Thinking Aloud About the Mac App Store

With the news that Apple has started accepting submissions for the Mac App Store — and with the announced launch date just a couple of months away — I'm sure I'm not alone in being an indie developer giving serious consideration to whether the store is the right place for me to sell my applications.

On the surface, this decision should be a no-brainer. The App Store model has succeeded beyond anyone's expectations on iOS, its high-profile nature driving hundreds of thousands of users who would not have otherwise to make purchases. And in case you're in any doubt as to the power of an Apple-managed store front, I present the following:

Can you spot the point where SimCap entered Apple's OS X Downloads list? No, the absolute numbers aren't very impressive, but relatively I'm very happy with the results. And remember that this is a relatively niche developer / marketing tool we're talking about here.

So why would I possibly want to say no to this kind of opportunity, most likely on a much larger scale?

There have already been many posts on these subjects which enumerate the potential drawbacks in a far more depth and with far more eloquence than I can. But from all those potentials, I see the lack of a demos as the biggest stumbling block.

While I'm sure that SimCap would pass Apple's entry requirements (for instance, it doesn't use any private APIs mainly because I wouldn't know where to find these private APIs), there's still something a little hackish about it. To be perfectly honest, there are some cases where SimCap simply won't work for users, and no matter what I do I'm unable to offer a solution or recreate the problem. In these cases the only option left to me is to apologise to the user for the time wasted. With SimCap currently available as a full demo, this is a frustration (on this side as well as the customer's, believe me), but it isn't a problem in that no money has changed hands. Maybe I lack faith in my own work, but to be perfectly honest I'm reluctant to charge up-front for SimCap when I can't guarantee that it will work every time for every user.

(The chart, by the way, is from Tyler Hall's excellent Shine dashboard. Highly recommended, if you decide to stay out of the Mac App Store.)