My ultimate fear is that the complacent state of the Mac App Store would lead to the slow erosion of the Mac indie community. The MAS is the best place to get your software, it comes bundled with your OS, it’s very convenient but when all the issues compound, developers will vote with their feet and continue the slow exodus. I feel that Apple needs to encourage the availability of high quality software rather than quantity over quality – the first step would addressing the core issues that have been known for years. The Mac platform would be a much worse place if we prioritise short-term gains, boasting about the hundreds of thousands of free abandonware rather than concentrate on the long-term fundamentals to sustain a healthy and innovative ecosystem.
It’s finally starting to dawn on people that application stores’ primary goal is not to make the lives of developers easier. No, the one true goal of application stores is to drive the price of software down to zero or near-zero – and if the side effect of that is that the independent and small developers who built your platform go out of business or leave the platform altogether, that’s just too damn bad.
It was fun in the short term, when the low-hanging fruits were ripe for the picking, but everyone with more than two brain cells to rub together could see the unsustainability of it all. The ‘app economy’ is pretty close to bust, and I suspect zero to none of the suggestions listed in this article will be implemented by Apple. It’s not in their interest to raise the prices of software in their application stores.
I disagree. The true purpose of app stores is the same purpose of Pet Rocks and other constructed fads: Sell disposable junk (that costs very little to make) after making people think they want it.
Software requiring big investments to make like Photoshop, AutoCAD, MATLAB, VMware, PinnacleStudio/PowerDirector/Ulead VideoStudio, RHEL, Maya etc is still sold at prices well above zero, and is sold outside app stores.
Even for software inside app stores, if it requires significant investment, or if the small developer behind it has put their heart and soul in the software and it’s good, it’s generally sold for a price above 1$.
But the idea you can just slap together an app in a weekend, put it for sale for 1$ or so and start making money, is dead. It used to work, but how many 1$ apps and games do people really need? The fad died.
However, App Stores are still useful to sell apps (just not the 1$ junk) and allow devs to easily monetize ads, they are just past their glory days (of selling 1$ junk by the ton).
Edited 2014-10-14 17:06 UTC
Not all apps in the App Store cost $1. I’ve bought a few, including the wonderful 1Password, that cost quite a bit more than that.
There has been a general erosion of software price, a process that goes beyond the spread of platform specific app stores although app stores are part of that process. Adobe is a good example of company with a long track record of making extremely complex and (mostly) high quality software that has struggled to maintain it’s margins with the traditional software bought as a product model, hence it’s switch to the renting software model, something I just don’t like.
Not sure what the solution is here, or even if there is one. I don’t think a return of the software market to a (partly imagined) past happy times model is viable. Time has moved on and we live in a world of increasingly low price, low margin software.
Developers can, and probably will, abandon the various app stores where they can to try to seek higher margins and greater control over their business environment but I am not sure that is going to work across the board so long as app stores continue to exist.
Personally, I think app stores are all about advertising. You bait people with free apps in the hopes they buy the more expensive versions with more functionality.
The problems lie with what can actually be done with the hardware plugged into the app stores. There is only so much you can do on a phone or tablet without a keyboard that people would be willing to spend big bucks for. Content creation is where the big money is at for developers and that is not what is done with most keyboard-less devices. And as far as consumption goes, people already expect free apps if they have to pay for the content itself.
That’s remarkably obtuse. What kind of strategy would involve nuking developers on your own platform? More likely, they have a different strategy in mind (such as appearing vast compared with competitors, to fulfill a marketing checklist), and the drive to lower and lower margins for app makers is a consequence of that, rather than a goal.
On the other hand, Nintendo has made efforts to protect it’s own developers’ (and it’s own) profit margins, but I don’t see a lot of defense of Nintendo in these comments on osnews.com.
At some point you are going to have to realize that like most things in life, it’s about balance. Developers need to be able to earn a living, and buyers need to be able to afford the wares peddled by developers. And if you really want to know how to achieve that – go talk to an economist, then talk to several more.
Although I like having the ability to side load when necessary, I like getting my apps from an app store. Primarily because it’s easier to ‘shop’ in one place, you can read user reviews and such, and hopefully the apps go through some sort of security scan. Although it certainly isn’t guaranteed that apps in an app store are safe, when you just download an app from some random person’s website, who the hell knows what you’re going to get. There’s a reason why most of the malware on Android happens because of side loading.
Here’s another way to look at it.
For years, many Mac apps have been severely overpriced compared to equivalents on other platforms. I remember when I went back to OS X and wanted to look for a dynamic window tiling utility that gave me similar behaviour to window managers I had on Linux and BSD. The one that suited my needs the “best” (in quotes because it still wasn’t even good enough to lick Xmonad’s feet) ended up costing about US$20. Seriously?!
Then there was an acquaintance of mine last year who went around looking for a OS X blog-publishing app that had the functionality of Windows Live Writer. The only one (in his opinion, I don’t blog so I don’t know) that he found usable was MarsEdit, which cost US$39!!
A lot more examples I can give you, from basic audio conversion apps to vi clients with pretty skins.
I don’t necessarily disagree with the sentiment of the article, but I do feel that many Mac app devs have gotten away with bloated pricing for years.
Edited 2014-10-14 21:51 UTC
This is about the Mac OS X appstore, a very different beast.
When the open-source community successfully competes with commercial software it is good. Yet when big business drives down the price of software it is bad?
The forms of viable commercial software is always in flux. There was a time when you could walk into a shop and spend a good amount of money on boxed screen savers, compression & encryption utilities, Internet firewalls, audio/video players, even web browsers.
Just because a form of software generates revenue today, doesn’t mean it will forever.
For the past 30 years Microsoft was responsible for setting a trend which suggested that software was the premium product while hardware was the commodity. Assuming Thom’s theory is correct (I don’t think it is) that such stores make software too cheap, it seems only fitting that Apple should reverse Microsoft’s software as premium status.
Edited 2014-10-15 01:49 UTC
And i thought the one true goal of application stores is to make money for the application store owner.
The first time (not really but still) I hear someone complain cheap isn’t good simply because it’s not expensive. The modern world is all about price. Big international web-only shops are killing smaller (or even bigger) physical stores and people actually love it. Too bad if some entrepreneurs don’t. We shouldn’t slow the world down just because archaic business models don’t work anymore.
But TBH I don’t think the core idea of app stores is to drive prices down, it’s just a symptom of something bigger.
Edited 2014-10-15 07:39 UTC
… which i almost never used. Mostly buying what I need directly, or in case of games from gog/steam (yes, in that order).
Now the iOS app store… i never visit it any more because it’s full of free with in-app purchases crap. I only buy specific apps if they’re mentioned somewhere else.
So basically both are heading towards fail now.
Edited 2014-10-15 08:57 UTC
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