzo Bank gives me the ability to create and tear down virtual debit cards that I can name and use to individually identify which card I used. Each is complete with a CVC number.
It's not one time unless you want to do the setup and teardown for every purchase, but the £15 monthly fee includes phone and other insurance and the app exports your account ledger to Excel and CSV. Customer service and vanishing transactions from the app ledger have been worrying me but I was promptly put in touch with management as soon as I dusted off a smidgeon of English idiomatic equivalents to "wtf" and this seems to have been caused by Transport For London running adjustments for the daily Oyster journey payment limit (via taking a holding charge placeholder payment in the way hotels ring fence for your stay on debit cards) so the final amount is adjusted the following day to enable the 0400 end of their day.
So in 2020, in order to allow the employees to keep banker's hours and go home indecently early, they put a hold on a card so an employee can finalize the transaction the following day rather than just letting the computers handle the transaction to completion? How/Why is this still a thing? Just like why does depositing a check have a hold on it when the computer can quite easily check that the money is available for withdraw, and then move it to the depositor's account?
The entire banking industry is so ripe for re-imagining, yet their strangle hold onto the old ways is super preventative from us evolving as a species.
0400 is 4AM, not 4PM, and has nothing to do with banking hours.
4am is the cut off time between “days” for TFL (London Transit) services - if you buy a ‘day travelcard’ it is good until 4am the following day.
It is guaranteed that if you make several transactions in the same day on TFL (by swiping in/out with a contactless card - or an Oyster card - at the ticket gates), the amount paid will be capped at the value of a day travelcard. I’m quite sure no employee is involved in any of this, and computers handle it end-to-end.
Banking in the UK is actually quite reasonable - largely because companies like Monzo have pushed it forward.
It’s a constant surprise to me quite how _bad_ banking in the US is in comparison though - and most of your points seem to reflect how US banking works rather than UK banking - as indicated both by the spelling of “cheque” and the notion of using them in the first place.
Being officially "semi retired" to cover a crisis of faith in the industry after a spinal problem nearly trashed my mental composure, and because of experiencing memory problems after quitting the painkillers [0], and consequently buying into Apple for the first time since 1987, I came to this discussion expecting to find reasons why I shouldn't commit to publishing the apps I've been working on [1] via the Apple Store.
But 15% of gross?
I have been thinking it was 30 percent of gross for the longest time and I can't believe myself for getting this so wrong.
I worked in advertising sales when the industry was freaking out over losing the universal 15% gross "agency fee" [2] for a multitude of hopeless performance contracts [3] and on the other side, when I sold space for a major publisher my own commission was 15% of gross.
A good salesman is worth 15%. At least to me.
The thing that's drawing me, now far more strongly, to publishing via the store is that although vexing problems exist, this looks like the most transparent platform to my eyes because the developer community is surfacing the issues and not burying problems with FUD and MVP-speak. Credit obviously to the community above all. But even giants struggle with enabling any community.
[0] Gabapentin. 2016: "NOT addictive don't worry John." 2019:"can I have you signature and ID?" - the UK government classified Gabapentin Schedule A along with heroin and cocaine. 8 months of dystopia and another 5 remembering how to think later the top "user reviews" found in the wild still praise Gabapentin to high heaven. Yes it does temporary wonders for concentration. I never took my full dose which was the minimum adult dose and broke regime regularly for at least two weeks a time and I don't even know how to describe the 8 months of "hell" because they were just too messed up. Gabapentin probably has amazing off label potential but now it's scheduled forget about intelligent prescribing.
[1] deep into the data structures for a advertising scheduler with fun like network flow limits (since we discussed on Shannon, if this is enough to tickle you I'd love to hear from you, I've got man decades in this needing fresh eyes.
[1] gross percentage fees wreck trading advertising simply. Google plus all mighty consortium wrote off $350MM in 2004 and AdAge said they were stuck on things we solved early. We hadn't solved lots they had. My Cofounder tragically died before the close of a critical stock placement and key man (that I insisted on afraid to ever lose a wonderful friend as well as Cofounder - replying to a snark about business and friendship he snapped (to a old friend of his no less I learned) "I don't know what kind of person you want to be in business with then but I hope you think better of your investors")
[2] my original paper of 1995 cited the total economic capture of the agencies to be 60% of the gross total industry budget. I didn't hear anything similar until in 2018 the former chairman of Mediacom the UKs biggest buyer pull the exact same figure out of thin air.
[3] the recent highly acclaimed book "Manslaughter On Madison Avenue" explains how the problems that made me light out for the territory in 1995 remain not only not fixed but not even addressed. Briefly I felt terrible pangs for trying to help the agencies who threw vexatious criminal copyright breach torts in the High Court at us within days of opening. Then I realised that anyone who can tell the problems just ran for the hills. Only being a partnership let us survive. A limited company requires professional counsel. I learned IP law the hard way with my entire net worth and that of the one person who believed in me on the line. Still a partnership but a Limited Partnership. The 1907 act is only 7 pages long and protects your wealth from rogue partners creation of severality.
>I have been thinking it was 30 percent of gross for the longest time and I can't believe myself for getting this so wrong.
They announced the change a month ago, and it goes into effect at the end of this year. It is a "small business" program, and only applies to developers making less than $1 million in sales.
Are you not concerned with Apple potentially delisting you or rejecting a future update due to some reason which may or may not be clear? I suppose you can always go back to direct if that happens, but people who bought via App Store will be out of luck for updates then.
> but people who bought via App Store will be out of luck for updates then.
Apps like Coda have offered mechanisms for people to update from the App Store version to a non-Store version for free, by looking for a Store downloaded .app, so it's not impossible.
I'm really sorry to hear you've been forced into this situation. I seldom use MacOS these days, but when I do, buying an app from the App Store is the one thing I'm least likely to do. I hope that one day it becomes viable to distribute your app through a less centralized platform.
OP hasn't been forced into anything; as they describe in their post, this is a choice that they've made. I don't know who you think you're convincing by speaking so sanctimoniously about someone else's choices, as though they're incapable of taking the right decision without having asked you first or that they must've been forced into it, but it certainly won't be OP or me.
Well said. As I commented elsewhere Apple with its app store currently acts like a corrupt-middle-man-bureaucrat because it forces itself between the developer and the seller and demands a bribe from both for the "privilege" to develop / use an app. Limiting our choice means less profit for the developer, higher price for the user and a violation of your privacy rights by Apple (apart from profiteering).
At some point I could imagine going subscription/IAP for new major features, and just grandfathering in all the people who bought it previously. But in my specific case, the app is a side project that honestly needs a lot of love, and it’s hard for me to imagine hitting up existing users for more money.
Just a feedback - As a developer, you are only encouraging Apple to gauge more money from developers like you by selling on App store, instead of boycotting it. Don't add value to the app store by making your app available on it. I never buy anything from the App Store. I prefer to buy directly from the seller. If you are selling exclusively only through the Apple app store, you are not only going to lose customers but also sabotaging yourself.
It's incredibly shortsighted.
I don't know why anyone even bothers with the app store on the macOS (or other platforms). We have been doing fine without it on the desktop for decades now, and suddenly every developer is supposed to drink the kool-aid that PAYING corporates for the privilege of adding value to that platform by developing and distributing your wares on that platform is supposed to be a GREAT thing?
People pay for convenience all the time. Apple thrives on convenience - the overall experience. You also completely disregarded the point he made that for him the value Apple brings now that they have discounted their fee to 15% for small developers far outweighs the 15% they charge.
Paying for convenience. It's the key to their success and also the thing that many geeks seem to discount the most (just like you completely glossed over); hence the continual geek mystification of how Apple can be so successful.
I sincerely doubt he's going to loose that many sales by being Mac app store exclusive. These days for the vast majority of apps I'm interested in I'm more than willing to buy them from the Mac App store. The only time I avoid the app store is if the sandboxing restrictions limit the app I want in some way; and there are very few apps that fall into that category - mostly utility or audio apps. So I buy them outside the store - which is a PITA to track all the relevant bits (payments, updates, keys, etc.). 1Password helps significantly with the license/payment tracking and thankfully more Mac developers are adding 1 click import of all your license details into password managers like 1Password - but it's still more stuff to track that you don't have to do when using the app store.
> You also completely disregarded the point he made that for him the value Apple brings now that they have discounted their fee to 15% for small developers far outweighs the 15% they charge.
I pointed out that this is extremely short-sighted for developers.
