Fission Exits the Mac App Store
We want to be sure to our customers who previously purchased Fission via the Mac App Store are taken care of as well. To that end, we will be transitioning you over to our directly distributed version.
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For almost twenty years, we’ve sold our software directly to our customers via our online store. Our fast and secure purchase process has served our customers very well. Since the Mac App Store opened in 2011, we’ve also experimented there. However, despite a decade of feedback from countless developers and users, Apple has made scant few changes and the store remains beset with issues. When you couple the many shortcomings and issues with Apple’s restrictive policies that preclude most of our software from appearing there, the Mac App Store is clearly a poor fit for us. With the removal of Fission, we no longer have any products in the Mac App Store.
I remember putting Fission in the Mac App Store, and it sucked, mainly because we had to mangle it and make the app worse for sandboxing.
A damning indictment of the Mac App Store.
I’d love to see a follow-up to this piece about overall revenue with any other apps/app-makers that have left the Mac App Store.
I’m thinking of removing my apps from the Mac App Store, the revenue from that source is constantly dropping and I’m really only offering it as a convenience for potential customers, especially those with a Mac App Store preference.
When I was selling via both the Mac App Store, and Kagi, it got up to around 80% MAS sales, and the direction was pretty clear. For something like PCalc which is (less) unlikely to fall foul of App Review, I think it’s still the best place to be.
Previously:
- Transmit 5
- Piezo’s Life Outside the Mac App Store
- BBEdit Leaving the Mac App Store
- OmniKeyMaster
- Fission 2.0
Update (2021-09-08): Steve Troughton-Smith:
Alternate take on the Mac App Store: I only joined the MAS in the past two years after years of my apps being iOS-only. It has since grown to ~30% of my revenue, a chunk that didn’t exist before, and, as competition is low, the App Store editors are eager to show off great apps.
How can anyone watch so many developers leave and/or completely ignore the Mac App Store and continue to think that the iOS App Store is actually good for the platform?