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Comment by dirtae | Hacker News Reader

Piezo, Rogue Amoeba's app, was removed from the Mac App Store with "minimal publicity", according to their blog post:

https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2017/02/10/piezos-life-outsid...

That is quite correct. When we removed Piezo from the Mac App Store a year ago, we didn't send out a press release, nor seek publicity over this move in any way. We simply removed it and explained why on our blog (https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2016/02/12/piezo-1-5-arrives-...). That was it.

We can certainly debate how well-established or tech-savvy our users are (though I will note that Piezo is by far our simplest application, and used by the least technically savvy among our user base). But to say that we did this in a “public fashion” is just false.

True, but your own brand and storefront is very well established and respected for more than a decade. This makes the story entirely unrepresentative of what happens when developers in general quit the Mac App Store.

We started outside of the App Store because of its sandboxing restriction.

It's still 2nd to 3rd page of search results despite having some reviews and only a couple of competitors. So a considerable investment in SEO is required.

I believe you didn't do it seeking publicity, but you definitely got some.

https://www.appleworld.today/blog/2016/2/13/rogue-amoebas-pi...

http://www.imore.com/piezo-improves-application-audio-record...

https://www.macstories.net/linked/piezo-exits-the-mac-app-st...

What percentage of your sales came from people discovering your app through the Mac App store vs. how many found your page and were linked to the Mac App Store?

At this point, we don't have any way of knowing for sure. But given the results in the year since we left the store, it appears that most people got to us, and then went to the Mac App Store to purchase. It would seem very few people found us directly via the Mac App Store, given the way sales shifted to direct when we were no longer there.

They're also a very savvy company that has their own store. They didn't have to do any work other than turn off the App Store listing.

Smaller developers may have to go through considerable pain and anguish in setting up their own store, or they can suffer through even more angusih and pain when the store they entrusted to do their sales goes down in flames, as with Kagi. https://tidbits.com/article/16665

Being self-hosted is obviously better if you can swing it, but it's more work and it's not for everyone.

Even if you're not the mighty Rogue Amoeba, services like FastSpring[1] seem to make it pretty easy.

[1] http://christiantietze.de/books/make-money-outside-mac-app-s... #noaffiliation

This is why I mention Kagi. When you go all-in on a third party service it might tank and then where are you?

I know you know the answer to this (i.e. move to another vendor, as you would for any vendor that goes away), so my apologies in advance for not understanding the point you're trying to lead me to.

I guess I don't understand the alternative. Go out of business?

I think the choice is between using a solid platform like the App Store or something like it, or building your own using tools that won't go away either. Stripe, PayPal, things like that.

It takes a lot of effort to build out your own store and get it right, this is no small task, which is why the 30% fee charged by these stores is not necessarily the biggest obstacle.

These intermediaries add considerable risk.

I'm not even sure we can assume Stripe won't go away, and Paypal has shown itself to be anything but dependable (sure it'll accept a payment but will you definitely get the money?)

Edit: Sorry I know those were just two examples - I'm not trying to refute your point

They're bordering on "too big to fail" at this point, but if they did go, they are just a payment provider. Switching from Stripe to PayPal to Square or whatever for credit card processing is a heck of a lot easier than switching from the Apple App Store to your own hand-crafted store.

For example, you can bang together your own store with Magento, Spree, or any number of other ecommerce store kits and pick one or more back-ends without a whole lot of sweat. This presumes you know a thing or two about web development and security, which is not necesarily a given for any group of developers. If you do know that, the difference between Stripe or PayPal is a few lines of configuration and API keys, if that.

Even when I was selling through Kagi, I had a backup payment service running simultaneously (Plimus, then later FastSpring). I could switch between them in just a couple of minutes by changing some if statements in my PHP code. I even had hidden 'coupons' I could give to customers to redirect to another provider, if Kagi wasn't accepting their card for some weird reason.

Don't hard-link to a third party service. Abstract everything through your own site that you have 100% control over, so you can swap out the underlying services whenever you want.

We started small and with no obvious path for going from the app we'd made, to running a company. Nevertheless, we were able to figure it out back in 2002, and it's gotten easier since.

It's slightly more work to sell outside the App Store, yes, but it's really just not that difficult. If a developer plans to make a living, or even just side income, from app sales, it's work that's worth doing.

If you started in 2002, and particularly if you have been actively link-building since then, you have a huge advantage in terms of visibility SEO-wise.

It's quite simply much harder to build a link profile in 2017 than it was 15 years ago.

It's not impossible, but don't underestimate the difficulty of starting up now. I started things in 2002, I'm still starting things now, and building an independent web presence now - at least, one which anyone will find - is considerably more difficult.

(Technically it's much easier - getting the actual website serving to the Internet is easier. But that was never the hard part.)

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