App Store on macOS doesn't have the kind of stranglehold it does on macOS like the ios platform. The more App store gains control, and the more developers are forced to distribute their apps on the platform, the more you give leverage to Apple to extort more money out of you.
All the current lawsuits against the app store are indicative of this. We developers would be fools to ignore that.
No, this is fine–in fact, it's how the system is supposed to work. Apple provides their solution, but it's macOS–you can just say "no" and do your own thing. The situation on iOS is broken.
> Apple provides their solution, but it's macOS–you can just say "no" and do your own thing.
For how long? Apple has already crippled application firewalls on macOS Big Sur to allow Apple authorised softwares to bypass them (and even VPN), even if the user explicitly chooses to block them. That's another move to make it a closed system like ios, where the user no longer has control over what apps can or cannot access the internet and Apple decides it for them. Does that seem like the old Mac platform to you?
FWIW, I refuse to buy stuff from the Mac App Store because it's just not compatible with my life. I don't have any i-devices. I have a handful of iCloud/iTunes accounts of which I'm not sure which is technically the one I want to use (one of them is even a legacy pre-email one).
I never connect my OSX box with my personal email and I will not in the future. I get it, but I just won't buy software from that store, hands down.
Maybe I'm just in the dwindling minority of Mac users.
Out of curiosity, do you buy software from small devs at all? It seems like, whatever the privacy/security implications may be when buying via Apple, they're worse when dealing with a totally unknown party.
Huh. Cool! As I said elsewhere in the thread, my personal intuition is that Apple is a significantly better steward of my information (and credit card!) than a random small-time dev on the internet, but I realize not everyone agrees.
The security of my credit card is really up to Visa or Mastercard to deal with. I'm more likely to have it stolen by a random fast-food worker than entering it into a PCI-compliant website (out of all the times it's been compromised, they've nearly always been because it was handed over to someone to scan in the USA).
FWIW, most small time devs aren't going to be "stewards of information" to any significant degree unless they're actively trying. Handling finance will be outsourced either way, using Stripe or one of many other 3rd party services, you wouldn't be processing any of that yourself. I buy a ton of 3rd party indy software on my Mac and always have, and nothing from the MAS, and typically the only "personal info", kind of, is an email and maybe my name (and it's not as if that's verified somehow, I could just put in whatever). I also have plenty of email accounts and can trivially make more, as well as developer-specific aliases.
Plus there are other tools to further layer if it was ever a problem, like virtual credit card numbers. In practice the very nature of credit cards means it doesn't seem to generally be a problem, has been less of a real world risk than hacks of physical retailers. If I see a bad charge, I just report it and get a new number.
Also FWIW, I've seen plenty of sites starting to offer Apple Pay as an option at checkout, I assume it's getting built into more payment systems now. That itself is solid defense, at least as good as the MAS though sometimes the checkout flows seem a bit wonky still.
I, too, vastly prefer purchasing outside of the App Store to the point where I’ll often not bother if I don’t absolutely need the app.
Too many times I’ve tried to run App Store apps and been bothered with my Apple ID. I prefer the decentralization and not relying so much on Apple’s cloud services.
Trivial to pull up old license info from 1Password or email if necessary.
Yes. TripMode, which I use like an application firewall.
(Side note: to further deny us users our right of choice, ownership and control over our device, Apple has already crippled ALL application firewalls on its newest macOS to allow all Apple authorised software to BYPASS any such application firewalls, even if the user has explicitly blocked such software).
Fun fact: the modern NetworkExtension signed Apple entitlements that are required to be a VPN app on the macOS are app-store-only. (There is one root-based workaround to make VPNs work on macOS without these entitlements, for now, which will likely be removed in the near future.)
This is why you can download a wireguard installer from wireguard.org for Windows, but have to provide your identity (name, phone, email, address) and device hardware serial number to Apple to get the Wireguard app on that platform.
Due to the signed system volume, doing so is now impossible without disabling system integrity protection, one of the main platform security features of macOS.
I made an effort to do this for Mojave, but macOS is not designed to be modular, and after a week of chasing weird bugs related to interdependencies of system services, I stopped my efforts. If you'd like to collaborate, reach out.
The chain of trust on macOS is… complicated. Too complicated. Apple binaries are validated in at least three different ways:
1. By the kernel using a root certificate hardcoded into the CoreTrust kext;
2. On Apple Silicon only, by the kernel using a trust cache that's supplied to the kernel by the bootloader;
3. By userland (amfid) using a root certificate hardcoded into Security.framework.
You'd have to modify or intercept all of those things, and key components aren't open source (e.g. the AppleMobileFileIntegrity kext which is responsible for querying CoreTrust, the trust cache, and amfid). Probably best to do some targeted function hooking rather than recompiling anything.
Of course, you would still have to turn off Secure Boot in order to load a modified kernel in the first place. But that's largely orthogonal to SIP.
> Due to the signed system volume, doing so is now impossible without disabling system integrity protection, one of the main platform security features of macOS.
No, macOS is fine without SIP! SIP just defines a set of actions that Apple thinks no user, including root, should ever be able to perform. Consequently, disabling SIP empowers root users to do whatever they want, which is exactly what root is supposed to mean! You're still protected by the standard UNIX permission system—just don't grant root to software you don't absolutely trust!
Security is all about layers—but in the case of SIP, the security comes from delegating control away from the user in favor of Apple. If you're a power user, I'm not convinced this is necessarily good, because you're giving Apple almost absolute trust. What if they get compromised?
And, if you're the sort of person who would want a de-Apple-ified version of macOS, I would think you'd have already disabled SIP.
> No, macOS is fine without SIP! SIP just defines a set of actions that Apple thinks no user, including root, should ever be able to perform.
I agree with Apple here.
> Consequently, disabling SIP empowers root users to do whatever they want, without Apple having a say in the matter—but you're still protected by the standard UNIX permission system.
It also empowers malware. The Creative Cloud, for example, installs as root and installs admin-permissioned services. The standard POSIX permissions system is crap, and SIP is a huge improvement and valuable tool against malware.
> The Creative Cloud, for example, installs as root and installs admin-permissioned services.
So don't use apps that do that! Creative Cloud has no business installing itself as root.
I realize that's probably not feasible if you e.g. need Creative Cloud professionally, and that's a perfectly valid reason to leave SIP on, if applicable. Although Adobe and similar vendors still need to be yelled at.
I think SIP—like Gatekeeper—is a great default setting for novices, who should trust Apple over themselves. But if you're a power user, turning off SIP is not going to spell disaster. It leaves you with equivalent security to most Linux distros like Debian.
More importantly, there's no way to have a feature like SIP while also granting users full control. I get really frustrated when I see people say they're switching to Linux because macOS is too locked down. If you want to switch to Linux, that's wonderful, Linux is great! But if you otherwise prefer macOS, just go ahead and open it up for yourself.
It might've; currently it's listed as working under the developer ID program: https://help.apple.com/developer-account/#/devadf555df9. (Don't quote me on this, but I think it wasn't there before. I know I was surprised when someone told me that this was the case way back and I checked.)
I use it for free stuff when I have the option because it's convenient to have the centralized install buttons and software updates, and I've bought some software for actual money (Affinity suite for example).
But given the option I'm perfectly happy to buy from devs. They don't have to give Apple a cut, there's no "drag the whole hard drive on to the window" sandbox workarounds, and they can structure their upgrade pricing however they want instead of not being allowed to do it.
To be honest, I don't use it for free stuff either. Why do I need to provide an account to download something that's free? If you're offering a free app, there's really no reason why you shouldn't have it on your website as well.
IIRC there used to be a way to get things like Garageband and Numbers from the store without providing credentials, but sadly that appears to no longer be the case.
I'm already in my account so I've never even considered that as an issue for getting free apps from the app store. You're right though, no other way to download Numbers, etc.
Semi-related note for apps outside the store: please copy paint.net's update prompt, which gives me the option to install the update when I close the app, instead of either right now (while I'm trying to use the app) or asking me again next time I launch it (when I'll also be trying use the app).
It's been 15+ years and this still hasn't caught on. Not interrupting whatever I'm trying to get done with software updates and relaunches is one of the major reasons I'd rather just get things from the Mac App Store.
What's a legacy pre-email one? Does that date back to before iTools or something?
I'm pretty sure I'm on my original Apple account from back when it was iTools and then .mac and finally iCloud. If one of those transitions didn't carry over, then maybe it's from 2004ish when I needed an account to redeem Pepsi caps for iTunes downloads.
