The Mac App Store

October twentieth, along with revealing a new iLife and previewing OS 10.7 Lion, Apple announced the opening of the Mac App Store within ninety days from the event. Now, what are the implications of the Mac App Store? There is a lot of good that can come out of it, as well as plenty of bad, and after seeing what that bad is, I've gotta say that I'm on the fence about it now.

When the Mac App Store was announced I absolutely loved the idea. The key for me was that it is centralized location where I can get and discover applications for my Mac. Up until now, I have had to rely primarily on Mac|Life when it comes to the discovery of applications. To name a few that I have gotten because of them: MagicPrefs, Anxiety, AppFresh, TrashMe, and RockMelt. With the exception of AppFresh and TrashMe, due to the nature of the apps, I use the apps every single day. Beyond that, there is no real easy way to discover new applications. All you can is tirelessly search the internet, and hope you can come up with what you're looking for. It will really make app discovery easier, which brings me to another key good thing about the Mac App Store: making app installation and management incredibly simple. As it is right now, you have to download and mount a disk image (though they often mount themselves) and then install the application. Being an experienced user, I have no trouble with doing this but it is a little too complicated and not exactly consumer friendly. The Mac App Store will fix this, downloading and installing directly into your apps folder. Then there is the matter of updating your applications. As it is right now, each application has it's own settings and has it's own dialog window that will pop when an update is available. Of course there are apps out there, earlier mentioned AppFresh comes to mind, that will keep track of all of your applications and inform you which ones need updates, but the Mac App Store will act as a native, centralized location to update all of your apps.

Then, of course, we have the negatives. The really big one in my, and many others, mind is rules and restrictions Apple has over what applications will be available in the App Store. The iOS App Store has it's own share of issues with what can and cannot be sold, but the Mac App Store is on a far larger scale and has much greater implications. While the majority of the restrictions are reasonable (as stated by Rik Myslewski in Mac|Life), there are a key few that have the potential to create trouble. To sum them up: Apple is completely free to decide whether they like the interface or not, after a certain point apps that duplicate the functions of apps already existant in the store won't be accepted, and apps that appear to be similar to Apple's own apps will be rejected. I had no idea about these restrictions until I read about them in a column yesterday in Mac|Life. Each of these will have an incredibly negative effect on what is offered and will skew what is offered in the store in Apple's favor so as to eliminate possible competition. I love Apple, but this is stepping over the line. The rejection of apps that perform functions similar to those already in the store discourages competition between apps and will give users less to choose from. A good example that comes to my mind would be web browsers. They could simply say enough with say Safari and some other browser and just cut it off. That's wrong. That would mean other, possibly better browsers like RockMelt would be rejected just because that function has been filled. Then we have the rejection of apps that appear similar to Apple's own. Doesn't that seem just a little ant-competitive to you? Finally, not to be overlooked, is the decision over an apps interface. It makes senses with Apple's intense focus on aesthetics and keeping things nice and cleaning looking, but that could a potentially fantastic app could be turned down just because Apple doesn't like the way it looks.

Sure, it is Apple's app store, and being theirs they have every right to decide what is and isn't sold there, but those three restrictions are a little too favorable for Apple, and if the Mac App Store becomes as big as they intend it to could potentially kill the free market. What are your thoughts?