Like any i-fanboi, I spent a few precious hours on the Mac App Store (and ironically mostly looking at Productivity and Business Category of Apps !). Here are my observations :
The Good
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Thank God, the App Store is a separate app and wasn’t made part of the bloated, crumbling-under-its-own-weight, cant-get-any-more-clunky iTunes. It maintains the iTunes App Store experience.
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Most likely to jumpstart the store, products that were sold as bundles (iWork, iLife etc,.) can now be bought individually (Yay! I can buy iPhoto without having to pay for GarageBand too), and buying everything in the bundle is still cheaper than buying the CD version before. This could also be because Apple can now enforce licenses more strictly (as opposed to the CD world where anyone can share willy-nilly). The CD version probably had a premium built in for piracy that is not there anymore.
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Apps already installed but not bought from the App Store are recognized as being installed (Although, apparently they cannot be upgraded from within the App Store
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Good for Apple, it is so easy to buy apps. (see the third items under “The Bad” too)
The Bad
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No easy way to pay just for upgrades (you got to buy new)
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No trials and beta. This is a big deal. I have bought so many pieces of software for my Mac and not ONE of them did I buy without trying it out first. I hope there is a way around this.
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Bad (for me!), it is so easy to buy Apps. I just accidentally bought one yesterday (for nearly 15 bucks!) . I have done this a couple of items in iOS, but there is a pretty big difference between 99 cents and 15 bucks!
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So I figured, I could contact Customer Service and was surprised to find a nice link from the FAQ. The bad news is that the link was broken. This was a bit surprising, given Jobs’ famous attention to detail, but hopefully this will get addressed soon.
Update : This seems to have been fixed by now) -
App store review and HIG still don’t seem to stop people from creating crappy apps
The Promise
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No matter what, this is going to be one monstrous distribution channel. Evernote, an app that is already pretty successful by many measure, reported a 1800% increase in new users. If an already successful app is seeing this, I can only imagine the goodness it will bring to apps and startups looking for a nice distribution channel.
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Kudos to Apple for continuously learning across its product eco-systems and adding good business models around long-standing technical innovations (Yum, RPM are all app stores, if you think about it.)
There are still a lot of unknowns (in-app purchases, subscriptions) and lot of things to be improved, but this is a good start, and hope it heads in the right direction.