Comment by 827a

Comment by 827a 15 hours ago

The odd thing about the Mac App Store is how needlessly embarrassing this is for Apple. The Mac App Store doesn't need to exist, but because it does Apple is lending its authority to these apps, and every day its customers, who come to Apple expecting a level of safety and authenticity, are fooled by them.

How must OpenAI feel about this? Or the dozens of other developers caught in a similar position? This is a stellar example of why extremely few businesses would choose to do business with Apple (and Google) when given the market of free choice. Its one thing if all these copycat apps all have their own websites and handle advertisement and SEO; its another entirely when Apple is saying "this is the safe place to get apps".

Apple and the World itself would be so much better if Apple were significantly stricter on curation in the Mac App store. Require a personal, high-level relationship with Apple. Personally, I'd also like to see the same thing on iOS, combined with a native application installation process, but that is of course far more tenuous.

Or, just get rid of both the app stores; what have they ever done for us anyway.

rchaud 15 hours ago

Apple doesn't care. The iOS app store is just as full of crummy shovelware and ads. They are a "software and services" company after all.

The embarassment should be felt by the commentariat that rushes to defend Apple's store sharecropping tax by repeating ancient canards about how a fee is necessary for Apple to maintain its rigorous app review process that differentiates it from the street markets of Android, F-Droid, and whoever else.

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radley 13 hours ago

> Apple and the World itself would be so much better if Apple were significantly stricter on curation in the Mac App store.

The current App Store is already the result of Apple-quality curation. Do you use Apple's own software? Most apps are buggy & sloppy, including Finder, Calendar, Mail, Music, and Clock. I don't think I can name a single app that "just works" anymore. Maybe upsell subscription apps work as expected?

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robenkleene 12 hours ago

> Most apps are buggy & sloppy, including Finder, Calendar, Mail, Music, and Clock.
Relative to what? E.g., which GUI apps are better than these? I'd list all of those apps (except Music, and maybe Clock, which I don't use enough to judge) as some of the strongest GUI apps I use today (although Notes, Logic Pro, and Final Cut would be my top three apps Apple makes today, in that order). Note that doesn't mean those apps are without flaws, but I'd be hard pressed to name anything definitively better. Ableton Live/MaxMSP is probably the only non-Apple ecosystem GUI app I can think of that I'd consider first rate (I might add Sublime Text/Sublime Merge, but I haven't used those enough to say definitively). Acorn, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, NetNewsWire, Transmit, Things, BBEdit, are all Apple ecosystem apps I use regularly that I'd consider great, but I don't think any of those are definitively better than Apple's first-party apps. So curious what software you're comparing Apple's apps to that you'd consider definitively better than them?
(Regarding Mail and Calendar, curious if you're using those with Gmail or Exchange. Mail/Calendar only work ok with those services.)

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- radley 10 hours ago
  
  > Relative to what? E.g., which GUI apps are better than these?
  Relative to the same apps 5+ years ago. I'm not claiming there are better GUI apps. I'm saying that the quality of the native apps has decayed, with prominent bugs or poor designs that have been around for years.
  
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  827a 10 hours ago
  
  I do feel that one of the interesting things to happen to software in recent years is how most super-popular native applications (most of those developed by Apple) have nosedived in quality, while web applications have done a tremendous job maintaining their quality. Many web experiences are now superior to native experiences, certainly due to nosediving native quality, but also I suspect because the web has always standardized on one stack, HTML/CSS/JS, and we get to reap the benefits of 30+ years of startlingly stable infrastructural consistency.
  This is what happens when the same hyper-smart people get to chip away at n% annual performance gains in V8 for 20 years. Apple, on the other hand, pushes major UI system refactors every ~10 years, disrupting all the hard-fought stability and optimizations that have been made to that point. Microsoft pushes new ways to build UIs, it seems, even more often.
  
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  robenkleene 9 hours ago
  
  > I do feel that one of the interesting things to happen to software in recent years is how most super-popular native applications (most of those developed by Apple) have nosedived in quality, while web applications have done a tremendous job maintaining their quality. Many web experiences are now superior to native experiences, certainly due to nosediving native quality, but also I suspect because the web has always standardized on one stack, HTML/CSS/JS, and we get to reap the benefits of 30+ years of startlingly stable infrastructural consistency.
  I'd be curious which apps you'd consider the best examples of this high quality experience? The only web app I even think is worth commenting on is Figma, which is easily the best web app I've ever used, but an app I'd only rank as mid-tier overall. VS Code is the closest analogy, VS Code is clearly a great app overall, in that it solves it's need very effectively, but its not an app I exudes quality the way the apps listed here do https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45252567 (as an example of how VS Code doesn't exude quality, note how when VS Code loads it's UI elements for the first time, each element pops in separately, instead of the entire UI displaying instantly and simultaneously, this creates the impression of the app struggling to display its textual UI). I think Figma is slightly worse than VS Code, mainly because it's a web app, which presents all sorts of problems inherent to the platform, e.g.:
  - Conflicts between keyboard shortcuts with the browser/web app split
  - Bizarre tacked-on native-app affordances (e.g., breaking the back button and high-jacking the right-click contextual menu, both to essentially disguise the fact it's a web app?)
  - Poor fit with the URL overall as a UI element (e.g., what does the URL mean when you're knee-deep in a single component in a larger document?)
  In summary, the web's core UI elements just don't seem fit well with desktop use cases. I can understand web apps being a nice compromise, e.g., collaborating on Google Docs/Figma is a good practical fit (the web helps with a lot of the challenge of collaborating on the same doc). But they never feel pleasant or high quality to me.
  
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  robenkleene 10 hours ago
  
  There's some truth to the software getting worse, but it's also a different world (e.g., I see the decline as being a result of supporting different devices [and especially syncing between them]). But my point is more that still making the best GUI software around is pretty good for a company of Apple's size and complex priorities! (I don't think Apple makes software that's better than everyone else, but I do think most of their core apps are on par with the best.)
  
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schnable 13 hours ago

It also exists because it's a low friction way for app developers to generate revenue for their app.

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tempodox 12 hours ago

On iOS it’s the only way an app can be installed at all, so it’s not like users or app developers have a choice.

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827a 13 hours ago

No one is making any money on the Mac App Store. Its likely that even Apple's internal accounting positions the Mac App Store as an unprofitable product offering, given the engineering and support it requires to run, let alone as a product to turn revenue for third party developers.

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- schnable 11 hours ago
  
  Strictly speaking, this can't be true because I have purchased apps (that have been around for years and are still supported) on the Mac App Store that are not available any other way.
  
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  827a 11 hours ago
  
  Yeah, I guess what I mean is, as a percentage of revenue, the Mac App Store is a rounding error for most developers. There's a small number of bespoke, $5-$15 apps, possibly distributed only through the Mac App Store, strongly reminiscent of the early days of Mac indie development; but this is fractions of a penny relative to the ~11 figures of revenue the iOS App Store drives every year.
  
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