Should you submit your app to Mac App Store?
Sketch (one of the top sellers) recently announced that they are moving out of Mac App Store. Primarily, to give a better experience to their users and Mac App Store hasn’t evolved to suit their needs. Sketch started out like any other in Mac App Store. They realized the limitations and started selling their app on their site directly along with the Mac App Store version. Now they have decided to discontinue the App Store version altogether.
So coming back to our question, Should you submit your app to Mac App Store?
Yes and No.
Yes, if you are just starting out, have no audience yet, can’t handle distribution yourself or don’t know if you will continue working on it (Yeah. It happens all the time)
No, for the rest of them.
Ask these questions to yourself.
Can your users wait for a week (2 weeks during holiday break) for a critical bug fix?
Distributing the patch through your channels might just take a few hours or a day. Apple’s review process takes about a week not because they review your app for that long, but you are in a queue.
App Store is an international platform. Most of the businesses might close in Americas and Europe during the holidays. But a majority of Asia is going to run during this time. In addition to the usual 1-week review period, the holiday break makes it almost half a month for a business in Asia to roll out a bug fix/update during the holiday break.
How about selling upgrades?
Numerous apps have completely redesigned themselves and redone their work in better ways to fix fundamental problems. Most of them had to do that for free since App store doesn’t let them set a fee for updates. Few of them decided to sell them as new apps like Omnifocus 2, Sketch 3.
These are not problems when you are just starting out. The above problems apply once you have a good number of users. If you got a good user base and your users are starting to trust your product, it is time to ask these questions and evaluate your options.
Mac App Store is still the best way to launch your app and build an audience. It helps in distributing your app and its updates forever for free and occasionally drive traffic by featuring your app on the home page. If you are just starting out, look no further. Launch it in App Store. Focus on building great apps and leave the rest to App store.
