Story of Two Developers Who Are Reporting Growth in Revenue After Leaving Apple's App Store (techcrunch.com)

John Biggs, writing for TechCrunch: In what amounts to one of the purest and most interesting experiments in assessing the value of Mac OS's App Store, the founder of Rogue Amoeba posted a description of what happened when he pulled his app Piezo. The result? More revenue as a whole without much damage to sales. The impetus for the move came after Apple pulled the Dash app off of the App Store. In the 100-day period since the move, Dash maintained and even increased revenue and found that its users didn't care which platform they were using -- 84% of the customers simply moved over to the independent app license from the App Store license. The bottom line? "It feels great to have full control over my business and to avoid App Store installation/updating/purchasing issues," wrote Dash creator Bogdan Popescu. When Paul Kafasis tried to move away from the App Store he was worried he'd lose half of his sales. After all, many months saw about 50% of sales coming from the App Store directly. When he pulled the app a year ago, however, all of those App Store sales turned into direct sales through his website, a fact that surprised and amused Kafasis.

Comments

Imma Dash Store Relocator

[TechyImmigrant]

I am one of those who had been using Dash and was forced to go through a re-licensing procedure when Apple kicked it off the Apple app store.

While moderately convenient, the Apple MacOS app store is not good and the experience buying from outside is better. The number of reviews on each application is too small to be useful. It is often 0. I assume this is because they are not being shows. I've posted reviews and they never appeared. So you are left looking at the promotional blurb, wondering if the application is going to be good.

Also there are bugs with the App store's licensing code, because I often get told I don't 'own this application on this computer' (I do, I purchased it on through the app store) and have to log into with my AppleID to make it go away - on the same machine I purchased the application.

So it's buggy, leaves consumers guessing and reams developers for fees. There is plenty of scope for someone to set up a better app store that all the vendors would switch to. Steam did it for games. So why not?