But I've heard the "I accidentally have purchases on 8 different Apple accounts" story from enough people that the account/license management is clearly a problem that needs dealing with.
If you care about it, you should try again, as they recently sent me an email about purging such usernames. I don't recall what the deadline was, but it's coming up.
>Maybe I'm just in the dwindling minority of Mac users.
I mean, I'm sure you are, but you're not alone. Same boat here. In principle Mac App Store could have been a really wonderful thing, I think Apple in the 00s had a real opportunity to do a great service to their users by creating a unified, solid and flexible licensing system for all devs (and then offering a fully optional vetted software store beyond that). Unfortunately they didn't do that and the MAS sucks. There is no upgrade system which is just absolutely fucking insanity. There are huge restrictions on useful functionality, so it can never be a one-stop place. The licensing and Apple ID management is a total fucking mess too, can't consolidate or transfer licenses like just about every previous Mac system in existence, all sorts of normal concepts like vol or other discounts are a pain/non-existent. I have an old iTools account, and I'm not even allowed to change the primary email address!
The MAS experience, and Apple's online service experience in general over significant time, is just miserable, completely unnecessarily too. Maybe they'll fix that someday, but it doesn't seem to be a priority so here we are :(.
FWIW, I love buying stuff from the Mac App Store and I wish all my favorite Mac apps were available there. I love the automatic updates, I feel safer with the sandboxing, and I appreciate the convenience of visiting a single point to download almost everything I want to put on a new Mac.
I also cherish having control over subscription renewals from one list and the Apple's easy refund process in the event of a third-party app not turning out to be worth the money (or an outright scam).
And as a dev I like knowing that anything I publish will be available to all Mac users.
I do hate the crappy App Store.app UI though. Feels like navigating a clunk web page, and why the fluff did they remove the download progress stats?? You have to hit F4 to see the actual size/downloaded numbers in the Launchpad (or in the Applications folder I guess).
Dwindling minority? Mac sales have grown to nearly 20% of industry revenues. With the M1 it looks likely they will get close to 10% of industry units, and blow by 20% of revenues.
Most independent software developers should not care about units sold, because it comprises far too many $200-$400 PCs that don’t buy much software.
They should care about the $1,000+ PC market, those are your best customers, and where Apples market share by units is at least 25%, and surging higher with the M1.
Yeah, that's definitely not the norm that I see among macOS users. I do the same thing but with Steam. If I can find it anywhere else, even for more money, I'll buy it elsewhere, including the Mac App Store because the experience of using Steam is so awful. So to each their own, I guess.
> Maybe I'm just in the dwindling minority of Mac users.
No, you are not. And even if we are a minority, we should definitely abandon the macOS platform if our right to choice, ownership and control is deliberately denied to us on it just the sake of apple's profit margins.
I don’t have much to say about the move to the App Store except that given that there is apparently a market for a standalone paid indie photo browser, the Mac market may be more vibrant than popularly assumed.
Looks like more of an organizer than browser. There's definitely a need for image browsers considering how bad Apple's Preview is for that. I'm still using my old and trusted Xee3 for any sort of image browsing on macOS because of that.
This is disappointing and sad. The more people who do this, the more difficult it becomes for those who don't.
You can't download even free apps from the App Store without providing an email address, phone number, and street address (to get an Apple ID). The App Store app also sends the mac's hardware serial number to Apple when you launch it, associating it with your identity in the logs. The email and phone required are verified so you can't just make some shit up.
This means that to get any apps from the App Store, even free ones, you must be thoroughly de-anonymized.
Not caring about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like not caring about free speech because you have nothing to say.
Developers should reject the App Store on customer privacy grounds alone. When this becomes the sole method of distributing apps on the mac, as it is on iOS, the world becomes a much worse place, as then the US government had permanent access without a warrant to every app you use.
Is the implication that I, a random guy across the internet, am a better steward of your personally identifying information than Apple? I'm not saying you're wrong, but that definitely doesn't match my own intuitions.
The implication is that, regardless of price, making the App Store more useful and valuable harms privacy for everyone, as it reduces the ability of people to resist Apple restricting features or functionality to App Store only, as they have already done with VPN apps using the NetworkExtension API. These cannot be installed outside of the App Store at all, even self-built ones.
There is also the issue of surveillance. Apple processed warrantless FISA surveillance orders for 30,000 users last year, per their own transparency report.
It's possible that people don't want Apple (and by extension the FBI and US military, with no probable cause or warrant required) knowing the apps they purchase and use, or when, or on which devices.
Being App Store only prohibits that, and requires that your users be subject to this surveillance.
It's the same issue with posting to Instagram, for example: deciding to donate free content to Facebook there makes the product more attractive to Facebook's users and makes it harder for small businesses to opt out of using Facebook's ad business. Decisions like this make the whole world worse.
I’m not sure why this comment is being downvoted. It is a relatively accurate description of how network effects work and the implications to those trying to resist those network effects and an opinion based on that. No need to downvote people expressing an opinion you don’t agree with!
During a software license purchase for macOS, you either need to provide your PII to Apple, or to an indie developer.
In your opinion, is it safer to provide your PII to an indie developer than to Apple as part of such a purchase?
Assuming that is the case, is your objection to Apple having your PII then extended to all other large-volume payment processors such as Shopify, Stripe, Amazon, and PayPal as well?
Absolutely. Many users / developers are forgetting that they are the ones who add value to a platform by creating for it. And now they are being asked to PAY for the "privilege" of doing so!? It's outrageous.
(Please don't let the downvotes stop you from expressing these views again and again. You are not a minority on this.)
> Consumers go where it's most convenient, and sellers follow them. Anything else is wishful thinking at best.
Objectively that isn't the Mac App Store in general, thankfully Apple's incompetence in the user experience has held them back in further damaging society by centralising application installation further.
Does the 15% have a shelf? Like... if a business makes $1,000,001, do they owe 30% on the entire amount, or just the extra dollar? In other words, is there a disincentive to go above a million until you're above two million?
I've asked that question of five or six Apple/IOS developers, some of them well known, and they've all just laughed at me.
Worrying about coming close to $1mm/annual sales is something precisely zero of them were worried about.
The answer to your question is, according to what I've read, yes - at $999,999 you owe $150K. At $1,000,001, you owe $300K. But - if you can get to $1mm, it's highly likely that $1.5mm, $2.0mm+, etc... are coming soon enough.
Many developers are focussing on $50k, $60k, type scenarios, where the 30% to 15% means enough money in their pocket to afford new development hardware, etc...
As I understand it, if you make $1 more than $1M, it's not that you suddenly owe an extra $150k in "back taxes," but rather that going forward, you'll be in the 30% "tax bracket." It's still a tax cliff, and therefore kind of problematic (if it's November 2021 and you've made $950k, you're strongly incentivized to shut down sales until the new year!), but as you say, that's a problem 99% of devs would love to have.
How is it a tax cliff? My understanding is that after you hit 1 million they will start taking 30% of money that comes in after that for the rest of the year.
The issue is that if you cross the $1m threshold in the current year then the next January you don’t go back to 15%, you stay at 30% for the whole next year.
So if next year your sales fall slightly below $1m, you end up paying $150k in extra Apple tax. Then the following year you go back to the 15% rate.
Yep, this is how the program works. One thing I would add is the $1 million threshold is based on your net proceeds after Apple’s cut, not your total sales.
> If a participating developer surpasses the 1 million USD threshold, the standard commission rate will apply for the remainder of the year.
If you make $999K from January to June, your July revenues will be charged at 30%. That's pretty close to a progressive fee structure, but not quite exactly progressive.
In no case will they claw back $150K from the money they already paid out.
Agreed - that's going to have some very weirded unintended consequences. It would be in someone's interest at 950k sales that year to basically stop selling. You would need to be sure you can make 150k of sales absolutely the next year or you actually lose money.
I suppose it's a first class problem to have but it's odd why Apple would make (a small number of companies admittedly) have it all.
I suspect it's a policy that will change after Tim Cook reads the viral blog post in 2022
Only the marginal fee goes to 30% -- there is no retroactive application to the first $1MM of income. The new rate applies to future income only.
And unfortunately, triggering the rate increase is sticky. If you go over $1MM is 2021, the 30% rate will apply to all of your income in 2022. (If you are under $1MM in 2022, the rate will reset to 15% for 2023).
