I used to have an app in the MAS but recently removed it and is using Paddle instead.
There are so many things wrong with the MAS.
Sandbox is the biggest complaint I have. I can understand it with the iOS to some degree. At least there they are constantly providing new features and hardware changes to help apps keep being innovative.
To give an example of the Sandbox issue.
We are using AppleScript for some of our logic in the background. Because of the Sandbox every time AS is used a little gear pops up in the top menu of OSX.
This started with Yosemite. But worse than that. The implimentation of this security measure was completely sloppy. The gear didn't just appear it also rearranged the top bar icons and I of course got a horde of users complaining. We tried many things to solve this but had to finally give up and just offer MAS users to switch to our non-MAS version.
You would think that at least people would be able to turn off such a thing with apps they knew were ok. But no.
Furthermore reviews can really make you or break you. For a long time we had good reviews because I spent a lot of time making sure people understood why the spinning gear was there. But after a while one star reviews started appearing and we had no way of mitigating that or contact the user and tell them they could switch to the non MAS app if they had that issue.
And so I finally realized that if you want to actually do any innovation with your apps and built a proper business MAS is not for you.
I am beginning to wonder if there is room for an alternate App Store based on the the Developer Certificate or some security setup open sourced.
Anyway. My next product wont even be going on the MAS. It's simply not worth it. It's just a distribution channel for Apple to show their latest features (the only way you get featured)
Although I am happy that apps are moving out of the MAS (it is slow, updates are slow, no possibility to offer upgrade licenses), as a user, Sandboxing is something that I want for every possible application. The model where an app can e.g. touch your whole home directory should go.
And for those potentially dangerous Mac apps that need to touch your home directory or essentially become a key logger, I'd want them to be as watched by Apple as possible. Keep them in the Mac App Store, with a strict permission / entitlements model.
That's what I've never understood about the Sandbox policy. Those apps will still be shipped... they're just another level removed from Apple's oversight. And it's not like iOS, where not allowing those apps ensures that 99.9% of users will never ever see those apps.
Gatekeeper helps with this to a degree, but why not just allow them in the Mac App Store?
I don't disagree but I think there must be ways around this.
For instance I don't mind Apples requirement that you have to ask for permission to access various files or folders but it should be possible and not come up with things like a spinning gear skating around your menubar. Those things are just sloppy.
A simple. "I trust this app to do more crazy things with my machine" feature must be possible to do.
Really? If that model is so awesome, how can I ever implement a screen reader for Hearthstone? Or how can I implement a deck tracker for Hearthstone?
Or any other kind of wild shenanigan Apple hasn't ever thought of.
Keep that stuff for mobiles.
If PCs also become grandma only territory, how will really interesting apps ever be developed? Interesting almost always involves "dangerous" somewhere along the way.
With a two tier system. I believe you should still be -able- to install apps that have wider rights but you should have to jump through some hoops and make sure the user is aware of what he's doing before installing them.
I'm not really an OSX developer, but shouldn't it be possible to bypass the sandbox in a way by offering the user to install an unsandboxed auxiliary application via a download from your website which then communicates with the main sandboxed App Store application using some protocol and performs any actions which the MAS version would be otherwise unable to?
For example, perhaps the auxiliary application runs a local HTTP server with a REST API. The MAS application simply makes HTTP requests to the auxiliary application such as `POST /applescript/doStuff`.
Against Apple Terms I believe. They will ban you if they find out.
I was talking with apple support and they basically said that if we even offered some extra component to get rid of the spinning gear we would most likely be banned.
Citation of the specific term needed. It isn’t against any of them and plenty of apps do it (Things, Boom or Monity come to mind). Apple requires that the app is functional without extra downloads and the app itself must not download the extra executables. But it’s OK to use them for extended functionality (Things: system-wide popup; Monity: extra sensors) as long as you only point the user to where to download the extra helper and they do it themselves (see e.g. http://www.monityapp.com/helper/ for one such helper download page, linked from in app).
