New Mac App Store, new rules
It’s never felt as essential as on iOS, but the Mac App Store is getting more love
With more than two million apps available for iOS, many developers felt it was increasingly difficult to get noticed, a concern that Apple addressed last year with an overhaul of the App Store’s interface in iOS 11. That change is now coming to macOS, where the Mac App Store doesn’t have exclusive software distribution.
As demoed by App Store product marketing manager Ann Thai, Mojave’s Mac App Store reflects the new focus on discoverabilty. Apps are divided into supercategories — Create, Work, Play, and Develop, the last aimed at app makers themselves — and, as in iOS, the front page offers feature articles about new apps, developers and users. ‘Editor’s Choice’ recommendations draw your attention, while user ratings and reviews are also prominent, with new mechanisms to let developers offer customers opportunities to give ratings without leaving the app.
It’s early days for this revamp, but Apple has already announced the return of big names including Microsoft Office 365, Adobe Lightroom (briefly available through the Store in 2012) and code editor BBEdit. Popular indie developer Panic also announced that the next upgrade to its popular file transfer app, Transmit, would be back in the fold: “The new, redesigned Mac App Store is a store we’d like to be in,” it said.
Improvements in presentation aren’t the only factor: Mojave also brings a relaxation of the Mac App Store’s rules on sandboxing — the quarantining of apps from other processes and files on your Mac. These restrictions made it technically impossible for some apps to deliver their full functionality, resulting in makers sticking to selling via their own websites. Now apps will be given a little more latitude if they need it, a concession that Apple can make as all apps in its store are vetted anyway.
For apps that developers still choose to distribute outside the Mac App Store, by contrast, there’s a new layer of safeguards. Since the introduction of Gatekeeper in OS X Mountain Lion, your Mac would block the installation of any app not digitally signed by a registered developer, and an admin password was required to override this. That won’t change, but apps will now be ‘notarized’ by Apple. This involves a process similar to App Store approval, but looking only at security aspects. You will still be able to run unapproved apps from other sources if you want to, but developers who prefer to keep their customers within the macOS comfort zone will need to go through this extra step. Free to try While you’ll still be able to buy Transmit from Panic at a one-off price, the app will be sold on the Mac App Store as a subscription, with an initial free trial period. Regular paid apps can now also offer a free trial, another feature developers have wanted for years.
A final change is that macOS updates seem to be moving out of the Mac App Store — where they’ve always felt awkward — and are getting their own System Preferences pane, instead.