Why the Mac App Store (probably) isn’t for us (yet)

For those of you who don't know, Apple announced today that they're bringing a form of the iPhone App Store to the Mac. This will allow people to browse and download Mac apps in a couple of clicks.

That's great in theory. However, we've got a couple of concerns.

1. It's only going to be available for users running Snow Leopard (and later, Lion). So if you've got an old Mac, you have to think about spending a fair wedge of cash on an upgrade. If you're a Windows (or Linux etc) user, you're just plain out of luck.
2. We're going to guess that Apple will want to vet every single app submission. They'll probably take at least two weeks to do so. This isn't so much of a problem on the iOS platforms, the apps are generally fairly small and it's fairly easy to spot and fix bugs during testing so it's not often that you have to submit fixes. Mac apps are usually huge and complicated, we can almost guarantee that they will have bugs. Will you as a user be happy to use buggy software for two weeks whilst Apple checks the patch? You could potentially lose all your client data in the process! Didn't think so.

The Mac App Store isn't fair

So, if Second Shootr was turned into a Mac app, the vast majority of our users would never even be able to download it. We'd have spent loads of cash and tonnes of time designing and building a desktop application that only a handful of people can enjoy.

That's hardly fair is it?

Don't get us wrong – in a few year's time, the Mac App Store will have evolved. There may be a Windows version and more people will have a Mac that's capable of running the App Store.  But we're not going to build a Mac App Store app now in the hope that one day everyone will get a piece of the pie.

What could we do instead?

We're not knocking desktop apps at all. In fact, we can easily see that a desktop app to enter and store your client and shoot data in would be fantastic.

In order to get there, our aim is to find a method of delivering a desktop application that doesn't just work on the most recent Macs, it also works on older Macs. Hey, why stop there, why can't it work on Windows and Linux desktops, laptops and tablets too?

The problem with traditional desktop applications is that they all run different code languages. A Windows application will likely use completely different code to a Mac application (for example). We're a very small company. Although Second Shootr (the iPhone app) is selling well... we're hardly millionaires (in fact, we've never taken a single penny from the money generated from Second Shootr, it's ALL gone back into developing new features) and we can't afford to build a desktop application for every single platform.

We're stuck between wanting to please everyone and keeping our accountant smiling.

On top of that, if we had a desktop applications for each platform. There'd likely be multiple, different bugs in each one and the whole thing will turn into a mess very easily.

There's companies out there that do deliver desktop applications this way, and we don't think they should be. Take Skype as an example. The Windows application is miles ahead of the Mac and Linux version. It's just not fair to the people who have to wait ages for the updated app because they prefer one platform over another.

What we need is a way of delivering one codebase to multiple platforms at the same time. This codebase needs to be really easy to update and fix should something go wrong.

There must be another way.

We'd be really interested on your thoughts. Feel free to add them to the comments below.