This is the actual confusing part. Surely Apple could just apply the 15% rate to the first $1MM of every developer's income in each year instead. It's simpler, and it doesn't create the weird incentive to depress earnings at the end of the calendar year if they are approaching $1MM.
Yeah it works like the sort of startup programs you can get from a lot of providers. If you’re income is under a threshold for that year your rate is discounted. It’s not a tax so doesn’t work in levels, if you no longer meet the requirements for the program then the next year you’re no longer on a discount.
A "better experience"? Maybe for a Mac only app. But once your product spreads across multiple platforms is much easier for the customer to download the app for all platforms in one place--your website.
Why so? Having Office 365 on the Mac App Store does not make the lives of users on other platforms more difficult in any way. It’s trivial to put a link to the App Store page on a website anyway: click on “Windows”, get a .exe; click on “Mac”, get it through the store. It’s not like the two cannot be integrated together, and games publishers have been doing it for several stores on the same platform.
Some years ago I looked at developing a MacOS app and distributing it through the App Store. I came away from that experience with two showstoppers:
- 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?
That's a janky workaround. You have support both the old and new features/behaviors in one app, and push an update that wraps the old and new features in code like 'if(IAP_X_ENABLED())'.
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.
Another work-around I've seen is updating the old app that has a one-time popup to alert users to the new version. As a user, I can live with that as long as it is a one-time popup.
Reeder did a really great job of dealing with this. I use Reeder 4 and got a one time modal on launch that Reeder 5 exists and what the potential reasons to upgrade would be.
Can I ask why? I'm using Reeder 3 and the only thing that I feel like I'm missing is that more recent versions of MacOS support adding an RSS feed from the browser. So I have to cut-and-paste the URL into Reeder.
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.
No upgrades is a lamentable omission, but subscriptions and IAP can help replace it (not as well tho).
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.
>For example, App Store customers never have to worry about being spammed by some developer they bought an app from.
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.
It is possible to buy highly targeted personal data as a seller on Amazon marketplace.
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.
The standard review prompt is actually presented by an Apple API, and it's designed so that developers only have some control over the details of its presentation. Basically you request it whenever you think it's appropriate, but the system decides whether it actually gets displayed.
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.
For apps, really? What happens if I bought some software in a box and just put it on my computer? I would be interested in reading about that; it seems strange and impossible to enforce.
One can argue whether it's good or bad but, in an online (or mail order) context, companies absolutely know in general who their customers are. Which has, as I say, both positives and negatives. Mostly I think it's a positive so long as the seller doesn't abuse it.
You're not allowed to sell digital goods, including things like feature unlocks or paid upgrades, via your own payment mechanism (which Apple Pay requires). You have to use in app purchase so Apple can take their cut, and so the transaction is between the user and Apple, not the user and you.
So no, this isn't a feasible solution, unfortunately.
Yeah, Apple has clearly failed on multiple fronts to make the App Store more useful.
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.
> Apple does not disclose to you who bought your app
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.
The problem with the MAS is that it's very difficult to leave it.
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)?
I think the developer fee is something on the order of $100 per year.
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.
> 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
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.
I just wrote above: the customer can keep using the app as long as they keep the app. Even when they get a new computer. If an app is removed from the App Store, it’s gone from the App Store, that’s all.
Well, a requirement of the App Store is that the application is self-contained, so all you have to do is go to the Applications folder (a default location in your finder) and drag/drop the app to your usb drive, etc. It does just work.
> 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.
> The app won't be uninstalled from their machines but it will completely disappear from the MAS and the list of purchased apps.
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.
And do you think that's acceptable? That Apple gets to decide what apps you can install and run on your system or else you have to jump through hoops (sometimes potentially risky ones when you consider jailbreaking) to do so?
If a developer chooses to remove their product from the App Store, what is Apple supposed to do about it?
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.
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 a developer chooses to remove their product from the App Store, what is Apple supposed to do about it?
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?
> Apple does not disclose to you who bought your app.
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.
The Mac App Store is further from a monopoly than the Play store is on Android. AFAIK even new Macs from Apple come with the gatekeeper setting allowing apps from both the Mac App Store and identified developers.
You could say that the developer account + notarization requirement is still a way for Apple to have a monopoly, but there aren't many stories of legitimate (ie. not adware) applications getting their certificate revoked or being rejected by notarization.
I buy directly from the publisher whenever that is an option simply because I figure they need the 30% more than Apple does.
But I agree that the App Store is a far better experience both in purchase and then upgrade. My mum has one non-app store app on her Mac and is always befuddled by the upgrade prompt. Even for my own use I find the App Store upgrade is almost always better than other means.
As a consumer I hate the Mac App Store so much if only for the reason that every time I want to do something I have login again and again. The Mac App store is quite buggy. Sometimes I have to log in two times in a row. I hate it so fucking much that I almost consider not buying a good product just to avoid the Mac App Store's shitty app.
I also hate that the purchase is tied to my Apple ID, especially for a utility that I'd like to use in another computer. Say a workstation where I might have a different Apple ID.
If an app, for example, can be installed in two work machines, I don't want my Apple ID to dictate which machines.
Anyways rant over.
I get that for the seller's point of view the Mac App Store's updated policy is a boon.
I get it worse. Sometimes it goes in a permanent loop asking for my password infinitely many times and doing nothing, until I Force Quit, which does not usually help the problem.
It truly sucks and I regret the few purchases I made with it. But, the light is at the end of the tunnel: Windows 10 and WSL.
I think the light you're referring to is Linux, and the tunnel is Windows :D
On a more serious note, you shouldn't be so dismissive of open source desktop environments, KDE 5 is quite usable today, and GNOME 40 looks to be pretty good too. Give it a whirl, you might just like it.
I’m using Pop OS now on a Dell XPS. It’s quite good. But Macs and Mac OS are by far the best machines you can buy. People complaining about the store is kinda funny. I can’t even get sound to work out of the box and I have to reboot every few days. Once in a while my machine will shit itself when I open the lid.
But the Apple Store, that’s the nail in the coffin? You’re going to go back to googling to find which specific drivers you need because of the Apple Store?
Yeah what gives - the software "stores" for most distributions are great. Elementary is particularly interesting in helping developers to make a living doing FOSS.
Grass is not greener on the windows and WSL side. It’s yellowed and littered with turds to stand in. I run both platforms side by side and the Mac is by far the least painful. Windows 10 on an average day is like gargling sand. I mean for two months now alt-tab is broken on 20H2 release. No fix incoming yet. Zero days unpatched for 90 days etc. On WSL it’s a networking and HyperV encrusted nightmare. Have fun trying to get anything vaguely complicated to do anything even remotely sane. Total shit show.
A fine comparison is the windows App Store which is genuinely like playing Russian roulette with a gun made of butter. The Mac App Store is much much much less crazy.
The Mac has its fair share of suck but my word at least they actually tried to put something cohesive together.
Going to put it honestly but I don’t think Microsoft are earning my respect or attention, just shouting about how wonderful their product is while it’s falling to pieces in my hands.
That’s even worse. File system performance is so terrible that it’s unusable for anything past trivial operations. AFAIK it maps the Linux ABI/syscalls to NT and that’s it. So you get the dire small file performance of NTFS to contend with (MFT locking).
Wherever you go there are puddles of this ick to stand in.
I’ve been at this long enough to know when to give up and walk away.
Slightly tangential at best, but there was software I used to use in a former life that was developed and designed for Linux systems first. They were then able to cross compile it for Mac and Windows. When first using the software, it was only ever used on Windows. Once I started using it in more advanced ways, I wanted to try out the Mac and/or Linux versions since they had a CLI client. Both of these systems ran circles around the Windows version in how much faster they were to do the exact same processing. Turns out, they were using the same C-style calls to access files. That C-style code is very slow on windows, yet using a Windows native call brought their software to the same speed.
TL;DR Windows definitely has its own way of doing file system access
Microsoft isn't really pushing their store though. Is there even any exclusives on it? It certainly isn't even close to my first stop look for software.
Also, WSL1/2 has been great - docker on WSL2 is fantastic, close to zero configuration required.
> Windows 10 on an average day is like gargling sand. I mean for two months now alt-tab is broken on 20H2 release. No fix incoming yet. Zero days unpatched for 90 days etc. On WSL it’s a networking and HyperV encrusted nightmare. Have fun trying to get anything vaguely complicated to do anything even remotely sane. Total shit show.
