Developer Bohemian Coding has pulled their hit app “Sketch” from Apple’s moribund Mac App Store.
“[This is a] deeply troubling indictment of the Mac App Store,” John Gruber writes for Daring Fireball. “Sketch isn’t the first big name professional app to be pulled from the Mac App Store (Bare Bones Software’s BBEdit, Panic’s Coda, Quicken, just to name a few). But Sketch is the poster child for Mac App Store era professional Mac software. It’s the sort of app Apple might demo in a keynote — and the winner of an Apple Design Award.”
“The Mac App Store is rotting, at least for productivity software,” Gruber writes. “There’s no other way to put it. If this hasn’t set off alarm bells within Apple, something is very wrong.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yup. It’s inexplicable. Apple treats the Mac App Store like it’s their red-headed stepchild.
Every single Mac developer on the planet who’s in the Mac App Store should get together and pull their apps on a single day. We’d love to see the reaction to that, especially Apple’s as they turn a collective groggy eye to the corpse they’ve wrought through sheer neglect.
Sometimes Apple, the world’s most profitable and most valuable company, still operates as if they only have five guys from NeXT working around the clock trying to do all the work on a shoestring budget. — MacDailyNews Take, November 23, 2015
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We barely use the thing. The problem is that it’s an app, among many apps, and we only ever really use it when it pops up after we hit “Software Update” in the Apple Menu. Sometimes, rarely, we launch it to see what’s on there, but it seems, uh… less than vibrant.
For longtime Mac users, the Mac App Store is an afterthought, if it’s thought of at all. It’s like Dashboard. We know, vaguely, that it’s there, but, seriously, who really gives a shit? (Frequent users of Dashboard, please, no need to chime in. Just substitute Dashboard with something you never use on the Mac. You know, like Launchpad.)
New Mac users, do you use the Mac App Store with any regularity? — — MacDailyNews Take, May 7, 2015
SEE ALSO:
How Apple could fix their flawed Mac App Store – November 27, 2015
Apple’s Mac App Store is a ghost town – May 7, 2015
Dev pulls MplayerX from Mac App Store over sandboxing; Latest of many Mac developers to abandon Apple app distribution – August 21, 2012