Slashdot Mirror
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.
Seriously, people are going to confuse this story with iOS 'apps', when in fact it's about full fledged computer applications on Mac OS.
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?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Rogue Amoeba makes a nice program Airfoill that allows my Apple OSX to play nice with the Google Chromecast. Casting audio to my old Stereo is now a cinch. Why Google and Apple don't seem to get along is no mystery.
so either pay 99 a year to be able to sideload software onto your device or redeploy it every 7 days. Not what i would call "perfectly legit"
To be clear, this is about the Mac App Store (MAS), not the (iOS) App Store. In both cases, you're effectively paying Apple a cut of the profits in order to make your product more accessible to consumers. In the case of the iOS App Store, it's pretty obvious that the 15%/30% cut is worth it, since if your app isn't there, it isn't for sale as far as 99.9% of people are concerned (even though that's not strictly the case).
But the MAS? Its value proposition has always been questionable.
For one, purchasing patterns are drastically different between mobile and PC. Consumers typically already know what Mac apps they plan to buy, rather than browse-shopping like they do on iOS, so whether the app is in the MAS or on a website makes no difference. As such, developers don't lose much from pulling out, or, in many cases, what they lose in unit sales is more than made up in reduced overhead.
Making matters worse for the MAS, it's oftentimes the case that the version of the app sold in the MAS is both more expensive and has less features than the one sold on their website. The MAS has a number of requirements (e.g. strict sandboxing) that make certain features virtually impossible to implement, so the apps in the MAS are oftentimes missing key features found in the direct-sale versions, or they might be lagging behind by a few versions due to the app store review process that all updates need to go through. And because developers don't see much benefit from the MAS, many of them simply tack on a 30% premium for the version sold through the MAS, that way they can recoup the cost. But even in the case that the developer doesn't price it higher, there's no way to offer upgrade pricing for loyal customers, so MAS users end up paying full price for subsequent versions, rather than being able to get a discount that the developer might be offering on direct sales.
All of which is to say, the MAS is a somewhat hostile environment to both developers AND users, so it's not surprising that niche apps aimed power users (i.e. the ones most likely to know how to use a browser to find software) are seeing improved numbers after pulling out of the MAS.
Lots of things may happen. For now, if the machine is working for you better than anything else you've looked into, keep using it. Simple as that.
As to your concerns, even if Apple decided to do what you said, it wouldn't be an immediate concern. You'd be able to keep using your existing machines for years as people worked on creating/polishing alternatives, given that there'd be nothing forcing you to "upgrade". By the time you needed to purchase an alternative, there'd not only be plenty of them available, there would also be plenty of blogs and other resources providing advice as to which ones suit your specific needs.
All of which is to say, leave tomorrow's concerns for tomorrow. Don't worry about them today.