The Apple Mac OS app store will offer similar rules to those for the iPhone and iPad. Hardly surprising, but some of the rules appear to either kill existing software models, or will cause major players to either revise their approach or not bother.



http://www.tuaw.com/2010/10/20/apple-po ... ighlights/

Also:



I know one software company who will want to be there, but for whom this may cause some head-scratching.

My reading of that suggests you won't be able to charge for 'point' upgrades but you would for new versions. I don't have a problem with that - anyone who charges money for a .1 update deserves a kicking IMO. Agreed it seems to mean you won't be able to offer upgrade prices to purchasers of previous versions though, which is a pain. So essentially you'll have to make sure each new version has enough new stuff in it to justify people paying the full price again. I don't really have any objection to that either but it's going to make life interesting for some companies who seem to put out new versions that barely differ from the previous one...

At the end of the day though the Mac App Store isn't compulsory so if you don't like the terms, you just don't use it. Plus they've got what, two years to amend the terms if one of the 400lb gorilla companies objects...

Jon

I suspect that the initial price might drop as well so that rather than having a retail price and an upgrade price they have one price instead, so that when they do sell users will not be too upset at the lack of discount for an upgrade. Also with developers getting 70% of the proceeds it might be a better option than conventional selling though third parties, to whom they have to give bigger discounts. As a big user of small developer apps I think that it will be the other models like macupdate and mupromo that might suffer. I have the macupdate desktop which is very good at updating the software that I do have. That could become free as a result of this.