Today’s launch of the Mac App Store will doubtless be feeding analyst speculation for some time to come. Developers who choose to work within it gain exposure; users who use it gain frictionless purchasing ability, unobtrusive DRM (perhaps too unobtrusive), and slick updating. However, there are costs — most prominently, Apple takes a 30% cut of revenues, which might not sit too well with some companies. Apple’s tight restrictions on what apps can do rule out a lot of programs which modify your system in various ways that Apple doesn’t approve of.
It’s too early to say how it’s going down with users, but how many developers have committed to the store for launch day? The Mac App Store UI doesn’t make this easy to figure out; there’s no master list of apps, but instead a sub-list for each of 35 categories (including the various sub-categories of games.) Even worse, many apps are listed in more than one place, meaning that if you start adding up across those categories, you double- or even triple-count many times. Fortunately, I have devised a method of working around this (gory details at the end of the article, if you are curious.) Click through the break for some analysis of how launch day on the Mac App Store is shaping up.
Continue reading Mac App Store by the numbers — almost 1,000 apps on Day One
Mac App Store by the numbers — almost 1,000 apps on Day One originally appeared on TUAW on Thu, 06 Jan 2011 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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