Apple today announced that over 100 million apps have been downloaded from the Mac App Store in less than one year. With thousands of free and paid apps, the Mac App Store brings the App Store experience to the Mac so you can find great new apps, buy them using your iTunes account, and download and install them in just one step. Apple revolutionized the app industry with the App Store, which now has more than 500,000 apps and where customers have downloaded more than 18 billion apps and continue to download more than 1 billion apps per month.
“In just three years the App Store changed how people get mobile apps, and now the Mac App Store is changing the traditional PC software industry,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, in the press release. “With more than 100 million downloads in less than a year, the Mac App Store is the largest and fastest growing PC software store in the world.”
“With Autodesk products in both the App Store and Mac App Store, we can reach hundreds of millions of Apple users around the world,” said Amar Hanspal, senior vice president of Platform Solutions and Emerging Business at Autodesk, in the press release. “With our free AutoCAD WS and the more powerful professional drafting tools of AutoCAD LT, we’re using the Mac App Store to deliver new products and reach a growing base of new Mac customers.”
“The Mac App Store has unparalleled reach and has completely transformed our distribution and development cycle,” said Saulius Dailide of the Pixelmator Team, in the press release. “Offering Pixelmator 2.0 exclusively on the Mac App Store allows us to streamline updates to our image editing software and stay ahead of the competition.”
“In less than one year we’ve shifted the distribution of djay for Mac exclusively to the Mac App Store,” said Karim Morsy, CEO of algoriddim, in the press release. “With just a few clicks, djay for Mac is available to customers in 123 countries worldwide. We could never have that reach through traditional channels.”
The Mac App Store offers thousands of apps in Education, Games, Graphics & Design, Lifestyle, Productivity, Utilities and other categories. Users can browse new and noteworthy apps, find out what’s hot, see staff favorites, search categories and look up top charts for paid and free apps, as well as user ratings and reviews. The Mac App Store is included with Mac OS X Lion and is available as a software update for any Mac running Mac OS X Snow Leopard.
Mac developers set the prices for their apps, keep 70 percent of the sales revenue, are not charged for free apps and do not have to pay hosting, marketing or credit card fees. To find out more about developing for the Mac App Store visit, developer.apple.com/programs/mac.
Source: Apple Inc.
So, no antitrust investigations about that in USA and Europe yet?
I remember that before the Mac App Store was introduced there were those that were saying it was the worst thing that Apple could do by creating another “walled garden” for desktop computers. There are always dingbats spouting their ignorance of all things Apple. It’s a terrific way to distribute Mac apps and so simple for anyone to use, especially non-tech users. Definitely something that Microsoft will have to copy in Windows 8. As long as Microsoft has been selling Windows I’m surprised they didn’t do one-stop software downloads before Apple. It’s a darn shame it wasn’t something that Apple could patent.
Technically, Apple was not the first with electronic store for applications. There was (is) narrow-focused store for games, and software distribution system for Linux (it was not quite what Apple did, though).
But Apple was innovator (not inventor) with this, presenting this concept universally in worldwide scale to common users.
Before Apple, people would not tell you what an app store could be, except for maybe figuring out that you mean physical stores with software, even if they knew what “app” stands for (most of people did not).
And as you can see the developers love it too… It simplifies the marketing and sales end of the business to the point where a developer can actuall concentrate on what they do best…. Develop and improve their software … Channel distractions are so radically reduced Apple’s 30% share becames a non issue. As a developer I can say the above from experience and with confidence.
The Mac Application Store still has issues:
1- Most of the apps are shit. Low Res windowed ports from iOS are a joke.
2- Navigation for discovery is poor- just like iTunes Application Store & iTunes Media.
3- If one has purchased retail copies of applications now for sale via the store, why do we have to re-purchase in order to keep current through the store? Very un-Apple like.
The good part is one purchase goes on all computers with the same account.
1. Universal rule about all kinds of things anywhere (music, books, applications, et cetera).
2. Not quite poor — many say it is very efficient thanks categories, immediate search, “also buy”, so on.
3. Obviously, this depends not only solely on Apple. Also, concept of “retail copies” is going away so quickly no one of normal people would even remember that such thing existed in quite short time.
However, of course, nothing is perfect, and this App Store system can not please everyone’s habits about everything. And Apple needs to do many things to improve here and there.
The app store app is still a bit slow and buggy but that is not a big issue. A bet lion made up a significant portion of those 100 million.
My biggest gripe is that some big iOs apple apps are not available. iBooks should be on there with cloud syncing.
Cards definitely needs to be a Mac app. iPhoto has some functionality but you cannot send cards to people.