While presenting the next Mac operating system, Lion, Steve Jobs announced that Apple is bringing the App Store to the Mac. This has caused a flurry in the blogosphere regarding the pros and cons of such a move. I won't rehash such arguments here but simply say I am on the fence as to how beneficial such a store will be to us as developers.
One question I feel our Mac-based customers will be wondering is if Cadent wineCellar will be moving to the new App Store and what effect that will have on the current wineCellar licensing.
First off, let me say that we are committed to supporting both Mac and Windows versions of wineCellar. As such, we have to continue offering wineCellar in its current form to our Windows-based clients regardless of what we do on the Mac side. That being said, there is no reason to not keep offering the Mac version this way as well. If we do go into Apple's App Store, that will just become another sales avenue.
There are three big differences between what we do now and the App Store:
- The App Store does its own licensing so we have to remove our licensing system from the application.
- The App Store does its own updating to new versions so we have to remove that from the product as well.
- The App Store will be taking 30% from sales whereas our current system takes significantly less.
On that last point, it would be tempting to increase the price of the product to make up for the extra being taken by Apple, but that would be unfair to our customers.
The plan, then, is to create a new version of wineCellar for the Mac (Leopard and Snow Leopard support only) which has no licensing or update support and to submit that to Apple for the App store. The price will be the same, $25US (probably $24.99 to conform to the pricing model used by Apple). The version number will be the same as the non-App Store version. Support and updates will be the same for all versions.
Hopefully, the new App Store will become a new avenue to more sales. Only time will tell how good an idea the App Store will be.