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On this Mac App Store Hysteria
Late last week, 9to5Mac - along with a number of other sites - reported the changes to Apple’s Mac Developer programme with “Mac Developer license falls to $99/year, Mac App Store coming?”. If you’ve read the piece, you may well agree there’s some logical failings, and whilst I try to not question the logic in too many articles for fear of sounding like a complete jackass, the more I read the 9to5Mac article, the more I found myself laughing at it. So here goes some clarification.
A $99 Mac Developer license means the barrier to Mac development is lowered for all of those thousands of developers who’ve had different measures of success on the iPhone.
No. The barrier to entry has always been precisely zero dollars. The tools to develop for the Mac - along with the API documentation for the currently-shipping version of OS X - have always been free of charge. You paid for a membership to receive advance pre-release builds of Mac OS X, a hardware discount, and maybe a ticket to WWDC - not for access to the Xcode IDE or currently-shipping APIs in Mac OS X.
Those developers, who can now port their apps to the Mac platform as widgets or full fledged Mac applications, need a means of distribution as well. … These people don’t have a way to distribute apps or a marketing budget or finance department.
I guess this tiny insignificant thing called the Internet doesn’t count? I mean, it’s not as though companies (like my own employer, or many other esteemed indie shops) have been selling, marketing or financing their applications for the past half-decade or more.
Yes: the Internet lacks the placebo sugar-coating of the App Store and the hands-tied approach to sales reporting that’s known as iTunes Connect, but there are tonnes of ways for folks to build, sell and market their apps via the Internet. Let’s also not forget that the App Store itself is not a marketing vehicle - it’s a listing system and that still requires the developer to proactively market their application.
Call me stupid, but doesn’t this sound much like the Internet to you?
I’m not going to labour this point too much - but I will add some sensible remarks on the new Mac Developer Program. Yes: the iPhone program quite likely influenced thinking on the programme pricing. Yes: it’s a play to encourage iPhone developers to bring their wares to the Mac. And, you know what, yes: it’s lowering the barrier of entry to develop - with pre-release builds of OS X. But to suggest that the drop in price is in somehow related to a Mac App Store - just because the iPhone programme includes an App Store - and base an entire article on such conjecture is missing the bigger picture, and completely downplays why the price change is actually important.
With that out the way, I’ll answer a slightly bigger question: will a Mac App Store ever see the light of day? I’m going with “No”. If Apple were building the Mac today, it’d without a doubt have an App Store. But that’s a little ironic too - because it sounds surprisingly like another certain device, whose mass-market consumer appeal I’ve written about before.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article in no way represent the opinions of my employer.
Posted on Tuesday March 9th, 2010
© Nik Fletcher 2010 ~ Contact
