Popular Design App 'Sketch' Leaves Mac App Store Due to Poor Customer Experience

[macUser2007]

Here we go again.... 30% is not highway robbery. 30% margin is low for a distributor in the software world. Ask MacMall to carry your product and see what it costs. Apple's 30% will look very attractive quickly.

I am sorry, are we talking about apples or oranges?

MacMall generally deals with physical products, which involve costs for transportation, storage and shipping, among others. Plus, the products they sell are not part of a closed ecosystem, which supports sales of some MacMall hardware responsible for the majority of MacMall's revenue.

Apple has a monopoly, for practical purposes, and this is the only reason it can get away with 30%.

 

[Dranix]

I've used Affinity's apps and they're not nearly as polished or featured as Sketch or Adobe Creative Suite in the grand scheme of things. They leave left to desire.

Really? Strangely all other consider Affinity Designer an Illustrator killer and Sketch more a toy.

 

[Kissaragi]

I like the app store customer experience

 

[Icaras]

I like the app store customer experience

Same here. All tied to one Apple ID makes browsing purchase histories and going to one place for customer support simple and easy.

 

[bsolar]

If you believe that all software companies only sell their product on their own websites then you're delusional.

Nowhere in his post he suggested that.

You also don't understand the fees that Square and others charge.

According to Square's documentation it's 2.9% + 30 cents for online store sales. Are these figures incorrect? Are they cheap compared to Apple's offer? Or expensive? Or comparable?

We'll just end it there. You have no grasp on the software industry.

You provided no argument to support this: you merely insinuated that he is incorrect without providing specific facts to support your argument or disproving his.

 

[inscrewtable]

...and no upgrade pricing...

I bought zbrush 1.13 in 1999 for £199 and 16 years later they are about to release the 64 bit mac version 5 and there have not been any extra costs over the original purchase.

 

[felt.]

Pixave is succeeding on the MAS where Pixa, Inboard and Ember are failing.

Gave Pixave a try based on your comment, Nice app but it keeps crashing over and over. What success are you referring to?

 

[ginkobiloba]

Being in the App Store means that you get yourself in front of millions of eyes that you aren't likely getting on your own website. The visibility is huge. It means tons more sales simply by people being able to find you easier and being in a more credible place.

That's only true however for "consumer" apps, apps that can be understood and used by a majority of people. For more specialized professional apps, being in front of millions of eyes will not really bring any more sales, since the majority of people have no use for such apps ( and probably wouldn't even understand what they're for )

There are plenty of apps made by single devs that are very succesfull commercialy and not available on the MAS ( Au/Vst audio plugins for example ), but like i said, they address specialized audiences.

In the case of an app like Sketch, i don't think leaving the MAS will impact their sales that much.

 

[entropys]

These are developer reasons to leave, not customer reasons, except maybe the trail period issue. I confess I would rather that than lite versions.
But sand boxing? It exists for good reasons. Maybe there is room for improvement there. Apple does tend to set stuff up and then ignore it. the las twelve months or so focus has really dropped off. Sure there is the watch and the iPad pro, but these are hardly mainstream products. Not everyone will get those, but nearly everyone would use Apple online services, or gasp, want an up to date laptop.

 

[Bromeo]

When comparing Apple's (or Google's, or Amazon's, etc) 30% cut on digital purchases, one has to compare it to the cost of building, testing, securing, and maintaining a digital store front... it's not just merchant processing fees or bandwidth; those are relatively minor costs. The real cost is development time. I'd have to hire someone at least part time. A compromise is to outsource the digital storefront to a service such as Digital River. Such services aren't free, either.

 

[wizard]

I'm not sure how much longer the MAS can remain a sustainable entity for either Apple or developers.

For developers of limited volume apps MAS is a big win.

 

[FieldingMellish]

What this thread did is effectively advertise Sketch, software I'd not heard of before.

 

[wizard]

Well stated! There is hardly a week that doesn't go by without a MAS update. Clean simple solution for simple apps.

