In agreement with Marco Arment? I shall quickly venture outside and inform myself of the possibility of catching a fleeting glimpse of an avian sus scrofa domesticus. “The Mac App Store is in significant danger of becoming an irrelevant, low-traffic flea market where buyers rarely venture for serious purchases. And I bet that’s not what Apple had in mind at all.” There’s an issue with the Mac App Store: Apple runs the danger of chasing most serious applications away from the store. While I would personally consider this to be a big win for computing, I’m sure Apple doesn’t exactly see it that way.
Flea-Market is an apt description.
#1 source of Bat Hero and Spiderguy action figure!
I’m appalled by the lack of lock-down on the Mac compared to the iPhone/iPod which is facilitating the Mac App Store’s future irrelevance, think of the shareholders.
Were does this leave the relevance of Metro?
OSX is build from the ground up for piracy, because of a corrosive mentality of openness bleuarghgeuargh *mouthfrothing*
The Mac app store *is* going to become irrelevant, for any number of reasons as I see it:
1. OS X is not iOS, no matter how much closer Apple brings them in functionality. The sort of “sandbox” that Apple wishes to mandate on apps for the Mac is not acceptable to most serious users. They may be fine with it on a mobile device, where such things have been par for the course since day one in the case of iOS, but the Mac has a serious ecosystem of entrenched apps that need to be able to do things outside of Apple’s requirements. If you look in the Mac app store, you won’t even see commonplace apps like Skype for this reason. Mac apps need to access the filesystem, USB devices, etc.
2. Mac developers aren’t going to pay Apple’s $99 fee. This is not iOS, where there are no other sources of apps. We’re accustomed to searching and downloading from web sites the serious productivity applications we need, and no developer fee is required to put your app up in a dmg on your own page, thank you very much. I’ve always thought that requiring developers to pay for the privilege of making your platform better was complete bullshit anyway.
3. Tying some apps to one Apple ID is no good depending on the various licensing options an app may offer, eg. family packs where you can purchase five licenses at a discount. You don’t necessarily want apps to be tied to your Apple ID in this case, e.g. if you have other family members you wish to use a valid family license but do not wish to give them access to your account.
Bottom line: OS X is not iOS and will never be. I don’t think the app store for OS X is necessarily doomed to failure under all circumstances, but as Apple has made it at this moment, it will not be taken seriously by anyone other than Apple.
That’s a remarkably insightful point.
When I published my book via Amazon’s CreateSpace, not only was there no fee at all, but they even gave me a free physical copy, then sold me a case at a 75% discount with no restrictions. Told my friends, and now some of them are publishing books via the same store.
Sounds like a company that knows how to build a store full of unique products – rather than charging me to put product in their store, they essentially paid me with perks.
Apple should take note.
BTW, has anyone here ever set up a paid product in the UbuntuOne store? Just curious about any barriers to entry there, as I’ve never tried it.
If the App store were to succeeded, we’d have a larger problem.
Bastard.
Edited 2012-07-27 06:23 UTC
Follow-up:
http://www.marco.org/2012/07/26/not-just-geeks
Man, it took him less than 24 hours to get caught by the brigade for deviating from the party line.
I, for one, welcome our new idiot overlords.
Welcome to Idiocracy.
Edited 2012-07-27 06:34 UTC
I could have liked the App Store very much: finally a central software repository, rather than a situation where every application has its own updater and installation method. More trust, less hunting around.
I can understand why Apple wants to sandbox applications, it reduces the attack vector when an application is exploited, or when a malicious application ends up in the App Store. Unfortunately, many of the applications that I use frequently do not fit in the current sandboxing model: VMWare since it installs drivers and requires direct hardware access, my GPS software (requires hardware access), Dropbox, etc.
The problem is that Apple wants to nanny us too much. They should have added many more entitlements, and ask the user if they approve in user-friendly terms. Then I could decide myself what an application is allowed to do on my system. Installing device drivers, VMWare? Sure! SuperDuperTwitterClient? Hell no!
Some will say that this is primarily a problem for power users. I beg to disagree, many of the applications that my non-techie friends use, will never be available in the app store. Besides that, we are talking about Macs, general purpose computers that people use for programming, design, etc. Not tablets!
