I noticed the below article about the Mac App Store a week ago and I keep wondering about it.
I understand that the iOS App Store is much more popular because people are bored and it’s filled with gadgets and gadgets that are aimed towards ‘impulse buying’. But on the other hand, it’s very saturated and hard to stand out.
The MAS however seems almost empty. Why is that? Is it dead? Do people simply not want to buy anything?
My questions is maybe a bit too personal but is there anyone out here actually making a full-time living out of the programs he deployed in the MAS? Or do you know anyone? Or is it just a 1:1,000,000 flappy-bird dream everyone is chasing?
No offense (really) but I somehow get the impression that only the Xojo (and Xojo -plugin) makers are doing well.
For me personally, I just started out with Xojo as a hobby and I’m currently building something that I would like to deploy in the MAS. Not a killer App but not some fart or nonsense App either. Just a handy tool for the people who need it.
I’m not really looking into marketing, pushing and promoting. I just wonder if it would work and if it’s worth all the efforts.
Here is my experience. I have absolutely no ambitions of making a living as a programmer. I do it as a hobby and enjoy the extra bucks that it brings in. When I first submitted apps to the MAS, my expectation was that my sales through other channels would be negatively affected. The data suggest otherwise. The MAS added a little more than half of my previous income to my total for '14 while at the same time, my sales through my own web site were the highest in about 5 years.
You say “The MAS however seems almost empty”. I have no idea what you are seeing nor what you mean by that. The OSX MAS is quite full and lively with a constant stream of new apps in my experience.
Finally, you will probably find what you are looking for on the MAS. If your expectation is low, than that may be what you get. On the other hand, it has definitely been worthwhile to me with my limited, reasonable expectations
The Mac App Store was awesome back in 2011/2012 for us, it very quickly became our #1 selling channel with 5x the sales of our own site.
However the case today is very different, no longer is it the main channel, it is just another sales channel. We’re continuing to try new things to get it rolling again, but it seems very hard to stand out amongst the crowd.
I have a friend who did a lot more commercial software than I ever did
He always complained that the issue with being a Windows developer was how to stand out from the huge crowd.
Sure there’s a lot more users which, in theory, could mean you could have a lot more customers & do better financially.
For some that worked.
BUT getting noticed was a lot more work because the market was crowded with many more devs who also thought “we should be on Windows” … so you had a ton more competition and rising above that overall “noise” was harder.
He said “It was harder to be a big fish in an immense ocean.”
Now they DID do something very novel & eventually got bought by MS - after being in business for 7 years and struggling along for most of it.
But thats not normal to get bought by a huge company.
Eventually he worked on Mac products.
His take was that building for the Mac it as easier to be a big player in a pond.
And he did very well commercially with exactly that focus.
His company got bought after 18 months by a much larger dev on the Mac side of things.
In part HE attributed it to being able to be THE big fish and getting noticed was a lot easier.
The MAS seems to have brought the “how to rise above the noise” problem to the Mac
Roger.
What I meant was ‘compared to the iOS App Store’. It looks as if developers are not interested. The MAS just seems very small compared to the iOS App Store.
Now I understand that the only way to get Apps for your iOS device is the App Store while the ecosystem for OSX is outside the MAS as well. I don’t know the numbers and I realize I’m not very well informed but my impression is that the MAS is tiny compared to the iOS App Store.
Sam,
And that just sounds weird to me. I would imagine that the MAS is the first place where a user would go to look for some software. And therefore always be the main channel.
May I ask what other sales channels you refer to? Apart from a website, I cannot think of much. Do you mean retail?
Norman,
The ‘rise above the noise’ and ‘stand out from the crowd’ is great and I believe that but how much is that worth if nobody comes/buys there? As was mentioned in the article in my start post, this guy ended up at the 8th position with a grand total of 98 downloads worldwide. So either I’m missing something or the MAS isn’t working because people aren’t buying there.
Again, I have no experience and my first App yet has to be deployed but reading articles like the above don’t sound very encouraging. Therefore I asked here where the developers are. I just wonder if the MAS works and if it’s worth it.
For now, all I can do is make a nice App that I think people will like/need, put it up in the MAS, offer a free version with an upgrade to a Pro version and build a great website around it.
Besides a marketing campaign (that is not really an option), I cannot think of much else.
Most definitely the MAS is not anything on the same scale the the iDevice App Store
Apple’s sold many times more iDevices than they have ever sold Macs so the scale is radically different
And the audience is different - people aren’t buying the same sorts of things on the App store that they are on MAS
And the MAS has competition from other places you can use to acquire software (Amazon, MS, other app stores, direct from the maker etc) where the App Store has none
So I think they definitely have a very different marketing appeal and audience
[quote=192033:@Marco Hof]What I meant was ‘compared to the iOS App Store’. It looks as if developers are not interested. The MAS just seems very small compared to the iOS App Store.
