Mac App Store to Launch January 6
Posted in: Apple, apps, desktops, Mac, Today's Chili
The Mac App Store will go live on Thursday, Jan. 6, 2011, ready to download for Mac users running Mac OS X Snow Leopard, available in 90 countries.
Coincidentally, that’s the same day that the Consumer Electronics Show kicks off, which probably indicates Apple’s intention to steal the spotlight from other tech titans.
More importantly for the rest of us, this will also mark the date when regular people start to buy third-party software.
The Mac App Store, to give it its stable name, will run on the same model as the iOS App Store: Sign in with your Apple ID and you can grab apps and have them charged straight to your credit card. And just like the App Store, updates will show up automatically, with just a click needed to get them.
Hard as it may be to believe, people still buy software on DVDs, in boxes, from stores. You or I might be happy buying shareware and paying for it with PayPal, but many people who are not as enthused about tech are terrified of buying anything on the internet.
It helps that the Mac ships with a great software suite, including iLife, but there is so much more great indie software out there that most people never see. The Mac App Store could solve that problem with the friction-free payment model that made the iOS App Store and iTunes so successful.
Developers can continue to sell the same apps on their own sites, and if they want to offer a trial version, they’ll have to — Apple won’t allow trials or betas in the store. On the other hand, new developers won’t have to bother setting up payment systems; they just let Apple take care of it in return for a 30-percent cut.
What I’m most looking forward to are cheap, $1 apps that do something simple. Right now, it’s not viable to sell a Mac app for a buck, but with the App Store, I’ll bet we’ll see a lot of them.
Apple’s Mac App Store to Open on January 6 [Apple Press Release]
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