Goodbye Mac App Store

While Jettison and HistoryHound are still supported and sold on the St. Clair Software website, I’ve pulled them from the Mac App Store. The versions that were in the Mac App Store were older revisions, and it just didn’t make business sense to rearchitect the apps to meet Apple’s current requirements for approval so they could be kept up-to-date.

For both applications, complying with Apple’s sandboxing and feature constraints to get them approved for sale would have required significant rewrites. And in Jettison’s case, it would also require that buyers download a separate helper app to enable its full functionality. I realize that some people will be put off or inconvenienced by the fact that these apps are no longer in the Mac App Store – my apologies if you’re one of those folks, but it just doesn’t make sense for Jettison and HistoryHound.

Without going into a full-on rant about the Mac App Store (I could ramble on for days), let’s just say that while the Mac App Store is convenient for consumers, it doesn’t really serve the needs of some developers. Much has been written about it already (here, here, here, here and here, for example) so I won’t rehash it all – and despite years of “constructive criticism” from developers, Apple hasn’t fixed some major problems.

I hope you’ll continue to purchase our applications, as well as those from other independent developers selling outside the Mac App Store. While it’s a little less convenient than the Mac App Store, it allows us to bring you the best software we can, and also gives us the opportunity to foster a two-way relationship with you – both of which really matter to us.

– Jon

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 2nd, 2017 at 9:19 pm and is filed under Development, HistoryHound, Jettison, Random Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.