Fear the Mac App Store

[younkin]

AppShopper: baby steps first...

It's pretty clear from this (and other) recent moves by Apple, that they certainly DO intend to lock the system as they have with the iOS hardware. As far as being "paranoid" - being able to examine what business moves Apple has made in the past and project them into the future isn't paranoia.

Apple is going to lock down the system and AppShopper will be a cornerstone of that move. I don't see how it could be more obvious.

Is this good? Maybe for some. For others, like me, probably not. I assume MS will do the same in some fashion, so you can't run there.

Five years from now, things are going to be quite different.

 

[synagence]

30% might sound a lot but consider the options....

If you're a small dev, you'll have to either get a publisher or direct-sell... if you're direct selling you need to:
1. Either setup a business paypal payment method (who takes several % of price for fees)
2. Get credit-card process system - googlepay? which probably also takes a % of fees.
3. Pay for download hosting (if app is large/popular this could get high)
4. Pay for your domain to have SSL certificates every year to secure transfer of personal data
4. Discovery - paying for advertising
5. Some method of generating licence keys / managing user accounts for registration

Yeah there are 'costs' to apple's approach but if you're selling a paid app its not 'free' either to direct sell either in monetary or time consumption terms.
At least with the MacAppStore its not the only option for devs ... but a new one which has already had plenty exposure and teething pain (and thus hopefully ironed out some of those issues already) with the iPhone appstore so any dev getting into it should have a pretty good idea of what they're letting themselves in for.

 

[roadbloc]

Well... personally I'm looking forward to the app store in OS X.