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The Subtle Developer Exodus From the Mac App Store
An anonymous reader writes: Milen Dzhumerov, a software developer for OS X and iOS, has posted a concise breakdown of the problems with the Mac App Store. He says the lack of support for trial software and upgrades drives developers away by preventing them from making a living. Forced sandboxing kills many applications before they get started, and the review system isn't helpful to anyone. Dzhumerov says all of these factors, and Apple's unwillingness to address them, are leading to the slow but steady erosion of quality software in the Mac App Store.
"The relationship between consumers and developers is symbiotic, one cannot exist without the other. If the Mac App Store is a hostile environment for developers, we are going to end up in a situation where, either software will not be supported anymore or even worse, won't be made at all. And the result is the same the other way around – if there are no consumers, businesses would go bankrupt and no software will be made. The Mac App Store can be work in ways that's beneficial to both developers and consumers alike, it doesn't have to be one or the other. If the MAS is harmful to either developers or consumers, in the long term, it will be inevitably harmful to both."
"The relationship between consumers and developers is symbiotic, one cannot exist without the other. If the Mac App Store is a hostile environment for developers, we are going to end up in a situation where, either software will not be supported anymore or even worse, won't be made at all. And the result is the same the other way around – if there are no consumers, businesses would go bankrupt and no software will be made. The Mac App Store can be work in ways that's beneficial to both developers and consumers alike, it doesn't have to be one or the other. If the MAS is harmful to either developers or consumers, in the long term, it will be inevitably harmful to both."
The author forgot the biggest one: money. I did a lot of iOS development in the early days and earned enough to buy a nice car (not super nice, just a mere mortal nice car). I'm now experiencing the long tail of the cycle. I get about $200-300 a month of sales. I wrote straight sale apps, not in app purchase type apps.
The biggest reason I don't do iOS development anymore (other than here and there) is because it's too damn crowded. I now have to invest in marketing and advertisement. I'd spend 3 months developing a really nice piece of solid software just to get a few downloads. It's not worth it for me. I've moved on.
The author has some gripes, and I have some more, but they are just gripes.When people were making good money on it, those gripes were farts in the wind. Now that most people are making no money, those gripes are still farts in the wind.
You're coding it wrong.
But there are no clear guidelines for coding it "right". Apps are often rejected for unclear reasons, with just a vague and terse comment from the rejecter. I have had apps rejected, then resubmitted them a few days later, with no changes, and had them accepted.
The Apple app store is flooded with lots of similar apps, and they no longer highlight new apps. So it is very hard for a new developer to get started. I know a team of developers that worked for nearly a year to create their app. They put it on the app store for a price point of $4.99. A week later they had sold five copies. The following week, three more. After a month, they had less than $100 in revenue for a year of work. Back in 2010 and 2011, it was easy to make money selling apps. Unless you already have a customer base, those days are gone.
I think he has some good points here, but as an IT (support) guy, I see other problems with the App Store that are completely unrelated. One of the biggest is the issue of "volume licensing". I don't know if Apple has sorted it all out recently, but last I looked into it, it was a confusing mess of a program with little administrative control. IIRC, at one point Apple was advising businesses to gift employees with applications that would then be bound to the employee AppleID, which is completely stupid, without the ability to withdraw the license and reuse it.
It's also pretty frustrating that you need to put in an Apple ID to install or update any application, even if it's free. For example, if the iWork/iLife apps are pre-installed on the system and there's a new update available, even though Apple detects that the apps are already installed, and Apple knows that the upgrades are free, it still won't install the updates until you sign in with an Apple ID. That might not seem like such a big deal, but when you're administering a few hundred Macs, it means that you either need to make every user create their own AppleID, or you need to provide them access to a company Apple ID which you then lose control over. Failing to come up with a solution means that your users are going to be bugged to update applications that they can't update.
And speaking of updates, AFAIK there's no command-line utility for the App Store application. This means that I can't control the thing with a script at all. Making it more confusing, there *is* a command-line utility to download and install system updates, which are normally installed through the App Store GUI. This means that if you look at a list of updates available for your system presented in the App Store application, you can write a script to install some of them automatically, but other updates need to be updated through the GUI. What I wouldn't give to be able to update everything with apt-get.
Getting back to the article, I'm not sure I completely agree with him. I understand his frustration with sandboxing, but on the other hand, left to their own devices, developers seem to do some really dumb and annoying things. For example, instead of using an installer or developing their app to be drag-and-drop, they develop a custom application that installs their software, making it difficult and frustrating to push out in an automated fashion. Or they code their application to require an installer, dumping their files all over the system, when it really shouldn't be necessary. I wouldn't be opposed to Apple supporting applications that require installers, so long as they (a) allowed customers to get access to the unaltered installer; and (b) kept tabs on what the installer did and rejected developers who used them unnecessarily. Otherwise, I think you'd see too much dumb crap on the App Store.
Exactly, there are plenty of ways to get software on a Mac.
Mac App Store is one, and it's required if you want to use iCloud (for security reasons - detailed below).
But there's also Valve's Steam (a good way for games), and you can always roll your own web store - it doesn't take much to accept Paypal or if you are a business, to get Amazon Payments or Google Wallet.
A lot of developers that started with iOS migrated to the MAS when they port their IOS apps to OS X - you find a lot iOS games "enhanced" for the Mac. Cross-platform games usually are on Steam, and there are few on both. Steam is nice, though it limits you to one user at a time, while MAS lets you have 5 copies on 5 different PCs at once. Useful if you want a quick multiplayer without having to have 5 copies (especially in a family setting).
