Bodega 1.3 available, a fun alternative to the Mac App Store

It would have been interesting to interview some developers to find out whether they have ever gotten significant sales for their apps through Bodega.

Also, one of the most important parts of the article is misleading: it doesn't make sense to compare Bodega's fee with Apple's 30% because Apple handles payment processing and licensing. Bodega does not do that for you. That means another 5-9% for most developers, so the total is going to be 12-16% vs. 30%, not 7% vs 30%. On top of that the developer has to eat the cost of supporting the licensing process, not to mention auto-updating.

I like Bodega, I've found some apps on sale there in the past. It's as nice a shopping experience as the Mac app store, and they have lots of stuff the Mac store doesn't have... yet.

Competition is good!

I just started using Bodega, and I gotta say, It's lovely for me so far.
For third party app updates, I had been using App Fresh for a couple years,
and my two gripes with it were the slow download speed, and if it couldn't find a download file, it made you navigate to it using a built in browser. Bodega has a concise interface for enumerating the apps on your computer,finding updates for them, and downloading and installing said updates.

This illustrates exactly WHY we need an app store for the Mac.

If this one has been available for a while, why is it it wasn't covered more in the press?

An app store HAS to be comprehensive, and known to most people, otherwise it won't provide the benefits of the app store as provided on the iDevices.

The whole point of the store concept is to have a CENTRAL place that everyone goes to to get their apps. This way, volume can be achieved to allow for the long term benefits.

For example, if Twitter hadn't become the foremost short-social communicator, do you think it would even be 10% as popular as it is today?

This service obviously had very bad marketing for people to not even mention it for the past couple months as we were all talking about the Apple Mac app store.

Amazing isn't it?... How many stand alone 'App' stores for the Mac were there before Apple announced their own?

Even with the success of the iApp store no one had the notion to think of doing it for Mac. In fact most people derided the possibility of such a thing.

But as soon as Apple show everyone how it's done, we have a (mini) flood of copy cats.

Just goes to show - where Apple lead, others follow.

i just downloaded bodega, but i get the message 'sorry, we're closed.' didn't know that online stores have opening hours like any regular retailer. interesting...

I remember trying this a while back and thinking it was promising. I'm trying it again now that you've posted about it as a competitor for Apple's store and, ironically enough, it doesn't load at all. Just get a "sorry we're closed ... connecting" screen which never goes away. If this was a real competitor for the Mac App Store, it'd be able to handle a little blog traffic.

Looks like they are swamped!