Comment by tolmasky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tolmasky | Hacker News Reader

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Its just as bad if not worse from a customer perspective. The Mac App Store is basically the antithesis of what Apple is theoretically about ("the details") while at the same time highlighting everything Apple is bad at (ahem hem >services<). Some simple examples:

1. I go to buy an app, oh, I already own it. I know since it says "Installed". So helpful, now I can go search for it again on my computer. Compare this to the iPhone where it isn't completely idiotic and instead of "installed" says "open" which you can click on.

2. Type "Diasy Disk" into the Mac App Store search. You'll get 5 results that AREN'T "Daisy Disk". That's because Apple couldn't search their way out of a paper bag.

3. Let me send a link to this app to my friend. Of course its buried in an unlabeled drop down since sharing content is a decade ahead of any thinking going on at Apple. Let's not try to get any network affects for these apps, that would be silly.

4. The top 10 is full of apps I already own. Super useful. Really makes me want to open this thing up periodically if I'm feeling spendy. Heaven forbid the tailor that page to at the very least show the top 10 apps I don't own. But we live in a world where selling me toilet paper online is more sophisticated than applications.

4.1. My favorite is that #2 on top free is OS X Mavericks. How about just putting up a banner telling me reasons to upgrade to Mavericks instead of eternally taking up a slot in the top 10 free essentially making it a top 9? Especially when most your customer base is already on Mavericks and thus making that slot the most useless slot ever.

5. Hey what was that app I was looking at yesterday? Welp, since we chose to make it a super-fast amazing native experience, I don't get simple features like browsing history that I'd get from this being in a browser. But hey, at least all these 3d graphics in the Mac App Store are crazy performant right? Now if only I could view two apps at once, you know, like maybe two competitors I'd like to compare, in tabs...

It's funny because they ended up having to mirror the content on the web anyways, so the Mac App Store is now the worse of the two options you get (the other being google -> mac app store pages)

At least (1) has been finally fixed as of late. An "Open" button at last.

I see MAS as a good entry point for novice Mac users. But Apple could do a better job at curation here. Unlike on iOS, MAS apps have a bigger responsibility with user data, since even with sandboxing you can lose files or have your data sent across the wire. Check out the reviews for countless "disk cleaner"-type apps.

Seeing apps like [1] repeatedly in top 10 makes me lose faith in the review process. Macs don't need users to manually manage "free" memory. By "freeing" memory you're purging the cache and forcing the system to reload things. Hey, at least it's free.

Another: seemingly dozens of poor clones of built-in apps like Preview, complete with one-star reviews. For example, [2] by a developer who published 60+ (!) apps of similar quality. Or, [3], same situation but with a $6.99 in-app-purchase.

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/memory-clean/id451444120?mt=...

[2] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jpg-to-pdf-converter-lite/id...

[3] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jpg-to-pdf-lite/id862295940?...

The lack of tabs drives me crazy. A few other letdowns on the user side:

6. No wishlist and no way to gift apps to friends (textbook example of leaving money on the table).

7. No way to rollback to old versions (particularly relevant when crashing bugs are introduced).

8. No way to transition from a non-MAS customer to an MAS customer. If I have equity in an existing program I purchased, possibly at great expense, I have no way to get the features of the App Store (updates, iCloud, etc) without paying again. And the developer can't do anything about this, even if they want to.

6 exists for the iOS App Store. It's a shame it doesn't (yet?) for the Mac App Store.

7 is meant to be handled by the developer or possibly by Apple, not by the consumer. If you have to manage versions manually, Apple has failed you.

8 can be accomplished by publishing the app as one of those "free + unlock" apps, but allowing the user to enter their predated proof-of-purchase to trigger the same effects purchasing the IAP unlock would. Apple disallows selling "things that are also IAPs" outside of the store—but as long as you stop selling the app through the non-MAS mechanism when you start selling it through the MAS, you're not violating the rules, because you're only validating previously-existing codes in the app, not issuing new ones. (So there's no way to purchase anything now equivalent to an IAP from you.)

  7 is meant to be handled by the developer or possibly by Apple, not by the consumer. If you have to manage versions manually, Apple has failed you.

So I get to wait two weeks for Apple to approve the developer's bugfix instead of letting me roll back now to the version that worked last week. Yay!

The problem with 7 is it puts the developer in control, not the user. What if the developer releases a new version with a drastically reduced feature set (ahem..iMovie). I should be able to choose which version I want to run.

iMovie is an exception that proves Apple's usual rule: in most of Apple's own apps (Quicktime, Aperture, Xcode, OSX itself) each major version is its own separate app.

This fixes both the "paid upgrades" and "choosing what version you want to run" requirements, very simply, as long as you do it correctly.

Most importantly, you'll need to make MyApp N+1 discoverable from MyApp N (likely by an update with text such as "click to see MyApp N+1 on the app store.") For example, look at how "Transmit 3" (one app) talks about "Transmit 4" (a separate app).

You'll also probably want to sync IAPs to some more canonical source of truth than Apple's own servers, such that your app can ask "has the user purchased IAP X in [any of our apps that provide IAP X]" rather than "has the user purchased IAP X in this particular app." Then IAPs purchased in MyApp N apply to MyApp N+1, and vice-versa.

Aside from all the little quirks of MyApp N+1 (multiple versions of the same app installed, new users accidentally buying old versions), there is one major flaw in this practice: upgrade pricing. I'm usually happy to pay $20-40 for a solid upgrade on a $100 productivity app; if I had to pay $100 all over again, I probably wouldn't bother.

If you charged $20 for both MyApp N and MyApp N+1, and made up the $80 difference in version-portable IAPs, then you'd get the pricing model you're suggesting.

A good candidate for this would be something like Photoshop, where $20 would get you the "engine" of Photoshop N, and then you pay $5 each for various brushes and filters. When you upgrade to Photoshop N+1, you're upgrading to a new engine—but keeping your brushes and filters.

Games could also work like this, though in that industry, the more common strategy is the "expansion"—effectively, keeping an entirely new version of the app logic/assets commingled with the old version but disabled using feature flags, and then unlocking it through an upgrade-priced IAP. (Now there's a thought. Could you ship two entirely separate binaries within one application bundle, and put a switch in your app's prefpane to toggle between execv()ing N or N+1?)

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