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Apple’s Mac App Store: What’s good … and what’s scary

Apple’s Mac App Store: What’s good … and what’s scary

Apple plans to corral the wild Mac software roaming the Internet, to make it easier for people to find and install. Overall the Mac App Store sounds like a good deal for developers, for consumers and for Apple, which will of course make money in the process.

But just like with the iPhone App Store, there is a dark side to the power that Apple stands to gain. By limiting what software gets into the store, and by managing which apps get the most promotion, Apple is bound to draw cries of censorship and manipulation, some which will likely be deserved.

A screenshot of the Mac App Store, taken during Steve Jobs’ presentation of the new Mac software.

I talked to Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, who answered some basic questions on the new App Store.

For customers, a Mac App Store will simplify the software hunting and buying process by a phenomenal degree, by providing one-click buying and installing, by offering a standardized review process by which to judge competing products, and by taking away (most of) the fear of downloading software from the open Internet. We still have to be wary, but Apple has in the past tended to err on the side of not letting in a nasty app, rather than letting in too many.

While we may end up paying a few dollars for apps that we previously might have got for free, it’s more likely that we will see pricing drop, like we did in the iPhone store. If payment is guaranteed every time an app is downloaded, a developer could charge less per download. Meanwhile, by giving developers a better-trafficked store to sell their wares, not to mention putting them alongside their competition, lowered pricing will very likely occur naturally. Schiller didn’t say that, but said only that developers are free to set their prices.

Right now, the alternative is pretty painful: You have to search the Web (or at least Lifehacker, as I do) for an app that fits your need, say a video player that can handle any format. Once you find out what that is, you have to download it from somewhere — hopefully a safe location, like the developer or publisher’s own website, hopefully not some skeevy backwoods site intentionally set up to ensnare people who don’t pay attention. If the app costs money, you have to pay — usually via PayPal — or suffer the ticking timebomb of an app that goes useless after 30 days, or some other humiliating money-extracting method the dev had to resort to for a payday. It beats mailing checks to Hungary, like in the pre-PayPal days, but not by much.

For many of these reasons, Schiller says there has been pent-up demand from developers for a centralized Mac App Store “since the day we launched the iPhone App Store” back in 2008. But unlike the store for iPhones and iPads, which exclusively distributes apps to those closed platforms, the Mac App Store would just be one of the ways for people to get software for the Mac. Furthermore, Schiller says Apple won’t tie developers to use the store exclusively. “If a developer also wants to distribute software from their website, they can,” he told me.

Schiller says the Mac App Store will appeal more to small and mid-size developers than it will to mega publishers, makers of must-have software that costs hundreds of dollars and is already widely marketed and distributed. Still, I would bet that even some multimillion-dollar players, like the games publishers, would make good use of this app store, as they already do well in the mobile App Store.

For developers, Schiller says, the process of submitting an app will be easy. Starting in November, there will be a submission process that includes an updated version of the Mac OS X software development kit (SDK), which will have just minor tweaks required to make an existing product App Store-ready.

Though this newest of Apple App Stores sounds promising for users and developers alike, you can’t talk about it without mentioning the bad stuff associated with the current one. The iPhone/iPad store is an exclusive channel of distribution, and as such has made Apple into a software gatekeeper: If the company doesn’t like your app, you don’t get distribution. For the Mac store, as I mentioned, developers would be able to distribute their software outside of the App Store and not be locked out.

Still, developers getting bumped from the Mac App Store will cry “Censorship!” if they are excluded, and not just those whose apps contain lascivious content or profanity. Apple has, in the past, restricted apps that present a competitive threat to the company’s own offerings. Though they seem to have lightened up a bit — a good example of this would be the Mog and Rhapsody music apps for iPhone, which clearly compete with iTunes music — the guidelines are not always easy to follow. As many a blog is quick to point out, there are no hard and fast rules. For developers this could be problematic. Just because a developer is “free” to distribute software on the open Web doesn’t mean the benefits will be anywhere near as good.

[Thanks: http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com]

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