Now I understand that the only way to get Apps for your iOS device is the App Store while the ecosystem for OSX is outside the MAS as well. I don’t know the numbers and I realize I’m not very well informed but my impression is that the MAS is tiny compared to the iOS App Store.[/quote]
I have 16 apps in the MAS and only one in the iOS App Store, as well as 6 apps in the Windows Store and have been selling both Windows and Mac shareware since the nineties through the usual free evaluation packages.
Sam is right : the MAS until a couple years ago was so vibrant. I got the same experience, with more sales in the MAS than on my own sites. But it kind of slowed down a bit and is now about the same. Which is still very significant.
The iOS App Store has been kind of disappointing. Talking about noise, I am not the only one reporting that his app cannot be found with simple keywords. Apple dev forums are full of people complaining about that. The only way to get to my app is to enter the exact name. And yet, a turkey with an app that is completely unrelated springs in front. I guess he paid for advertising. Sales are anecdotal and the only way people buy is when they come from my web site. For the moment, I have given up. I like iOS but it’s not worth the trouble. The learning curve is consequent, Xojo iOS is very limited and requires tons of declares to do the simplest things. It took me a couple months to complete the app not counting the beta period when I familiarized myself with Xojo iOS. The same app in Desktop I would have probably completed in a week.
The Windows Store is worth mentioning, as Xojo apps should be accepted there soon. The six apps I have are made in VB, but are identical to their MAS counterpart. At the moment, sales are about 20 times lower than the MAS. Maybe that is due to the low acceptance level of Windows 8 and 8.1 which are the only ones having the Windows Store. A bit like if the MAS was available only in Yosemite. Noise is indeed much less pronounced than on the regular try-before-you-buy Windows market, and the display for each app is as good as the MAS, unlike the crappy shareware archives. I have a new app in the works for when Xojo apps will be able to list there and will report.
All in all, for me, the best deal is by far the MAS.
[quote=192033:@Marco Hof]Sam,
And that just sounds weird to me. I would imagine that the MAS is the first place where a user would go to look for some software. And therefore always be the main channel.
May I ask what other sales channels you refer to? Apart from a website, I cannot think of much. Do you mean retail?[/quote]
It may be the 1st place that many go to look for Apps, but getting your application noticed is certainly harder. It takes about two weeks to get reviewed, then you may have a week or so on the new list, unless your application is instantly picked up by App Store users or Apple promotes it, then it will quickly disappear into the ocean of cheap clones.
Not to mention that Apple’s restrictions may not even allow your on the Mac App Store, or a change may break your application. Right now, our #1 selling application cannot be Sandboxed, so it’s not on the App Store.
There are many places to sell your software, Amazon I would avoid, took us months to get everything set-up for them and we’ve sold maybe a handful of units in two years (not to mention the one where we had to do a return because the customer didn’t read anything about the product and then got angry because it doesn’t do what they thought it did). MacUpdate are working on a store, bundle sites and promotion sites don’t seem to have as much impact as they used to, but it all helps.
No matter what you do, you’re going to need a marketing strategy if you want to make some money. At this point, this is where you need to talk who someone who knows about marketing as I suck at it big time.[quote=192033:@Marco Hof]As was mentioned in the article in my start post, this guy ended up at the 8th position with a grand total of 98 downloads worldwide. So either I’m missing something or the MAS isn’t working because people aren’t buying there.[/quote]
We made #13 with nearly 400 units the other day! So I think it depends on the day.
I’ve had 4 apps sold through the App Store. For the first 2-3 months, it was exciting. After that, copy cat apps started showing up for $1.99 and i dropped from the attention pool and sales plummeted. Even creating “updates” didn’t help. And, one update where I just changed the version and the icon color was rejected when 3 previous copies of the exact same code were accepted.
Well I am a developer with 80% income from projects with custom made business apps. Most of my projects are under NDA so there is no chance to monetarize them via alternative distribution channels like the Apple App Store. They even wouldn’t run out of the box. But sometimes there are some smaller projects without any NDA and it makes a lot of fun to create products out of them with own websites etc. These Apps are already paid by my customers so each sale in MAS is a welcome additional revenue. My MAS revenues are not high but they are high enough to pay all my server hosting costs, Internet bills and even my Apple Developer Membership (for Mac and iOS).
Selling software isn’t my top source of income, bespoke development for business is my main work. However, I’ve been on the App Store with a couple of apps for 3+ years. I don’t do any marketing as such, however the income has paid my mortgage every month since I’ve been listed. Sales have dropped over time, however they’re still at a healthy level for a secondary income.
I wouldn’t like to comment on how feasible it would be as your only income source, however as a supplemental income it’s a very welcome boost.
I am afraid the Mac App Store is the only real game in town. Mac Update is not selling, the Amazon App Store sells sometimes Mac apps, but the bulk is Android and Windows.
Since 2013, my revenue has dropped some 30%, but remains significative enough to justify I keep apps there.
If Xojo iOS had been anything like an easy transition, iTune app store would be the natural future for our apps. Unfortunately, any serious iOS development requires something else.
One thing that I learned with my two projects - push updates at least once a month, even if all you did was a fresh build - change some help text, modify a color or two, rearrange things in a menu - but something. Otherwise, you fall off the RADAR for most users.
