On May 28, 2012, at 5:43 PM, Fritz Anderson wrote: > The tradeoff is that most developers don't have the resources to handle > publicity, distribution, updates, or worldwide payments, and the MAS does > those things for them. (You can afford time and money to do those things for > yourself? Fine. Not everybody can eat cake.)
I’m not sure the “Let them eat cake” thing really works for the MAS, since: - MacUpdate provides the same type of “publicity” that the MAS provides (better, in fact, since you get bumped back to the top each time you release an update), and it’s free. - Updates can be handled by Sparkle, which not only is both free and easy to set up, but which, unlike the MAS’s update scheme, *actually works* — your users will find out about updates when they use your app, as opposed to the App Store’s update scheme where you never find out about an updated version of an app until you happen to go to the App Store for some reason. I don’t know about you, but I rarely go to the App Store, and when I do, there’s usually a bunch of ancient unapplied app updates in there that I didn’t know about. I doubt most end users regularly check the App Store to see if any of their apps need updating. - Worldwide payments are already handled by services such as Kagi, eSellerate, et al., and they’re usually quite a bit *cheaper* than the MAS. The MAS only gets price-competitive with Kagi if the price of your app drops below $3.50 or so. Anything above that, and Kagi will be significantly less expensive. The only thing that’s legitimately more expensive when going non-MAS is getting a website for distribution, and a) web sites are cheap, b) if you move any kind of volume at all, their price will be easily dwarfed by the savings from not paying the App Store 30% of profits, and c) really, even if you’re going MAS, you’re going to want to have a web site anyway. I’m not really seeing the “cake” in non-MAS software development. Charles _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
