Hi,
anyone selling apps thru MacUpdate?
Since AppleStore is a limbo, I was thinking of finding a new outlet.
Why is the Mac App Store “a limbo”?
MAS is not a limbo here. But it has declined some 50% as compared to 2013.
I do consider MacUpdate as well. It is more like the classic try-before-you-buy market familiar with Windows, apparently.
it was referred as such (limbo) by somebody on the forum. I found it funny, and somehow it conveys the idea of what MAS has become after the golden age (2011-2013).
The MAS is definitely alive. It is not without some warts, though. Sandboxing is a pain and makes certain apps impossible to submit due to their requirements.
I’ve found the app reviewers to be wildly inconsistent too. I’ve had apps go through with obvious bugs and some rejected for a misspelling in a label. Sometimes it takes a few days and sometimes it takes a few weeks for the app to get reviewed.
So, no, it’s not perfect.
The iOS App Store is in a much worse predicament. Apart from $0.99 games it is barely breathing.
Now that I will disagree with. The iOS Store is the ONLY (legitimate) avenue for getting apps on your iPhone. The Mac App Store is not and never has been.
It’s breathing, there’s just no money to be made and it’s oversaturated with crud. Exploding Kittens climbed and topped the charts because the guy who made it (The Oatmeal) has a huge following. To me it shows what can happen with a quality product.
Apples < 7 day old financial reports for Q1 would have me believe the App store is selling a lot since they said sales were UP 2- 25%
There’s a LOT of crapware and knock offs in there - tons of “candy crushes” and such but there are gems too
Searching the store is probably the worst thing
And people have figured out how to game the system (like always) to rate lousy stuff highly
I’d almost rather see “Apple Staff” curated ratings on them
Personally, I would never purchase software from a 3rd party site. There lies malware. If I find something on MacUpdate I DuckDuckGo the software/publisher and buy from their website directly.
+++1
But since MacUpdate doesn’t vet the software (nor do the thousands of other sites that latch on to apps from there)… you are no more or less likely to get malware from them as from the authors website.
it’s amazing. We are talking selling software over MacUpdate, and we have someone talking about HIS PERSONAL purchasing habits. Sorry, Art, for all the value of your sharing, there are hundreds of thousand if not millions of visitors over MacUpdate a honest developer may want to talk to.
Besides, most vendors simply place their evaluation package over there, which brings them business through links inside the trial or in-app purchase. No need for DuckDuckGo at that point.
I’ve purchased things from MacUpdate, but there were some reports late last year of MacUpdate injecting adware into software they host.
Yes they did. They started to wrap apps (in this case Skype) in their own installer that offered you to install other crap apps (for me it was MacKeeper, which shocked me as it was a known malware). So if you were not careful suddenly you installed software that you didn’t want. I reported it as a comment, then others chimed in, there was a HUGE “discussion” (during which they blatantly lied), and then all our comments were removed.
Not what I call trustworthy anymore.
He is right. Most shareware/freeware commercial repositories routinely pack software in installers that offer to install additional software.
Unfortunately, it was already the rule on the Windows side and Mac was relatively safe, until these bad habits jumped over the fence.
That is what users get from never wanting to pay anything. Advertisement is the engine that powers free stuff. Such an enterprise as Macupdate requires curators, staff, designers, well, people who need to eat. Hosting and bandwidth, etc. Altogether costly infrastructure. Since Macupdate, unlike the MAS, does not belong to a company that does 17 billion dollars a quarter, I guess they need to make a buck.
As a user, I don’t like that. As a businessman, I can understand where they are coming from.
If they had been upfront and honest about it then there would not have been a problem.
But they were very sneaky, offered the wrong software for installation (crapware, adware, or known malware), underhanded, controlling (deleted comments pointing out what they were doing), posted fake positive comments both on MacUpdate and on other sides defending their actions (and were found out), etc etc
Not a smart business move.
Yes.
Good, your applications should be sold in as many places as your can sell 'em.
They do vet apps, just no-where like Apple, heck not even Apple vet Apple’s software like they do ours.
I once bought an image resizing app that Apple was promoting, I wanted to figure out what made it worthy of Apple’s promotion. It didn’t resize any of the images to the dimensions I specified, it simply had one job to do and couldn’t do it. Yet it was promoted by Apple. Go Figure.
The App Store has simple become an additional sales channel for many developers, you need to look into marketing and finding a way to get your application in front of the apps that just shipped while I wrote this post.
@Sam Rowlands Since you use it, can you tell me if they automatically provide for a trial-period before purchasing the app itself? Or do I have to roll my own function, or upload a separate trial-app?
You will have to roll your own DRM.
How you choose to do that is up to you, and they will work with you (even if you pick the really horrible idea of using a trial app and a full-version app)