I love the App Store product and what it offers, what I don’t like is the bureaucracy that grew around it.
Because Lunar uses lots of private and reverse engineered APIs, it isn’t allowed on the App Store, so I had to replicate a lot of the distribution myself:
- payments and refunds
- license activation
- anti cracking measures
- automatic (and rolling) updates
- making a website for the app
- SEO (the App Store is quite good at this)
- error reporting and crash data collection
- anonymous analytics
- making sure I’m not mishandling any user data
I mostly opt for the App Store nowadays because it saves me the hassle for all of the above, but it comes with a number of pains and disadvantages:
- no trial mode for one-time purchase apps
- the sandbox is very limiting: no private APIs, no full disk access, no Accessibility Permissions etc.
- the review process is more annoying than helpful
- the user ratings can hurt the business a lot when the product is harder to understand and users leave an angry review because they didn’t read the description before buying the app
For the trial thing I have my own solution where I publish a trial-only build on my website and a link to buying on the App Store when the trial ends.
The sandbox, well I found workarounds for most of my needs [1] but I still skip building some ideas because I know they would never be approved.
The reviews are as annoying as ever [2], I even got my name in a Wired article [3] because of that. They can be very discouraging.
- in-app purchases come with more disadvantages than a one-time purchase (harder to implement, more UI and explaining needed, restoring purchases is a confusing thing)
- I don't want ads in my products
- there's not much functionality to limit, since the apps are very focused on a single thing
- App Store reviewers don't approve apps that limit functionality too much
The App Store way of doing this is with an additional $0 in-app purchase named "7-day Trial", but I tried it and it creates an incredibly confusing experience for users.
Because Lunar uses lots of private and reverse engineered APIs, it isn’t allowed on the App Store, so I had to replicate a lot of the distribution myself:
I mostly opt for the App Store nowadays because it saves me the hassle for all of the above, but it comes with a number of pains and disadvantages: For the trial thing I have my own solution where I publish a trial-only build on my website and a link to buying on the App Store when the trial ends.The sandbox, well I found workarounds for most of my needs [1] but I still skip building some ideas because I know they would never be approved.
The reviews are as annoying as ever [2], I even got my name in a Wired article [3] because of that. They can be very discouraging.
[1] https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/window-switcher-app-store/
[2] https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/App%20Store%20review%20timeli...
[3] https://www.wired.com/story/apples-app-store-review-fix-fail...