Sketch dev pulls out of Mac App Store, cites slow reviews, tech limitations

Re: "App Review continues to take at least a week"

Apple could easily rate-limit developer submissions to prevent such abuses. Spending a week to review a minor code change to an established application is ridiculous.

However, the bigger problem is upgrade pricing, I'd imagine. This is the big flaw in the "app" model from a developer's side of the deal: once a customer buys your app, they must get every new feature for free. Those features, unfortunately, do not cost nothing to implement.

As an example: if an iPhone user bought a utility app like PCalc (Hi James!) back in 2008, they still have it now, for free, on their shiny new Apple Watch and iPhone 6s. Seven years of a developer's time means the current one is far more useful than the original, but the user has had all of that for free.

That's just about manageable for an "indie" developer with low overheads, but if you're a larger company, with premises, staff, and customer support costs, you cannot operate on a model that prohibits you from recouping your product improvement investments.

Re: "App Review continues to take at least a week"

On the other hand, if there is a serious bug that means users can't work, waiting for the fix to be programmed and tested, then a further week for it to be reviewed at Apple's leisure is unacceptable.

For serious problems, especially security problems, there needs to be a fast-track method of pushing out updates. Unfortunately, at the current time, that means you can't use an app store and you have to run your own sales and support infrastructure.

I got my refund

I had exactly the same experience with a Mac program that I bought from Apple's App Store. It didn't work right and the developer's web site was permanently offline. I persisted with Apple customer service (one additional email) and got my $8 back.

Re: Argh!

You may be right.

Re: I like gardens

I do paid apps (judiciously), as long as paid with gifted gift cards;)

Despise the idea of walled garden though and I will never consider any limited platform as inherently more trusted, especially if all my data can only be synced through someone's "cloud".

Re: On the plus side...

"Updates (and update notifications) of all kind are managed by the OS itself. You don't need app-specific services or a manual check running to check for updates.

Upgrade pricing is always available in the App Store if you choose to implement (essentially) a new product."

The latter breaks the former; suddenly the app has to scan for updates and hassle you.

Re: On the plus side...

Upgrade pricing doesn't work AFAIK. If you make a new version under a new entry in the store, you can't give owners of the old version a cheaper price than new customers. That is the problem.

Yes, you can get more revenue from putting v. 2 in as a new app, but that doesn't allow you to reward loyal customers.

Re: On the plus side...

> Negative reviews are a good thing as far as the end user is concerned.

In my experience users write support requests as negative reviews - instead of using the support link, looking at the website, or even looking at the pictures and description on the app store.