Lessons from early days on the Mac App Store with Evernote

The App Store means different things to different developers.

In the world of Evernote (who I am a big fan and subscriber) the App Store is a perfect vehicle. It is after all a free application that hopes to board you as a subscriber--a truly viable software as a service product. All you need to do is make a great product and they will come.

What if however, you are a developer in the traditional sense where you are used to selling your software through traditional "boxed" software channels with pricing that matches? The App Store creates a new world where Joe Bob the developer has equal capability as does Electronic Arts to produce a game. Joe Bob was squeezed out many years ago by traditional software publishing opting for tried and true as the their buyers were looking for turns on the shelf. That is why you don't see new products at retail for PC and Mac because the cost of shelf space is so high and no one takes the risk with anything but the big titles.

In the case of Joe Bob the budgets are different of course. EA can throw millions into a project but as we have all seen million dollar budgets don't always make a great game. Further the boxed software business often relies on using licenses from movies, sports and television to create their products. These licenses have a cost... and those costs are not easily absorbed into the App Store model we have seen for iOS. And for those who like to license their brands they are not interested in the software business unless it moves the needle on the balance sheet. So lower licensing fees with the hope of a hit on an App Store is hard to sell. One last point - many traditional software publishers rely on the fact that those who hold license can't get into retail on their own easily.

In the new App World the license holders may try (and fail) to enter the App Store themselves not knowing what it really means to make a software product. We as users suffer from worse titles that are underfunded as a result.

I think things can be good all around if there is not a race to the bottom in the App Store economy. However Joe Bob is motivated to race to the bottom as he doesn't have the costs the big guys do. The traditional software publishers and long time Mac developers are motivated to keep prices up.

This is what you see on the Mac App Store today. I think we as customers would be smart not to yell too much about high prices and understand that a middle ground is going to have to be reached if you want the mid to high-end software world to stay around.

Just my two cents.

Sounds nice and all, but until the App Store has user controls of what and how much data gets sent to who-knows-where, I'm not touching it (nor may I for any machine I use professionally).

iTunes has you opt-in to Ping and for album art downloads, the App Store needs the same sort of privacy safeguards.