The Mac App Store has been a boon to many Mac developers since it opened for business in 2011 - more than ten thousand Mac apps are available for download, and any one of the millions of customers who have an Apple ID can buy apps. But it's come with some consequences that have fundamentally altered the way that many developers conduct business, and it's not all for the better.
Why we needed the Mac App Store
Apple previewed the Mac App Store in 2010 at its "Back to the Mac" event, when it gave invitees a look at OS X Lion for the first time. At the time, Steve Jobs sketched out in broad strokes what Apple planned to do with the store: To offer Mac owners the same experience they were already accustomed to with the iOS devices, but on the Mac.
Jobs said that the Mac App Store wasn't there to replace other ways of download software, though it was clear that Apple's intention was to compete.
"It's going to be the best place to discover apps, just like it is on the iPhone and the iPad," said Jobs. "It won't be the only place, but we think it'll be the best place."
The Mac App Store opened with a bang in January, 2011. Within 24 hours a million apps had been downloaded; later that year Apple reported that 100 million apps had been downloaded. It is, by any measure, a success.
And it came at a time when many Mac app developers were desperately looking for a better way to sell their wares.
Apple retail stores were one of the very few places that OS X developers had a reliable place to set boxes on store shelves, unless they had the resources to produce cross-platform products that could also be put on the shelves of retailers who sold PC boxes, like Best Buy. Even then, retail sales were a sketchy proposition: publishers ran the risk of having to take back unsold inventory, for example.
As Apple ramped up iOS product sales, they learned that iPhone and iPod buyers were more interested in purchasing accessories to go along with their new acquisitions - cases, headphones, and so on - and those began to squeeze out the software on Apple retail store shelves. By the end of 2010, it looked dire for many Mac software publishers, so the Mac App Store was a lifeline.
Unintended (or perhaps intended) consequences
As I said at the outset, the Mac App has been great for many developers. I've had developers tell me that without it, they would have either gone out of business or (horrors!) would have had to start developing for other platforms in order to survive. The Mac App Store has brought an entire population of Mac users to third-party apps, many of whom may never have found the software otherwise. It's easy to click on a Dock icon and use your Apple ID to buy software. It can be scary for the average user to fork over their credit card info on a web site they've never seen before.
But as the influence of the Mac App Store has grown, Apple's changed the playing field.
One prominent example of that was in 2011, when Apple told Mac App Store developers that their apps needed to be "sandboxed." Sandboxed apps can't make any changes to the operating system and can't change the way other apps work. If something goes wrong with a sandboxed app - if it crashes - only it is affected. Other apps and the operating system will keep working as if nothing happened.
This has excluded an entire class of applications from being able to be distributed on the Mac App Store: Rogue Amoeba's excellent Audio Hijack Pro, for example, records any audio from any app, but because of the way it works, can't operate in a sandbox environment. Smile Software's fantastic time-saver TextExpander 4 similarly didn't make the cut.
Developers in a bind with sandboxing have two choices - either get their software in line with Apple's system requirements, thus sacrificing features and functionality, or just distribute the software themselves, hoping that customers will find them.
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/95yTP2NLLeM/story01.htm
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