This is a rather bizarre list since I never had these issues on my Windows 10 installation.
For what it's worth, the "log in repeatedly" bug has hit me too, but I discovered that if I sign out and then sign in again, it remains fixed for weeks if not months. Worth a try.
The App Store is great for products from unknown developers and in other cases where I'm not to sure if I fully trust the software/developer. In other cases I prefer to buy direct.
App stores are monumentally complex works of infrastructure. It's inevitable that they'll take years to get right, and Steam still isn't quite there yet.
Not to mention how slow the store is and music app too. Loading one single artist or app it takes time. I guess both the app is slow rendering the items and architecture delivering the data.
Sign out of the first ID, sign into the second ID, install the program you want, sign out.
I (and many people) used to buy all apps under one ID and would have to do this. Apple and the software publishers have moved to "Family Sharing" for most apps which means I can buy an app and they can install it without having to deal with multiple App Store IDs. That's true for MacOS and iOS.
Please don't use it. Just boycott it. If an app is not available outside the app store, email them and ask them to make it available. Remind them that they are being fools to add value to the app store as it reduces their options and makes them more dependent on Apple. This will allow Apple to gauge even more money from them in the future.
App stores also kill otherwise free open-source projects as it adds an unnecessary financial burden on them.
Remind them we have been doing fine without it on the desktop for decades now. Ask them why PAYING Apple for the privilege of adding VALUE to the macOS platform - by developing and distributing their wares on that platform - doesn't make them feel like a jackass!? Apple should be the one paying them for creating value for the macOS platform!
The App Store protects users from shitty developers and scummy companies. Users appreciate that. People like having a single point for discovery, reviews, updates, and refunds.
Every time an third-party app turned out to be different than advertised Apple refunded me within a day. Meanwhile an app which uses their own payments system screwed me over a month ago and I'm still waiting for a response from them.
Doesn't campaigning for depriving users of the choice to use the App Store make you "feel like a jackass!?"
> Doesn't campaigning for depriving users of the choice to use the App Store make you "feel like a jackass!?"
What "CHOICE" are you blabbering about? Can you install an app on the ios independently without resorting to risky jailbreaking on your iDevice?
With similar closed Apple ARM processors (like in the iDevices) now on the Mac platform too, Apple is moving towards denying us CHOICE on the macOS platform too. (And for all those who want to reply that this is not going to happen, Apple is boiling the frog slowly - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog ... Apart from the closed Apple ARM processors, the latest version of the macOS already CRIPPLES firewalls to allow any Apple authorised application to bypass the firewalls to spy better on its users, and to exert more control over the device (worst case e.g. killswitch).
> Apple is moving towards denying us CHOICE on the macOS platform too. (And for all those who want to reply that this is not going to happen, Apple is boiling the frog slowly - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
You can be an Apple fanboi, but you have to be real naive one to believe that Apple doesn't want to increase their billion dollar+ profit margins through the app store by making the macOS a closed platform like the ios too. (And yes, the app store can be successful only in a closed platform where Apple dictates how - and what - software you can install on it.)
All comments here saying they prefer the App Store as users are being downvoted.
Probably by user-hostile developers who want to give the impression that people don't want the App Store, likely because Apple's policies prevent them from preying upon users.
(One of the top comments here is by a dev acting surprised they can't snoop on users who buy their products)
What a nice piece of whataboutism. Convenience is king. And stupidity is his queen. When I sell products I want full control of my CX, just as Apple. Creating, maintaining and optimising CX is not for everyone. It requires new mindset, new priorities, new expenses and mind geared towards product for customers, feedback, support etc. If your dream software is egoistic projection with profit only goal you will be better with App Store bonanza. If by any chance you want to Serve people and have valuable product the idea of using App Store is absurd. In App Store you have no control over UX. It is what Apple is decided to be. You have no direct customer feedback or connection. Apple owns this channel. In summary: You are working not for you and your customers. You are working for Apple and paying for the "privilege".
For those who have need for critical thinking: Reality is that New Apple are masters in dark UX. They don't appeal to rationality and logic. They model UX for psychology of appeal. In short deep in our psyche we crave Father/Mother figure and majority of us are in some form of misbalance. When You listen to Apple Marketing you are witnessing the work of the best of the best. Everything is with neutral tone, presentations are balanced with Man/Woman dynamic etc. The difference with Jobs era is that when he used psychology (NLP) he backed it up with real features and added long term value.
App Store marketing is perfect for small developers, small developers are perfect for Apple profit.
Small developers are wiling to obey every rule. They have no choice.
Until small developers start to read about marketing, business operation and UX, App Store will prevail.
The closest thing to this right now, other than Paddle which is fairly different as it does no aggregation, is probably Setapp – it's more like Netflix for Mac apps. Unfortunately I think it's let down by mostly having the 2nd/3rd choice apps in any given category.
Is there a convenient way to sandbox non-appstore apps?
It's a real chore to figure out what apps that aren't available through the appstore (Chrome, VSCode, etc.) are doing to my computer. So much so that I'd rather just castrate them by default and deal with breakage later.
As a developer, assuming your app isn’t doing stuff not supported in sandbox mode, it’s as easy as a checkbox. As a user, Catalina’s absurd barrage of dialogs asking for your permission for an app to so much as look at your data may be annoying, but the dialogs are at least potentially effective. (For instance, I’ve disallowed Dropbox from touching anything outside its folder—despite it trying to access everything.)
The problem with the Mac (and iOS) App Store is too many API restrictions - Apple can do too many things that developers can’t. And I don’t mean crazy things. I mean normal things that a normal application would want to do.
Can you define one of those? I've met some huge obstacles with adding tables into UITextViews - but there are work arounds for pretty much anything you could want (within reason).
Mac Addresses and Device Identifiers APIs make sense to limit coming from the privacy minded company.
This is an issue in both iOS and Mac app stores. Certain apps are (arguably rightly) only available in certain regions (like banking apps) but Apple's poor design means you now have to switch stores to upgrade.
So Capital One tells me I have to upgrade my app I need to log out my Apple account, switch the region to USA, type in my address, phone numbers, and a USA credit card (this is for apple), then start the store back up. Sometimes it takes a while for it to switch. I can then download the new version of the Capital One app. Then my MUFG Bank app needs an update so I have to repeat the process to switch back the Japan store.
Even funnier, the app store will tell me I need to upgrade but then won't upgrade (Because I'm not on the right store) so it's clearly the same store since the upgrade notices flow through the same store app, it's just bad design.
Why Apple can't figure this out is beyond me. They're an international company. They must have 1000s of employees that have to deal with this issue. Sure I get it does not affect the majority of users. The same can be said for accessibility features yet they still make them.
Meanwhile that's a feature that google already finished for years. You just login all your accounts at once and it will chose the correct one to update software. And even some chat software like telegram already has this build in.
Do google patient this or for whatever reason that apple can't implement it?
As a user, I have the following honest question for anyone who's clamoring for the abolishment of the App Store(s):
Can you guarantee that your proposed distribution mechanism will give me a refund if I ask for it?
Apple has always given me a refund for all third-party apps, almost no questions asked, ever.
Whereas on the other hand, apps/services which bypass In-App Purchases and use their own payment systems stall me for weeks or months before they refund, if ever. For example I'm still trying to get my money back from Couchsurfing after they basically hijacked my account about a month ago until I paid a "COVID contribution" just to delete my info.
What these people are suggesting is the worse evil, with the goal or at least the end result being to make users more vulnerable to all sorts of predatory third-parties.
You may downvote these comments to manufacture an impression of homogenous opinion in this echo chamber but I will continue to support Apple with my money to counter that. The App Store is necessary, for users and for devs.
I am a bit split on that one. I see the convenience of using the app store, but I try to buy directly if I can. I lot of tools for power users have problems with scripting when containerized, direct purchases are much more convenient if I need to buy an upgrade license (which means cheaper in the long run) and developer gets more money that way.
Yes, this is the far-sighted approach. Apple with its app store currently acts like a corrupt-middle-man-bureaucrat because it forces itself between the developer and the seller and demands a bribe from both for the "privilege" to develop / use an app. This means less profit for the developer, higher price for the user, and a violation of your privacy rights by Apple (apart from profiteering).
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 261 ms ] threadThat's the problem with the model.
But when you are small, you have enough problems to solve to bring a quality product to market, this is one headache you can happily avoid.
