Funny no mention of an app store for desktop apps. It seems obvious this would be the next strategic step for iTunes. As it is, OSX is in dire need of a package manager.
Working with Apple via the iTunes store is an absolute nightmare. Why on earth, as a developer, would I want to give Apple all the cards on the desktop, too?
Allegedly because you'd get access to iTunes customers. Many of whom already have their credit card on the account, which probably makes things easier for the customer and for you. Also because your competition will be there. In any case, I'm not saying this has to be a sweet deal for developers or that it would necessarily be a success.
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/ seems to serve a similar purpose to developers, though - listing apps from within a standard directory. I'd imagine that it's much easier to have a user download an app and drag it to their Apps folder on their Mac than manually finding and installing apps seamlessly on a mobile device.
It seems to me like an App Store for Mac developers would only benefit Apple with their profit from it.
But that's not a package manager. Think macports with a pretty UI and servers in Cupertino. And yes, apple would surely be happy with the sales commissions and tightening developer control.
I'd expect this to take the form of a stand-alone App Store app. I'm quite sure that Apple will do this eventually. It has done wonders for the iPhone, but they might hold off until the iPhone App Store excitement shows signs of dying down.
i will bet you any amount of money that apple will never release a Mac app store.
simply put, they can't. the genie is already out of the bottle. mac users can install apps from any source right now.
iphone developers don't enjoy being bottled up in apple's app store. they'd love to sell directly to iphone owners, but apple has made that impossible. it's not impossible for the mac, so a theoretical apple mac app store would have almost nobody developing for it.
The app store is a double edged sword, for sure. But for all the complaining about the grueling approval process, I don't think anyone would be in a hurry to abandon the store if Apple opened the iPhone up for alternatives.
The 30% fee is quite reasonable. It covers all of the variable costs such as transaction fees, bandwidth, etc. Not to mention the fixed costs of developing a store. It greatly lowers the barrier to entry for selling software.
The top 10 lists, the featured apps, and all the other perks of a central location have created significant wealth for a number of lucky developers. Otherwise, those developers would have had to make a significant marketing investment (in terms of either money, or sheer effort, or both).
Sating that "they can't" is completely unimaginative. If Apple released an App Store for OSX, developers would flock to it. Many would keep on selling software the way they have been doing it through the web, or through brick and mortar locations, but the ecosystem would flourish. Anything that increases the value of the OSX ecosystem, sells more Macs.
Apple would be crazy not to do this. Microsoft would have done it long ago if the EU would let them...
Maybe next year. There's too much anger among developers about the App Store bullshit — not the store itself, but the stupid hoops Apple has made developers jump through to get listed there. (See Gruber's recent http://daringfireball.net/2009/05/diary_of_an_app_store_revi... for a taste of the development community's feelings about the App Store.)
My take: If they want to build an App Store for Mac, this year's WWDC keynote will include a quick reference to something like 'streamlining' or 'expediting' the process — just enough to let people know they're aware of the problem and have some interest in fixing it. And then if they do fix it, they can announce the Mac App Store at next year's WWDC to rousing cheers.
But people have to realize that the mobile App Store really is for a phone. There's no reason to put the same hoops on apps on a platform that has absolutely no concern for branding, battery life, network usage, etc.
Both Macs (and to a much lesser degree, Windows) were both designed to allow applications to be atomized into easier to install "drag-and-drop" installs. The problem is from those development houses who get too ambitious or too paranoid to allow users to keep their installs in just one folder. (Either they are being too worried about library versions, which is really a red herring, since in the real world, apps can only maintain reliability if they keep they're own copies of the libraries separate from other apps. Or they're too afraid of software piracy to allow apps to be too easily moved.)
The classic Mac architecture did things right by having a simple key/value lightweight DB built-in, to allow apps to have all it's components in one file. (Actually two "forks", but that's ancient history.) Even under OS X, the OS provides the "bundle" folder concept to keep an app's state in folder, save for a prefs file.
I've worked with package managers like Fink, and they strike me as solving a problem that should not have existed in the first place: Unix's insistence on breaking apps into little teeny tiny pieces strewn over half a dozen directories. It's sad that Windows succumbed to this by the time of Win 3.1, and OS X is heading in this direction too.
I miss the time where I both knew what files were on my system, and that the organization was simple enough to do things "manually" without too much technical knowledge. We didn't have to have the current byzantine system of thousands of files in an install; it's not progress, but technological laziness and paranoia to keep the underlying technology complicated enough to cow most end users.