Regarding MAS and iCloud, well, you have to hark back to the bad old days of Microsoft office viruses - they'd infect Microsoft office's default template files and then subsequently infect every document since then. Well, you can imagine one using a variety of exploits that infect an entire computer. Use something like iCloud and now the attack's persistent - you reformat the computer, reinstall the app, and boom, you're infected again (thanks cloud!). So Apple made sandboxing a requirement for the MAS, and use that with iCloud mean well, if that happens, damage is limited to within the sandbox. So you're isolating the rest of the computer from the infection target (since the sandbox keeps the infection to a small area) in case a persistent piece of malware tries to remain in that way.
Without sandboxing, a cloud storage account could prove very interesting. I'm actually surprised we're not seeing viruses try to persist using Windows Explorer vulnerabilities and say, DropBox. (Remember the ones involving specially constructed image files? Imaging putting one of those in DropBox, and now when you browse to it, your PC gets infected. And the virus makes sure to keep a compromised image there so even if you wipe and reinstall, you install dropbox and boom, infected again.)
In none of the articles could I find evidence of the 'exodus from the app store.'
Maybe the title would be better, "Things that Could Be Improved in the App Store"
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You're coding it wrong.
I know you're making a joke (which worked pretty well) - but if he's complaining about forced sandboxing, I think Apple is (sorta) in the right. I can see the argument for allowing some kinds of apps to escape the sandbox, but it should require some hoops be jumped through and it should require specific notification to the user.
#DeleteChrome
Most... and I mean 99.99% of apps in both the Apple and Android stores are utter crap. Completely worthless. Surprise surprise, after a few years your customer base has become jaded. I never pay for anything through any app store anymore. It's almost guaranteed to be garbage. Even the Free games are nothing more than gambling scams anymore. You want my money? I need to read about your app in forums, from real people.
Developers burned themselves.
FTFY.
In my view, the Apple store was so hostile that I never even bothered.
In addition to all the issues pointed out in TFS, there's:
o The rejection of adult content;
o The constant breaking of both OSX and IoS WRT earlier (but very recent) hardware
o The failure to bugfix both OSX and IoS except for a few bugs in the first few years
o The arbitrary dropping of useful capabilities (PPC emulation is the poster child for this)
Plus, they seem to be able to pick the perfect path to annoy the shite out of me:
o My macbook pro... suffering from serious bugs at its current OS... can't be upgraded to the next (not even latest) because they stopped supporting the CPU *and* the OS version
o The new Mac Pro is exactly what I would *not* buy. Can't be expanded without desk warts, and so hugely vulnerable to physical mishap
o Never released a mid-tower, which is really what I need (but nothing below (or above) an older Mac Pro is properly expandable)
Best I can do is keep buying used earlier Mac Pros and then installing Mavericks on them, while completely ignoring the existence of the app store otherwise.
The sad thing is I really like the OS, and I'd be happy to develop for it if they made development accessible and quit leaving trails of unfixed bugs behind them.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I submitted an app to Apple for approval, which normally took 2 weeks at the time. After 2 weeks the app still was not approved. I reached out to Apple for the reason of the delay, and they wouldn't give any feed back besides the application is in review. After 3 or 4 months they came back and said the application was denied because they did not like one of the sentences in the description of the application. Re-submitted without that sentence then was approved a week or two later.
In the meantime a competitor beat me to the store with an app that was quite similar, but only because of the delay! Fuck Apple!
After a few attempts that made it through the gauntlet, it quickly became a fool's errand. Why should anyone risk months of work only to watch some nameless, faceless drone at Apple issue a thumbs down rejection? At least in Roman times, the Emperor was brave enough to show his face when issuing the thumbsdown. What a wretched market. It's impossible to do anything except sell stupid games. (And I say that as someone who likes stupid games.) Then they have the gall to take 30% for doing next to nothing. Seriously. It's just a db insert and some FTP.
This analogy would ALMOST work except for there aren't 42 italian restaurants lined up, side by side, doing the same thing, all for $.99 with the only visible difference being olive garden vs olive g4rden.
In London and various other cities there is "China Town" with Many Chinese restaurants. Amongst them is Mr Wu's which is an all you can eat buffet for 5UKP (about US$8).
In Manchester there is curry mile with many Indian restaurants. Again many are very cheap.
It is a completely valid analogy.
Try that with a burger king...
They opened a Burger King near me, behind a petrol (gas) station, where it was't easily seen from the nearby busy road. It was a bad location, so it got virtually no customers. It was open a couple of years then closed - presumably the minimum time before they could get out of the franchise agreement and/or property let. ALL businesses suffer if the owners don't do the market research.
I've got a MacBook Air. It serves as my secondary PC (as a Windows user on the desktop and a Linux user on the server). Of all the apps that are installed on my Mac that aren't from Apple, I think only a single one of them (MPlayerX) is from the app store. From Dropbox to VLC to Chrome to Creative Suite to DiskInventoryX to SmoothMouse to Steam, almost nothing is available in the app store.
In fact, some things that I run on my mac (like Civ 5) through other "app stores" (like Steam) are available in the Mac app store... but are essentially crippled because they don't support multiplayer with the regular version of the game. And even though I bought the game, I would have to pay for it again to get the App Store version. Which, I wouldn't do, because I like actually being able to play multiplayer games with my friends who bought it like everybody else (through Steam).