Mac App Store

On Wednesday evening Apple caught us off-guard by announcing that not only will Mac OS X Lion ship with a built-in Mac App Store, but that the App Store will also be available within 90 days to Mac OS X Snow Leopard customers. It's clearly an exciting time to be a Mac developer, with the new distribution platform offering great potential for easily reaching the ever-increasing Mac userbase.

Simply put: we're planning to have all our apps available on the Mac App Store at launch. That's not to say there's some niggles we'll have to work around, but with the App Store offering users the incredibly-hassle-free method of delivering software, we'd be crazy to not be there. The licensing setup of the App Store may not work for every edge-case out there, but for the majority of the Mac community it means that dealing with store systems, billing details, email confirmations, serial number registration and vastly different installation processes are a thing of the past. That can only be a good thing!

There's obviously some issues that we're going to have to work out: a couple of our apps will in the near future receive paid upgrades which simply aren't possible on the App Store, and the co-existence of our own store alongside Apple's (at least, for the time being) being just two that spring to mind.

Despite the integration issues that we're inevitably going to encounter adding (or maybe that should be moving) our apps to the App Store, we can't help but be optimistic about the store. Since the App Store launched two and a quarter years ago, Apple's interaction with the developer community has slowly changed: we're all finally on the same page with regards to approval guidelines, and Apple are willing to listen to developers offering feedback about those guidelines.

We're excited to see the Mac App Store launch in the coming months - a way that makes it ridiculously simple for users to buy the latest and greatest Mac apps - and will be working to ensure our apps are "Available on the App Store" from launch!