What is the benefit of the Mac App store for developers?

IMO easy way to disburse, advertise, and collect payment for apps

 

-No payment/credit card processing

-Similarly, Apple deals with any payment issues

-No bandwidth worries (if you have a 20MB app, for ex, that becomes popular you're going to be spending that much more for hosting it on your own website)

 

Plus exposure. With multiple apps in one convenient place many more people are more likely to see your product. apple's cut is somewhat offset by the savings in advertising, chasing the money (as noted in the above reply) and increased customer exposure.

 

So you thought there is a way or place to sell something without a significant amount of distribution costs?

 

If you factor in advertising (which you would still need to do to some extent even on the App Store) it's still going to hit hard on your bottom line.

Credit Card Processing is another big one. A real time sink when you think about making sure you're capturing data properly for serial number look up. The data needs to be stored securely. Data transmission from the website to the credit card processor needs to be secure.

Credit card processing alone is a real headache.

Website maintenance isn't huge. You should still want/need a website presence for your apps anyway. You just can't put enough information in the app store to allow for people to really get a good idea of some apps. Plus you will probably want the app and website to allow for support questions. So a website is still a good requirement. But you don't need a storefront and a credit card processing setup. That's $$ in the bank.

The exposure is big. It can REDUCE advertising costs. But the really lucky people get the kind of exposure you're thinking of. App of the week. Etc. You still need to advertise. The nice thing is once you get your app out there and people see it, popularity on the app store does a LOT. Once it hits the top 20 you're in good shape. If you can get it there. Otherwise, back to your own advertising because it likely won't be enough just to be "on the app store."

 

I'm really curious as to if it will hav the control over the device as it does on the iOS.
Ie. Go into a spassm and uninstall everything else if you log in with a different account, change store location or something similar.

Also I'm very concerned what this will do to the normal distribution means.
I could easily imagine apple requiring all install apps installed to be licensed to your apple id. (maybe not now, but at some point within a couple years.)