Apple recently announced their
Mac App Store which is basically their App store already known from the iPhone, but for the Mac Computers. Developers will be able to upload applications starting with November, and it's expected to go live for end users in January.
If you are a developer, the App Store initially sounds like a good idea. But Apple is Apple, and the details don't sound that nice: Apple wants 30% of the revenue if you publish your program on the Mac App Store. And additionally, you need to pay 99$ per year to access the Developer Program, only to get information about the App Store internals in order to develop for it. Additionally, Apple forces you to obey an
incredible long list of stuff you may not do in your application: License keys? Forbidden. Own update mechanism? Forbidden. You app is similar to an app created by Apple? Forget it. Using your own copy protection scheme? No chance. And the list also includes other ridiculous stuff like "apps that [...] do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected". Oh come on.
From a developers perspective, and known the bad history of Apple, rejecting plenty of totally valid apps for their own reasons, the App store currently looks to become a censorship and revenue sucking tool generating money for apple and putting us developers at the mercy of this company. And since the distribution of Apps via normal website downloads doesn't generate any money for Apple, I bet they'll make it more and more difficult in the future for developers to go that way instead.
But it's not that bad. Apple won't be that evil, right?
Right?
I know several developers whose business fortunes are entirely down to the App Store. All the brouhaha about rejected Apps are about a tiny, miniscule proportion and really of no consequence - great for driving traffic to internet sites but really not a big deal in most cases. And try getting published on XBLA or PSN - I guarantee that is several orders of magnitude harder, and yet there aren't blogs full of people bitching about that.
Yep, 30% is high. It's also the same as Steam, PSN and XBLA. It's basically what you can expect to pay to not only get sales handling, but also marketing and portal access. The question is whether it generates more revenue than it costs - the experience of people I know is a 'hell yes' - Steam basically saved some developers businesses (e.g. Introversion).
License keys and outside updates are disallowed because the experience for the user is supposed to be uniform & predictable. If you don't like that, don't use any of the normal app portals.
But sure, stay away from it on principle if you like. IMO that's not likely to be a smart business decision though - users like the App Store even if (some) developers don't.