Still don't get what the bad experience is .... I have nothing but good experience through the appStore. I don't end up on any unwanted mailing lists just because I bought something and I don't have to save any licensing files that I need to find when I want to install the app on my other macs (or have to buy again because those licenses are limited to the mac where they were bought for).

MAS is awesome for me. There are many great companies that sell outside of the MAS that also provide good experience, but many are not. MAS is just easy to use and convenient for me (and I know that the company does not get my email or other info that the might use to spam me).

The only problem for companies is that there is no upgrade pricing ... that is the one thing Apple needs to add to the MAS.

If the app is priced right one can simply offer up a new version that bypasses the old version. Developers that worry about paid updates likely have a failing product with waning sales.

 

[wizard]

The Mac App Store always felt wrong. It seemed like Apple let the iOS app store success get to its head and thought they could just do the same on personal computers where it is much easier to access and download applications.

On the contrary MAS was exactly what I was hoping for. Effectively a package / app manager like we see in Linux land. Like Linux land yum or whatever doesn't solve every app need but it does give you easy access to popular apps without a lot of complications. Special apps still require manual installation on both platforms, this is no big deal really.

I always look towards MAS first for software, flowed by HomeBrew and then build your own. It is a great system!

 

[TCK]

Really? Strangely all other consider Affinity Designer an Illustrator killer and Sketch more a toy.

Sketch and Affinity are very different pieces of software. Affinity, like Illustrator, is more for vector illustrations.
But if you want to design interfaces, Sketch is way beyond anything else, even if its drawing tools are terrible (I still have to use Illustrator to decently design icons and similar).

Sketch has been an epiphany and literally halved the time I have to spend managing dozens of PSD files.


As for the "all other"...

Survey of 4000 designers from 200 countries:
http://tools.subtraction.com/wireframing.html
http://tools.subtraction.com/interface-design.html

 

[Eric5h5]

Most of those are extremely problematic feature sets from a security standpoint. And while useful functionality can be made on top of them, they should give users pause. I like that those sorts of things are blocked, and they should be by default for most apps.

It's not an exhaustive list of every possible technical thing that sandboxing makes difficult. The goal of security is of course good, however the way it's currently implemented makes implementing some legitimate features more difficult than they should be. If a dev says "the MAS sandboxing is making it difficult/impossible to do certain things", a response of "oh, you just want to steal user data" is very ignorant.

As for 30%, before the iOS app store came along, it was pretty common for the percentage to be the other way around. (i.e., 70% for the store, 30% for the developer.) It caused a lot of upset at the time. How short peoples' memories are, that some people are calling it "highway robbery" now. In most cases (not all), the 30% that Apple takes is more than offset by the increased exposure.

--Eric

 

[OldSchoolMacGuy]

Apple's and Oranges. Retailers are physical / AppStore is Digital - with a lot of automation. You cannot compare a physical store vs digital store. Different beasts.

They are the same beast. What do you think Amazon, MacMall, and all the other sources that sell software online take for a cut? Seriously. Go take a look and see.

Selling on the MAS is no different that any other reseller. You act like they're required to sell it nowhere else including their own website if they sell on the MAS.

Here's how it actually works for software developers. If we can get you to our websites to buy and we can take the largest portion of the sale, awesome. But why just rely on our own website? Why not sell on other websites too? Who cares if they take 30% or 50% of the profit because it's still 70% in my pocket from a sale that wouldn't likely have come my way if it wasn't for that site (if they would have bought it from me instead of Amazon, why did they buy it from Amazon rather than coming to my site?).

Developers are willing to give online resellers a cut just the same as they would a traditional retailer. Because just like a traditional retailer, these online stores get our software in front of many many more people than we can on our own.

Why do you think software sellers are willing to include their product in things like the Mac Vault discounts and all those other deal sites where you can buy it for 75% off for 10 applications? Because it costs them nothing to give their software away at any price but even at a 75% discount, it still means 25% in their pocket which wouldn't have happened before.

Did you know Google takes a 30% transaction fee too, just like Apple, on the Google Play store?
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/112622?hl=en

 

[Stella]

They are the same beast. What do you think Amazon, MacMall, and all the other sources that sell software online take for a cut? Seriously. Go take a look and see.

