In the first year of the Mac App Store, before sandboxing, I bought as much as I could from it. As a customer, the convenience was so great that I even repurchased a few apps that I already owned just to have the App Store updates and reinstallation convenience. And, most importantly, when an app was available both in and out of the Mac App Store, I always bought the App Store version, even if it was more expensive. But now, I’ve lost all confidence that the apps I buy in the App Store today will still be there next month or next year. The advantages of buying from the App Store are mostly gone now. My confidence in the App Store, as a customer, has evaporated. I agree whole-heartedly with Marco on this. When the Mac App Store first came out, I began buying everything on it, and why not? It was great! I could sit down at any of my 4 Macs and instantly have access (well, with download times maybe not quite instantly - but easily) to all of my OS X software. I began to snug apps who weren't on the Mac App Store unless I absolutely needed them, such as SuperDuper!. And then, Apple had to rain on its own parade with Sandboxing and Entitlements. Now, I've had to purchase newer versions of several apps off of the Mac App Store because they've pulled out due to Apple's onerous restrictions that break core functionality of their apps. Apps that have been hampered by the Mac App Store that I rely on or are very popular: Textexpander, Alfred (which you cannot get from the MAS if you want to add-on their 'Powerpack' functionality due to the inability for in-app purchases), Hazel, SuperDuper!, Reflection, all of Atlassian's apps, Postbox. Myself, Manton Reece, Daniel Jalkut and others have been keeping a running list of articles on Pinboard about apps that have pulled out or have had updates rejected due to Sanboxing shenanigans. Someone at Apple who has the power to step in and reverse this poor direction Apple is currently taking with the Mac App Store had better do so soon, otherwise they are going to either doom the Mac App Store from being a long term success or lose years of progress while they recover from this bad decision years from now.

A few weeks ago, on our anniversary no less, I did this. As a surprise for Steffanie when she got home from the hospital, my family had came to the rescue and bought her a new 15.4" MacBook Pro. Monday night while she was in the NCCU, I turned on her old Mac along with her new Mac and using a spare Firewire 800 cable with Migration Assistant, I moved all of her data over to her new machine. It worked wonderfully. This was my first time using Migration Assistant, not ever having fully trusted it before, I usually manually copied over any data when moving to new machines. Everything worked great. Fast forwarding two days, Steff was home and using her MacBook Pro. She launched Twitterrific for the first time but the Mac App Store login prompt popped up. Not having ever logged into the MAS on this machine, it needed to verify her identity before allowing Twitterrific, a MAS purchased app, to launch. I wasn't aware it would do this, but it makes sense diving the DRM attached to these apps. It surprised me but I thought it was neat.

The Mac App Store's Future Of Irrelevance

Trivial Mac App Store Observation