Why the Mac App Store rocks for developers

I think this could be a gold mine for devlopers. They make a app send it to apple and then bank the $. No ads needed, no hosting no credit cards to worry about.

This is a great thing as long as Apple allows other sw installation methods as well.

You have to be a paid (not free-registered) mac developer just to see the information about this? WTF is that?

I'm a paid iOS developer and registered for the free Mac developer program since I don't write Mac apps for release. Now they want me to pay just to *decide* if I want to start?

I think most of the people here are missing some important considerations and understandings.

1) The mobile world is very different from the "PC" world. A vast majority of applications being sold for mobile devices are what I would call "short" applications. Short applications are highly focused on a very select interaction. Where as a desktop application for the PC is loosely focused on a generalized objective and is built to provide a more involved experience to achieve a full end-result. The best way to compare this is in the difference between a novel and a short story.

2) Steve himself stated that the appstore would be just one of the ways for acquiring an application. He did not state that it would be the only way. The reasons behind building an appstore for the desktop is very different from the reasons for doing so for mobile devices. It will take many years for and/or a very dramatic shift to lock-out external distribution models for the desktop. Also consider the fact that Apple will have no success in forcing the big players into an exclusive appstore model.

3) At no point has there ever been a block on third-party static libraries for the development of native mobile applications. Even if the appstore became the sole distribution of Mac applications, These third-party static libraries could still be used. Where it could get (helpfully) interesting is if they locked out Java, Qt, and a few other frameworks that do not use native source (Cocoa / Objective-C). Keep in mind that the locking down of the appstore from other non-native environments is not a bad idea from a user experience perspective. Java, Qt, and Adobe Air all have had their fair-share of untoward user experiences.

4) Keep in mind that even-though Apple will take 30% from the top of a sale, this usually is comparable to same overhead in operations and advertising expenses that occurs in the current distribution model.


Who knows... maybe my own perception is... well... distorted.

Is apple going to host the bandwidth and charge like iOS, or are the devs going to host there own apps?

I can't buy shrink wrapped Mac software anywhere near where live and the number of times I've followed searches to "Free software that does X" and ended up with some watermarked crapware beggars belief.
I don't see it as a threat to existing devs as you can still use existing routes to obtain your apps. The vast majority of Mac owners never buy any software anyway. They buy the machine to perform a task and it does that till it gets replaced.

Do you think I could buy Adobe Creative Suite on the Mac App Store?

If done right, this could very well clamp down on a lot of piracy as well. Or at least make it that much more difficult. Same effect that Steam has on the games it distributes.

Can developers charge more for the app store version?

Maybe so. I'm all for another easy way to download/install/buy apps. But I think it's difficult to compare the iOS App Store with a Mac App Store since users can currently get Mac apps from dozens of places, including a developer's own site--but there's only one (legitimate) place to get iOS apps. I think I kind of prefer downloading an app (say, something like MarsEdit, for example) from the developer's site. How often are Apple's current Downloads pages used now? Same thing, without Apple's portion of the booty. And as far as automatic downloading of updates, isn't the Sparkle framework and the like widely in use?

Seems great for you since you don't care about making money, but this is basically a 30% revenue cut for many developers. Boycotting the store will be tough since users will be less willing than ever to look for software outside the store.