For better or worse Apple can do no wrong and the eyes of its customers, so even if they did somehow get hacked, you wouldn't have hundreds of angry emails headed your way.
I personally really do love the walled garden of owning a Mac, when I'm working on a song or music video, I just want it to work using final cut and logic. If I really feel like compiling the Linux kernel from scratch, I have a PC for that
OP owes the world, outside of their paying customers, nothing.
Short sighted profiteering.
It's demonstrative of the knee-jerk reactions from people who see the mere mention of the words 'Apple' or "App Store" and immediately come to piss all over everybody's cereal without actually knowing the full story.
All I see are baseless assumptions coupled with a condescending, know-it-all tone from those unwilling to engage with either OP's points, more prone to redefine the discussion to allow their soapboxing. Worse, it's delivered with a tone that screams "oh, the silly thing, why didn't they come to me first? I could have told them better!".
Pardon the rant but it gets tiresome in every damn thread about anything vaguely Apple-related.
They have tremendous influence and it strongly affects the world. Through that influence, they ruined the openess of mp3 players, GUIs, and then cellphones. Now the writing is on the wall: personal computers are next.
Forgive me if I care about this stuff.
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 are genuine and valid - that it aims to turn the macOS platform into a more closed system like ios.
[0] - Thankfully my bank handled this without issue.
There was a lunch place near my work that I frequented. They used Square POS terminal, once I noticed that it somehow linked my email to my credit card, I started using cash to pay. Cash is horribly inconvenient and gross to handle, but at least once you paid you don’t need to worry about it. You can’t be hit with some unexpected charges, wait to check the transaction when posted, no possibility of data leak, no privacy concerns, etc.
It's not one time unless you want to do the setup and teardown for every purchase, but the £15 monthly fee includes phone and other insurance and the app exports your account ledger to Excel and CSV. Customer service and vanishing transactions from the app ledger have been worrying me but I was promptly put in touch with management as soon as I dusted off a smidgeon of English idiomatic equivalents to "wtf" and this seems to have been caused by Transport For London running adjustments for the daily Oyster journey payment limit (via taking a holding charge placeholder payment in the way hotels ring fence for your stay on debit cards) so the final amount is adjusted the following day to enable the 0400 end of their day.
The entire banking industry is so ripe for re-imagining, yet their strangle hold onto the old ways is super preventative from us evolving as a species.
4am is the cut off time between “days” for TFL (London Transit) services - if you buy a ‘day travelcard’ it is good until 4am the following day.
It is guaranteed that if you make several transactions in the same day on TFL (by swiping in/out with a contactless card - or an Oyster card - at the ticket gates), the amount paid will be capped at the value of a day travelcard. I’m quite sure no employee is involved in any of this, and computers handle it end-to-end.
Banking in the UK is actually quite reasonable - largely because companies like Monzo have pushed it forward.
It’s a constant surprise to me quite how _bad_ banking in the US is in comparison though - and most of your points seem to reflect how US banking works rather than UK banking - as indicated both by the spelling of “cheque” and the notion of using them in the first place.
But 15% of gross?
I have been thinking it was 30 percent of gross for the longest time and I can't believe myself for getting this so wrong.
I worked in advertising sales when the industry was freaking out over losing the universal 15% gross "agency fee" [2] for a multitude of hopeless performance contracts [3] and on the other side, when I sold space for a major publisher my own commission was 15% of gross.
A good salesman is worth 15%. At least to me.
The thing that's drawing me, now far more strongly, to publishing via the store is that although vexing problems exist, this looks like the most transparent platform to my eyes because the developer community is surfacing the issues and not burying problems with FUD and MVP-speak. Credit obviously to the community above all. But even giants struggle with enabling any community.
[0] Gabapentin. 2016: "NOT addictive don't worry John." 2019:"can I have you signature and ID?" - the UK government classified Gabapentin Schedule A along with heroin and cocaine. 8 months of dystopia and another 5 remembering how to think later the top "user reviews" found in the wild still praise Gabapentin to high heaven. Yes it does temporary wonders for concentration. I never took my full dose which was the minimum adult dose and broke regime regularly for at least two weeks a time and I don't even know how to describe the 8 months of "hell" because they were just too messed up. Gabapentin probably has amazing off label potential but now it's scheduled forget about intelligent prescribing.
[1] deep into the data structures for a advertising scheduler with fun like network flow limits (since we discussed on Shannon, if this is enough to tickle you I'd love to hear from you, I've got man decades in this needing fresh eyes.
[1] gross percentage fees wreck trading advertising simply. Google plus all mighty consortium wrote off $350MM in 2004 and AdAge said they were stuck on things we solved early. We hadn't solved lots they had. My Cofounder tragically died before the close of a critical stock placement and key man (that I insisted on afraid to ever lose a wonderful friend as well as Cofounder - replying to a snark about business and friendship he snapped (to a old friend of his no less I learned) "I don't know what kind of person you want to be in business with then but I hope you think better of your investors")
[2] my original paper of 1995 cited the total economic capture of the agencies to be 60% of the gross total industry budget. I didn't hear anything similar until in 2018 the former chairman of Mediacom the UKs biggest buyer pull the exact same figure out of thin air.
[3] the recent highly acclaimed book "Manslaughter On Madison Avenue" explains how the problems that made me light out for the territory in 1995 remain not only not fixed but not even addressed. Briefly I felt terrible pangs for trying to help the agencies who threw vexatious criminal copyright breach torts in the High Court at us within days of opening. Then I realised that anyone who can tell the problems just ran for the hills. Only being a partnership let us survive. A limited company requires professional counsel. I learned IP law the hard way with my entire net worth and that of the one person who believed in me on the line. Still a partnership but a Limited Partnership. The 1907 act is only 7 pages long and protects your wealth from rogue partners creation of severality.
They announced the change a month ago, and it goes into effect at the end of this year. It is a "small business" program, and only applies to developers making less than $1 million in sales.
Apps like Coda have offered mechanisms for people to update from the App Store version to a non-Store version for free, by looking for a Store downloaded .app, so it's not impossible.
It's incredibly shortsighted.
I don't know why anyone even bothers with the app store on the macOS (or other platforms). We have been doing fine without it on the desktop for decades now, and suddenly every developer is supposed to drink the kool-aid that PAYING corporates for the privilege of adding value to that platform by developing and distributing your wares on that platform is supposed to be a GREAT thing?
People pay for convenience all the time. Apple thrives on convenience - the overall experience. You also completely disregarded the point he made that for him the value Apple brings now that they have discounted their fee to 15% for small developers far outweighs the 15% they charge.
Paying for convenience. It's the key to their success and also the thing that many geeks seem to discount the most (just like you completely glossed over); hence the continual geek mystification of how Apple can be so successful.
I sincerely doubt he's going to loose that many sales by being Mac app store exclusive. These days for the vast majority of apps I'm interested in I'm more than willing to buy them from the Mac App store. The only time I avoid the app store is if the sandboxing restrictions limit the app I want in some way; and there are very few apps that fall into that category - mostly utility or audio apps. So I buy them outside the store - which is a PITA to track all the relevant bits (payments, updates, keys, etc.). 1Password helps significantly with the license/payment tracking and thankfully more Mac developers are adding 1 click import of all your license details into password managers like 1Password - but it's still more stuff to track that you don't have to do when using the app store.
I pointed out that this is extremely short-sighted for developers.
App Store on macOS doesn't have the kind of stranglehold it does on macOS like the ios platform. The more App store gains control, and the more developers are forced to distribute their apps on the platform, the more you give leverage to Apple to extort more money out of you.
All the current lawsuits against the app store are indicative of this. We developers would be fools to ignore that.
For how long? Apple has already crippled application firewalls on macOS Big Sur to allow Apple authorised softwares to bypass them (and even VPN), even if the user explicitly chooses to block them. That's another move to make it a closed system like ios, where the user no longer has control over what apps can or cannot access the internet and Apple decides it for them. Does that seem like the old Mac platform to you?
The day SIP can’t be disabled we’ll know things are changing, but until then the machines are only as locked down as you want them to be.
I never connect my OSX box with my personal email and I will not in the future. I get it, but I just won't buy software from that store, hands down.
Maybe I'm just in the dwindling minority of Mac users.
Plus there are other tools to further layer if it was ever a problem, like virtual credit card numbers. In practice the very nature of credit cards means it doesn't seem to generally be a problem, has been less of a real world risk than hacks of physical retailers. If I see a bad charge, I just report it and get a new number.