<big snip>

Amazon / MacMall sell hard copies of software, App Store is digital.

Apple and Oranges.

</Getting bored comparing different distribution mechanisms >

 

[diddl14]

As Sketch customer, I think they are confusing 'bad customer experience' with 'bad vendor experience'...
There's a few minor issues I have with the app but none of these seem limited by AppStore restrictions.

 

[dumastudetto]

Hating on Apple and MAS will not please customers who love the convenience and security of a single point of purchase for all their applications. I will never buy a Bohemian Coding app now. They are dead to me.

 

[sracer]

Hating on Apple and MAS will not please customers who love the convenience and security of a single point of purchase for all their applications. I will never buy a Bohemian Coding app now. They are dead to me.

Exactly! I was thrilled when a MAS certificate expired and I was unable to use the apps that I paid for. Because I couldn't get work done, I ended up going outside for a walk and getting some fresh air. I really appreciate companies that look out for their customers' well-being.

 

[ShadovvMoon]

They cite:
1. Review times of one week or above;
2. Sandboxing limiting possibilities;
3. No upgrade pricing.

My opinion:
1. Don't see this being a problem if more attention was given to testing and software quality which is a well-known problem with Sketch. Facebook and many others are able to deliver features and bug fixes with a 2-week review cycle;

2. Would be nice to understand what possibilities they're referring to, but my opinion is: fix your bugs first, improve the current workflow next, focus on adding features when Sketch matures;

3. Heard this complain multiple times, never seen an opinion on alternative revenue models such as the one Adobe employs (subscription).

1. Bugs happen and it's not possible to test every single possible configuration. If we find a bug (or a customer reports it to us), the time to develop a fix is generally small (< 1 day). Affected customers then need to wait upwards of a week for Apple to glance at it for 5 minutes. I had a chat with the head of Facebook's release engineering team a few weeks ago and can tell you that he isn't happy with the review times for Apple either. Facebook updates their website once every 4 hours and are heading towards instantaneous pushing of code from developers to production. It's tricky to maintain server updates (without breaking anything) when their app is a week or more out of date. On iOS, they're forced to use the App Store, so they're developing react so that they don't need to wait for Apple to push updates.

2. There are so many instances in so many applications where sandboxing has not allowed for a highly useful feature. The current 'workaround' is to offer a crippled App Store version and a fully-featured non App Store version. Daisy Disk, Coda, BBEdit, ... the list goes on ...

3. What is the incentive for developers to add new features? Subscription models suck. They make customers pay for something that they have already bought, regardless of whether it gets improved or not.

 

[Dranix]

2. There are so many instances in so many applications where sandboxing has not allowed for a highly useful feature. The current 'workaround' is to offer a crippled App Store version and a fully-featured non App Store version. Daisy Disk, Coda, BBEdit, ... the list goes on ...

What feature is not possible with sandboxing in code editors? I ask this as a developer failing to see any problem here...

 

[ShadovvMoon]

What feature is not possible with sandboxing in code editors? I ask this as a developer failing to see any problem here...

It highly depends on what you are trying to develop. If your app needs to do anything out of the ordinary (i.e. requires admin access, needs to access i/o devices or what not) then it's not going to conform to the sandbox. If you're building a basic text editor, the sandbox wont be a problem.

Coda: https://panic.com/blog/coda-and-sandboxing/
BBEdit: Saving files directly into restricted places is incredibly handy
Daisy Disk: Scanning all files on the system

Ironically, Apples own apps used to use 'temporary entitlements' which effectively let them bypass aspects of the sandbox that they couldn't fit within. I don't know if this is still the case. It would be preferable if developers could specify their own custom requirements (like the sandboxing already supports) in these unusual cases. Currently, the only option is to either dumb down the app or leave the App Store. While you are allowed to use temporary entitlements in exceptional circumstances, an app I submitted with a minor temporary entitlement spent upwards of 6 weeks being reviewed.

 

[Dranix]

Hmm I fail to see any problematic stuff in the Coda list. Everything fine security wise. Some things *should* only be possible with system tools.