We still get some protection via the ‘only run signed apps’ gatekeeper option. But it’s all a missed opportunity. The Mac App Store could be a central repository of software, now it’s primarily a repository of Apple software, some games, some utilities, and lots of junk.
Edited 2012-07-27 06:39 UTC
That would probably just lead to “UAC fatigue” in most of its users…
MacOS is designed for Piracy!
Once enough developers leave the App Store and ^aEUR~side^aEURload^aEURTM applications, Apple will have no recourse but to block that method of getting apps, or they could stop blocking APIs. I know which they^aEURTMll choose.
Oh, well. They want money. More money. Even more money.
That’s their main and primary goal. And how can you get lots of money? by charging gazillion of people small fees and payments. They know what they’re doing.
People who buy specially crafted piece of software once on the few years are not a benefit to Apple. It’s just not enough. They need to be able to convince users to buy new version every X months, so they get even more money.
Now, there’s nothing wrong in earning money. However, this type of practice, which we already know from the commercial software market in general [“we have a new version with 2 new feature. You need to upgrade, or else”].
If anybody thinks users are most important for Apple then he’s obviously wrong. Money’s on the first place.
Defining your market to the non-geek/non-nerd section of the population is a problem as in the long term what the geek/nerds want is what the general population wants in a few years.
1970s you were one if you just wanted to own a computer.
Early 1980s using emails/BBSs/Usenet made you one.
Late 1980s-early 1990s surfing the Web made you one.
1990s Video chat or sending pictures half way around the world the same day you shot them.
Late 1990s and early 2000s social networking pre-Facebook made you one.
Whatever nerds/geeks want today – the general population will want tomorrow!
Edited 2012-07-27 13:27 UTC
Not always…
I am a geek because I write code. I’m not seeing the general population doing that. I was writing code back in 1981, and I’m still doing it. Non of my non-geek friends are doing that…
But… I take your point and pretty much agree…
Late 1980s the Web? Don’t tell that to Tim Berners-Lee – who seems happy thinking he made the first web browser, server, website in 1990-91 time frame
Your time scales seem a bit off in general, more or less corresponding to when a given activity could be reasonably first done – but computers were still geeky overall throughout the 80s or even early 90s, similar emails/BBSs/Usenet (some of those hardly really caught on with general population, or in very changed form, likewise computers), webcams and such also early naughties. Especially when looking less at Bay Area, more world at large.
Edited 2012-07-30 02:38 UTC
I think the Mac AppStore is a design fail. It lacks functionality, doesn’t really stand on its own and what’s worst, it lacks some originality. It isn’t a Mac OS X application but an iOS application in OS X which kind of looks alien to me.
Apple should resign the whole thing from scratch to be more like a Mac OS X application and it should also make it faster. I think Apple should just forget gaming and support Steam in their quest of creating a standard gaming platform for all three mainstream platforms. No one is going to buy a full price game from Mac AppStore if they can get the same game cheaper from Steam and run in on Windows, OS X and GNU/Linux. Not to mention all the other benefits Steam offers.
Also the kind of feature I’d like to see from it is that when you browse to some application, you’d see similar applications to it and applications that are related to that particular application. Mac AppStore is lagging behind the Android Market which cannot be a good thing. At least there’s that “more from the same developer” part.
I’d also like to see meta-packages in Mac AppStore. It’s pain to hunt some of the parts of the application suite in Mac AppStore. It would be very useful if you could just buy iLife package and get small discount for buying all those applications at the same time.
Edited 2012-07-27 14:13 UTC
1. MacPorts
2. Fink
3. Homebrew
(in no particular order)
Wishful thinking — and there simply isn’t enough data to justify this conclusion. Whether or not you like Apple or approve of its App Store practices, the fact of the matter is that it’s got a pretty big ecosystem now. I don’t like their practices, but so what. Many, if not most, developers will hold their noses and still submit their apps to Apple’s store, because of the breadth of that reach. The only thing that would change that is if Android and Microsoft start eating its lunch in a big way.
You are aware that the article is talking about Mac OS not iOS? They are two completely separate app stores.
How does that affect in any way shape or form what he was saying?