Also FWIW, I've seen plenty of sites starting to offer Apple Pay as an option at checkout, I assume it's getting built into more payment systems now. That itself is solid defense, at least as good as the MAS though sometimes the checkout flows seem a bit wonky still.
Too many times I’ve tried to run App Store apps and been bothered with my Apple ID. I prefer the decentralization and not relying so much on Apple’s cloud services.
Trivial to pull up old license info from 1Password or email if necessary.
It's not a good user experience, and Apple's actions elsewhere with app stores are so utterly beyond the pale I cannot support that financially.
(Side note: to further deny us users our right of choice, ownership and control over our device, Apple has already crippled ALL application firewalls on its newest macOS to allow all Apple authorised software to BYPASS any such application firewalls, even if the user has explicitly blocked such software).
This is why you can download a wireguard installer from wireguard.org for Windows, but have to provide your identity (name, phone, email, address) and device hardware serial number to Apple to get the Wireguard app on that platform.
Show ID for privacy software.
I was staring at a red dot on the System Preferences because Apple decided that logging in with iCloud was important enough to remind me of daily.
I made an effort to do this for Mojave, but macOS is not designed to be modular, and after a week of chasing weird bugs related to interdependencies of system services, I stopped my efforts. If you'd like to collaborate, reach out.
1. By the kernel using a root certificate hardcoded into the CoreTrust kext;
2. On Apple Silicon only, by the kernel using a trust cache that's supplied to the kernel by the bootloader;
3. By userland (amfid) using a root certificate hardcoded into Security.framework.
You'd have to modify or intercept all of those things, and key components aren't open source (e.g. the AppleMobileFileIntegrity kext which is responsible for querying CoreTrust, the trust cache, and amfid). Probably best to do some targeted function hooking rather than recompiling anything.
Of course, you would still have to turn off Secure Boot in order to load a modified kernel in the first place. But that's largely orthogonal to SIP.
No, macOS is fine without SIP! SIP just defines a set of actions that Apple thinks no user, including root, should ever be able to perform. Consequently, disabling SIP empowers root users to do whatever they want, which is exactly what root is supposed to mean! You're still protected by the standard UNIX permission system—just don't grant root to software you don't absolutely trust!
Security is all about layers—but in the case of SIP, the security comes from delegating control away from the user in favor of Apple. If you're a power user, I'm not convinced this is necessarily good, because you're giving Apple almost absolute trust. What if they get compromised?
And, if you're the sort of person who would want a de-Apple-ified version of macOS, I would think you'd have already disabled SIP.
I agree with Apple here.
> Consequently, disabling SIP empowers root users to do whatever they want, without Apple having a say in the matter—but you're still protected by the standard UNIX permission system.
It also empowers malware. The Creative Cloud, for example, installs as root and installs admin-permissioned services. The standard POSIX permissions system is crap, and SIP is a huge improvement and valuable tool against malware.
So don't use apps that do that! Creative Cloud has no business installing itself as root.
I realize that's probably not feasible if you e.g. need Creative Cloud professionally, and that's a perfectly valid reason to leave SIP on, if applicable. Although Adobe and similar vendors still need to be yelled at.
I think SIP—like Gatekeeper—is a great default setting for novices, who should trust Apple over themselves. But if you're a power user, turning off SIP is not going to spell disaster. It leaves you with equivalent security to most Linux distros like Debian.
More importantly, there's no way to have a feature like SIP while also granting users full control. I get really frustrated when I see people say they're switching to Linux because macOS is too locked down. If you want to switch to Linux, that's wonderful, Linux is great! But if you otherwise prefer macOS, just go ahead and open it up for yourself.
Perhaps they are not referring to just permissions. Maybe how the system as a whole is setup.
This is why I don't run desktop Linux, either. That's not a good security model.
> To add this entitlement to an iOS app or a Mac App Store app, enable the Network Extensions capability in Xcode. and
> To add this entitlement to a macOS app distributed outside of the Mac App Store, perform the following steps:
Did they change it recently? Have you tried it? I don't have a developer subscription so I can't test it.
But given the option I'm perfectly happy to buy from devs. They don't have to give Apple a cut, there's no "drag the whole hard drive on to the window" sandbox workarounds, and they can structure their upgrade pricing however they want instead of not being allowed to do it.
IIRC there used to be a way to get things like Garageband and Numbers from the store without providing credentials, but sadly that appears to no longer be the case.
It's been 15+ years and this still hasn't caught on. Not interrupting whatever I'm trying to get done with software updates and relaunches is one of the major reasons I'd rather just get things from the Mac App Store.
I'm pretty sure I'm on my original Apple account from back when it was iTools and then .mac and finally iCloud. If one of those transitions didn't carry over, then maybe it's from 2004ish when I needed an account to redeem Pepsi caps for iTunes downloads.
But I've heard the "I accidentally have purchases on 8 different Apple accounts" story from enough people that the account/license management is clearly a problem that needs dealing with.
I mean, I'm sure you are, but you're not alone. Same boat here. In principle Mac App Store could have been a really wonderful thing, I think Apple in the 00s had a real opportunity to do a great service to their users by creating a unified, solid and flexible licensing system for all devs (and then offering a fully optional vetted software store beyond that). Unfortunately they didn't do that and the MAS sucks. There is no upgrade system which is just absolutely fucking insanity. There are huge restrictions on useful functionality, so it can never be a one-stop place. The licensing and Apple ID management is a total fucking mess too, can't consolidate or transfer licenses like just about every previous Mac system in existence, all sorts of normal concepts like vol or other discounts are a pain/non-existent. I have an old iTools account, and I'm not even allowed to change the primary email address!
The MAS experience, and Apple's online service experience in general over significant time, is just miserable, completely unnecessarily too. Maybe they'll fix that someday, but it doesn't seem to be a priority so here we are :(.
I also cherish having control over subscription renewals from one list and the Apple's easy refund process in the event of a third-party app not turning out to be worth the money (or an outright scam).
And as a dev I like knowing that anything I publish will be available to all Mac users.
I do hate the crappy App Store.app UI though. Feels like navigating a clunk web page, and why the fluff did they remove the download progress stats?? You have to hit F4 to see the actual size/downloaded numbers in the Launchpad (or in the Applications folder I guess).
Most independent software developers should not care about units sold, because it comprises far too many $200-$400 PCs that don’t buy much software.
They should care about the $1,000+ PC market, those are your best customers, and where Apples market share by units is at least 25%, and surging higher with the M1.
No, you are not. And even if we are a minority, we should definitely abandon the macOS platform if our right to choice, ownership and control is deliberately denied to us on it just the sake of apple's profit margins.
You can't download even free apps from the App Store without providing an email address, phone number, and street address (to get an Apple ID). The App Store app also sends the mac's hardware serial number to Apple when you launch it, associating it with your identity in the logs. The email and phone required are verified so you can't just make some shit up.
This means that to get any apps from the App Store, even free ones, you must be thoroughly de-anonymized.
Not caring about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like not caring about free speech because you have nothing to say.
Developers should reject the App Store on customer privacy grounds alone. When this becomes the sole method of distributing apps on the mac, as it is on iOS, the world becomes a much worse place, as then the US government had permanent access without a warrant to every app you use.
Please don't contribute to building that world.
There is also the issue of surveillance. Apple processed warrantless FISA surveillance orders for 30,000 users last year, per their own transparency report.
It's possible that people don't want Apple (and by extension the FBI and US military, with no probable cause or warrant required) knowing the apps they purchase and use, or when, or on which devices.
Being App Store only prohibits that, and requires that your users be subject to this surveillance.
It's the same issue with posting to Instagram, for example: deciding to donate free content to Facebook there makes the product more attractive to Facebook's users and makes it harder for small businesses to opt out of using Facebook's ad business. Decisions like this make the whole world worse.
During a software license purchase for macOS, you either need to provide your PII to Apple, or to an indie developer.
In your opinion, is it safer to provide your PII to an indie developer than to Apple as part of such a purchase?
Assuming that is the case, is your objection to Apple having your PII then extended to all other large-volume payment processors such as Shopify, Stripe, Amazon, and PayPal as well?
(Please don't let the downvotes stop you from expressing these views again and again. You are not a minority on this.)
Consumers go where it's most convenient, and sellers follow them. Anything else is wishful thinking at best.