I tried them. Integrating their SDK is a breeze. 30 minutes and you're ready to go. I also signed up for their paid analytics package. It's OK - nothing revolutionary but enough to track events.
A few weeks later I wanted to cancel the subscription (app development would take a little longer). But there's no button to cancel. So I wrote them an email and all I got was a reply where they'd like to give me a Skype call to "talk over my decision".
That and their regular "customer engagement" emails (I just want to use your service, I don't want to video chat every weekend) made me choose Devmate instead.
(I still pay the $10/month for the analytics so I guess their plan worked).
Surprisingly good. They don't support anything out of the box but they always seem to have a workaround (for instance I am switching to a "nag" demo model instead of a time based one i.e. like Sublime)
Stuff like that is not natively supported by Paddle but it will be and there are ways to do it through their framework.
And as long as I price my app at around $10 or more it's cheaper than MAS.
I am writing a "year in review" post about Ghostnote where I am going to spill all the beans :)
It already can. You don't need to go through the MAS to download and install an app on your Mac.
What I am talking about is if I am downloading something from the MAS. If I am using an app and it pops up first time with the spinning gear I should be able to hide the spinning gear for that specific app.
I find it absurdly ironic that such a powerful system doesn't give me that simple ability.
It's my understanding (albeit limited) that the spinning gear was an indicator to the user that AppleScript was doing something (did I ask the app to do this?!?!)
You will always see the gear in the menu bar if you are using Automator.
Not having the spinning gear just because app came from MAS implies a whole level of trust that Apple probably isn't ready to afford. But again I have no idea about Apple internal design mentality.
I think the issue is that sometimes the spinning gear doesn't go away after the script completes confusing users. This is an OSX bug not anything to do with the Mac App Store.
The issue was literally that the gear would pop-up and start switching around the order of the icons in random order. It wasn't even consistent. Some users had it on Yosemite others didn't.
Surely it should be possible to turn of the spinning gear without having to turn of the security measures.
That's like saying I should be able to turn off the lock icon in the browser address bar for HTTPS. Those spinning gears are there to tell the user that stuff is happening, even if they might not be aware that they requested something to happen. If you can turn it off, then every piece of malware is going to tell the user that they can't use the app unless they turn that off. And then they have no protection, which is the exact opposite thing that Apple wanted.
If you let anyone turn it off, then effectively you've let everyone turn it off.
Again. The gear is there to tell you something specific is going on but most people don't care about that. So of course it should be possible to turn it off for specific apps that you actually trust.
This is only an issue with Sandboxed apps not apps outside the app store. And it wasn't an issue until Yosemite.
Not sure why you keep insisting on arguing against something that isn't what is being suggested for a solution.
There are so many things wrong with the MAS.
Sandbox is the biggest complaint I have. I can understand it with the iOS to some degree. At least there they are constantly providing new features and hardware changes to help apps keep being innovative.
To give an example of the Sandbox issue.
We are using AppleScript for some of our logic in the background. Because of the Sandbox every time AS is used a little gear pops up in the top menu of OSX.
This started with Yosemite. But worse than that. The implimentation of this security measure was completely sloppy. The gear didn't just appear it also rearranged the top bar icons and I of course got a horde of users complaining. We tried many things to solve this but had to finally give up and just offer MAS users to switch to our non-MAS version.
You would think that at least people would be able to turn off such a thing with apps they knew were ok. But no.
Furthermore reviews can really make you or break you. For a long time we had good reviews because I spent a lot of time making sure people understood why the spinning gear was there. But after a while one star reviews started appearing and we had no way of mitigating that or contact the user and tell them they could switch to the non MAS app if they had that issue.
And so I finally realized that if you want to actually do any innovation with your apps and built a proper business MAS is not for you.
I am beginning to wonder if there is room for an alternate App Store based on the the Developer Certificate or some security setup open sourced.
Anyway. My next product wont even be going on the MAS. It's simply not worth it. It's just a distribution channel for Apple to show their latest features (the only way you get featured)