Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by troels | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

troels

Distribute Mac apps on the Mac App Store

$99/year

Hm ..

View on HN

Really that's a pittance. And it'll keep people from blatantly spamming the App reviewers with garbage.

It just means the garbage will be submitted by people with $100. There's plenty of junk on the iOS App Store which has the same developer license required.

There's plenty of junk on the Mac App Store already. So yeah.

Can you imagine the volume of junk without $99?

Also it helps pay for the reviewing of apps, although they still take a loss on running the appstore, last I heard.

>Can you imagine the volume of junk without $99?

No need to imagine: http://www.android.com/market/

Market costs $25 to submit to, as well.

It'll also keep out a lot of indie games, free software and other cool things. It's sad.

Yeah but it kind of sucks for open source apps

I don't know. Let's say I wan't to host it myself, I'd pay about $240 per year for Linode VPS.

I'd pay nothing, and host it on GitHub. In fact I, and many others do.

The OP said "Let's say I wan't to host it myself". So his pricing is right.

And the new appstore doesn't stop anyone from hosting their OSS on github - even for Macs. The appstore is for the average user; github is for the better than average programmer.

D'oh, I read wan't as don't want because of the superfluous '.

you'd also be alienating a large number of non-technical users who just want to see a large download button.

If your users are the "compile from source" crowd, I agree the Mac App Store has no benefit to you.

Have the terms changed so radically from the mobile store? At least there licenses like the GPL are incompatible with the extra restrictions that Apple places on the software it distributes, causing software to be removed or refused.

Would be a good gesture if they were to make it free for open source apps, even free apps that are closed source but don't contain ads.

Oh come on. I'm sure they could easily get it through donations if they really can't handle the $99/year.

I guess some would pay that much just for exposure on Mac App store, even if they had to host the app and process the payments themselves.

If you're in any way serious about your Mac-based product, you'd probably want to be part of developer programme even if you don't care about the app store. (for testing with prerelease OS versions, etc.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com