The Mac App Store is set to be the definitive place to get applications for the Mac. And it’s almost an ideal situation. One place to buy apps that you cam guarantee are from a reliable source that won’t leak your credit card details. One place to browse for quality applications (and crappy ones). And one place to go to reinstall your apps on all your machines.
The license agreement allows you to log in with your iTunes account, which continues to grow in usefulness and becoming the one place to spend money online. Once logged in, you go to the Purchases page and hit the Install button.
Where this could start to fall down is when relying on developers to stay active. Imagine this. You’ve spent £39.99 on some app from the MAS and you have just gone and bought a brand new iMac or MacBook Air. Unfortunately, the developer of the wonder app you love has shut shop and closed his developer account. Now you can’t reinstall your app because it doesn’t exist now. We’ve already seen this with the iPhone, where a number of apps have been removed later. This leaves the only trace of that application on your old computer.
For normal users, they may not even think about backing that up. They’ve been conditioned to believe that the MAS is there to go and reinstall all their apps.
In the old days, you would still have a CD with a printed license key there to reinstall even years later without issue. It’s not friendly but it’s always there (unless you lose either part).
This isn’t a problem exclusive to the MAS but it’s more prominent given how Apple promote the store.
So what is the expectation? If Sony closed, you wouldn’t expect them to support your TV that is still in warranty. If the company is gone, you lose your support. It’s a risk we take without thinking about it, but with bigger companies, we’ve come to expect they will be here for years. When it comes down to a single iOS developer working weekends to build that cool app you can’t work without, where is that expectation? How far can you reasonably expect the developer to support that app?
Honestly, the truth is not at all. You don’t buy software with a support warranty. You buy as is. It could be gone the next day and you’re stuck. No update, bug fixes or support and no refund.
What could you expect a developer to do? Well they could continue to support an app for a set time period, or suggest alternatives to their “killer app”. Or they could put the app in a DMG and stick it on a web host somewhere. That allows users to carry on using it, and download it regardless of it’s presence in the MAS.
In some ways the solution comes down to backup again. But it’s also having someone who knows to backup those apps, a friendly tech savvy person who knows this stuff. As that tech savvy person, we are already doing this. We have our SuperDuper nightly clones and Time Machine backups and know what to do to get it back.
But we’re not the normal users are we?