Objectively that isn't the Mac App Store in general, thankfully Apple's incompetence in the user experience has held them back in further damaging society by centralising application installation further.
The App Store might be safe and all, just like Disneyland is a safe place for kids, but I personally prefer the real world.
Worrying about coming close to $1mm/annual sales is something precisely zero of them were worried about.
The answer to your question is, according to what I've read, yes - at $999,999 you owe $150K. At $1,000,001, you owe $300K. But - if you can get to $1mm, it's highly likely that $1.5mm, $2.0mm+, etc... are coming soon enough.
Many developers are focussing on $50k, $60k, type scenarios, where the 30% to 15% means enough money in their pocket to afford new development hardware, etc...
So if next year your sales fall slightly below $1m, you end up paying $150k in extra Apple tax. Then the following year you go back to the 15% rate.
If an App is found through external marketing they take a minimal fee. But if it's discovered through the store they take the full commission.
a) If you currently make under 1$ million your rate will now be 15%
b) If you to over 1 million you will be charged progressively, so each additional dollar you now only get 70%
c) If you go over, the next year your starting rate will be 30% for every dollar
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program...
> If a participating developer surpasses the 1 million USD threshold, the standard commission rate will apply for the remainder of the year.
If you make $999K from January to June, your July revenues will be charged at 30%. That's pretty close to a progressive fee structure, but not quite exactly progressive.
In no case will they claw back $150K from the money they already paid out.
So you can make 1MM and keep 850k or make 1.001MM and keep 660.001k?
I suppose it's a first class problem to have but it's odd why Apple would make (a small number of companies admittedly) have it all.
I suspect it's a policy that will change after Tim Cook reads the viral blog post in 2022
Only the marginal fee goes to 30% -- there is no retroactive application to the first $1MM of income. The new rate applies to future income only.
And unfortunately, triggering the rate increase is sticky. If you go over $1MM is 2021, the 30% rate will apply to all of your income in 2022. (If you are under $1MM in 2022, the rate will reset to 15% for 2023).
This is the actual confusing part. Surely Apple could just apply the 15% rate to the first $1MM of every developer's income in each year instead. It's simpler, and it doesn't create the weird incentive to depress earnings at the end of the calendar year if they are approaching $1MM.
- 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?
Or do "In App Purchases" not really allow for deploying new code and features?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Maybe because it's none of your business?
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 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.
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)?
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 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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
Do both, at the very least.
You could say that the developer account + notarization requirement is still a way for Apple to have a monopoly, but there aren't many stories of legitimate (ie. not adware) applications getting their certificate revoked or being rejected by notarization.
But I agree that the App Store is a far better experience both in purchase and then upgrade. My mum has one non-app store app on her Mac and is always befuddled by the upgrade prompt. Even for my own use I find the App Store upgrade is almost always better than other means.
I also hate that the purchase is tied to my Apple ID, especially for a utility that I'd like to use in another computer. Say a workstation where I might have a different Apple ID.
If an app, for example, can be installed in two work machines, I don't want my Apple ID to dictate which machines.
Anyways rant over.
I get that for the seller's point of view the Mac App Store's updated policy is a boon.
It truly sucks and I regret the few purchases I made with it. But, the light is at the end of the tunnel: Windows 10 and WSL.
On a more serious note, you shouldn't be so dismissive of open source desktop environments, KDE 5 is quite usable today, and GNOME 40 looks to be pretty good too. Give it a whirl, you might just like it.
But the Apple Store, that’s the nail in the coffin? You’re going to go back to googling to find which specific drivers you need because of the Apple Store?
A fine comparison is the windows App Store which is genuinely like playing Russian roulette with a gun made of butter. The Mac App Store is much much much less crazy.
The Mac has its fair share of suck but my word at least they actually tried to put something cohesive together.
Going to put it honestly but I don’t think Microsoft are earning my respect or attention, just shouting about how wonderful their product is while it’s falling to pieces in my hands.
Wherever you go there are puddles of this ick to stand in.
I’ve been at this long enough to know when to give up and walk away.
TL;DR Windows definitely has its own way of doing file system access
Also, WSL1/2 has been great - docker on WSL2 is fantastic, close to zero configuration required.
Wait until you try mixed mode windows and Linux containers. That’s the definition of a shitshow.
Not on my 20H2 release, wdym?
This is a rather bizarre list since I never had these issues on my Windows 10 installation.
I (and many people) used to buy all apps under one ID and would have to do this. Apple and the software publishers have moved to "Family Sharing" for most apps which means I can buy an app and they can install it without having to deal with multiple App Store IDs. That's true for MacOS and iOS.
App stores also kill otherwise free open-source projects as it adds an unnecessary financial burden on them.
Remind them we have been doing fine without it on the desktop for decades now. Ask them why PAYING Apple for the privilege of adding VALUE to the macOS platform - by developing and distributing their wares on that platform - doesn't make them feel like a jackass!? Apple should be the one paying them for creating value for the macOS platform!
The App Store protects users from shitty developers and scummy companies. Users appreciate that. People like having a single point for discovery, reviews, updates, and refunds.
Every time an third-party app turned out to be different than advertised Apple refunded me within a day. Meanwhile an app which uses their own payments system screwed me over a month ago and I'm still waiting for a response from them.
Doesn't campaigning for depriving users of the choice to use the App Store make you "feel like a jackass!?"
What "CHOICE" are you blabbering about? Can you install an app on the ios independently without resorting to risky jailbreaking on your iDevice?
With similar closed Apple ARM processors (like in the iDevices) now on the Mac platform too, Apple is moving towards denying us CHOICE on the macOS platform too. (And for all those who want to reply that this is not going to happen, Apple is boiling the frog slowly - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog ... Apart from the closed Apple ARM processors, the latest version of the macOS already CRIPPLES firewalls to allow any Apple authorised application to bypass the firewalls to spy better on its users, and to exert more control over the device (worst case e.g. killswitch).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
I definitely try my best. Even for downloading Xcode and/or MacOS system updates I will try to scour the Apple dev sites for proper installers.
I understand 30% is a large cut and I wish they'd cut it down to 15% across the board [it could be a competitive advantage, too].
Probably by user-hostile developers who want to give the impression that people don't want the App Store, likely because Apple's policies prevent them from preying upon users.
(One of the top comments here is by a dev acting surprised they can't snoop on users who buy their products)
> [not-publicly-disclosed-but-substantially-less-than–30]%
Later in the article:
> a 3.5% fee with all those downsides is substantially worse for both me and my customers than a flat 15%.
I wonder what Paddle's fee is...
It's a real chore to figure out what apps that aren't available through the appstore (Chrome, VSCode, etc.) are doing to my computer. So much so that I'd rather just castrate them by default and deal with breakage later.
Mac Addresses and Device Identifiers APIs make sense to limit coming from the privacy minded company.
This is an issue in both iOS and Mac app stores. Certain apps are (arguably rightly) only available in certain regions (like banking apps) but Apple's poor design means you now have to switch stores to upgrade.
So Capital One tells me I have to upgrade my app I need to log out my Apple account, switch the region to USA, type in my address, phone numbers, and a USA credit card (this is for apple), then start the store back up. Sometimes it takes a while for it to switch. I can then download the new version of the Capital One app. Then my MUFG Bank app needs an update so I have to repeat the process to switch back the Japan store.
Even funnier, the app store will tell me I need to upgrade but then won't upgrade (Because I'm not on the right store) so it's clearly the same store since the upgrade notices flow through the same store app, it's just bad design.
Why Apple can't figure this out is beyond me. They're an international company. They must have 1000s of employees that have to deal with this issue. Sure I get it does not affect the majority of users. The same can be said for accessibility features yet they still make them.
Do google patient this or for whatever reason that apple can't implement it?
Can you guarantee that your proposed distribution mechanism will give me a refund if I ask for it?
Apple has always given me a refund for all third-party apps, almost no questions asked, ever.
Whereas on the other hand, apps/services which bypass In-App Purchases and use their own payment systems stall me for weeks or months before they refund, if ever. For example I'm still trying to get my money back from Couchsurfing after they basically hijacked my account about a month ago until I paid a "COVID contribution" just to delete my info.
What these people are suggesting is the worse evil, with the goal or at least the end result being to make users more vulnerable to all sorts of predatory third-parties.
You may downvote these comments to manufacture an impression of homogenous opinion in this echo chamber but I will continue to support Apple with my money to counter that. The App Store is necessary, for users and for devs.