Why are so many developers leaving the App store?

A source of frustration for developers

The Mac App Store hasn’t had much success with developers lately. Initially launched in January 2011, the Mac App Store was supposed to give developers the same sort of centralized marketplace to sell their apps that had made the iOS App Store such a success. However, instead of providing a better place to market apps, the Mac App Store has been an increasing source of frustration for developers.

The result is more and more developers are actually leaving the Mac App Store.

Technical limitations and bugs

There have been several sources of frustration for developers on the Mac App Store the past several months. In November, a bug caused application purchases to stop loading because of a security certificate. Then, in December, Bohemian Coding cited that the platform wasn’t workable for them. They said that, coupled with several other small issues had finally resulted in their decision to pull their professional design app Sketch from the Mac App Store.

In a blog post, the company stated, “App Review continues to take at least a week, there are technical limitations imposed by the Mac App Store guidelines (sandboxing and so on) that limit some of the features we want to bring to Sketch, and upgrade pricing remains unavailable.”

So where does it leave us?

Having developers leave will eventually take a toll on the Mac App Store. Sketch, for example, was among the top-grossing apps in the Store and received one of the design awards handed out by Apple.

Among reasons behind developers have given deciding to make the move away from the Mac App Store are that they’re just frustrated. Scott Kyle, the developer of an app named Current, said, “It’s a joke that they have barely updated the Mac App Store in five years, have made little effort to improve certain limitations like sandboxing, ignore it for new features like app analytics, and continue to take 30 percent.”

Scott isn’t necessarily wrong. The App Store really hasn’t changed all that much since it launched back in 2011. Many dissatisfied developers wish Apple would pay more attention to it. If the developer attrition from the store continues, Apple might be forced to start giving more attention to the App Store.

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