Unlock the full potential of macOS with system extensions, daemons, no sandboxing, private API, and more.Ship updates whenever you want, no need to wait for them to be reviewed and no fear of random rejections.Can’t unlock the full potential of macOS because of the strict sandboxing requirements.Every single update, no matter how minor, has to go through App Review and has the potential of being rejected for arbitrary and random reasons.Have to pay a 15% or 30% cut of all sales to Apple, depending on how much you make in a year across all apps.Can use features such as Sign in With Apple which are not available for apps distributed outside the Mac App Store.Potential to get featured by Apple and reach more customers.The app is easier to find and install for most users.Apple handles the distribution, billing and licensing for you.The same goes for many other types of apps which simply wouldn’t work with the restrictions of the Mac’s sandbox.įor those who do have that choice, I’ve compiled a list of what I believe to be the pros and cons between shipping through the Mac App Store or shipping directly. An example of that is my app AirBuddy which, in order to provide deep integration with Apple’s wireless devices, needs to run a system agent and use some private APIs, which would never be allowed in the App Store. App Store x Direct: pros and consĪll of these choices come with their pros and cons, and depending on which type of Mac app you’re making, you might not be able to have it in the Mac App Store to begin with.
My hope is that having everything listed here will help demystify the process for beginners, and the descriptions of my own process will be useful as starting points. It is meant to be a guide on the things that you’ll need to know about when distributing a Mac app outside the App Store, rather than a how-to tutorial. This article is my brain dump on the subject. What this means for us developers is that, when targeting the Mac platform, we have choices: we can distribute our apps independently, outside the Mac App Store, through the Mac App Store exclusively, or through both at the same time. Even with the introduction of Apple Silicon, Apple has made it very clear that the Mac is still the Mac, and is still hackable, even when running on the new architecture. The Mac has always been very different from its close relative, iOS, especially when it comes to what a user is or is not allowed to run on their system.
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