The Mac App Store

The highly spoken about, Mac App Store, will be publicly released to that shiny new MacBook Air and other Macs very soon! We haven’t spoken on our thoughts of the Mac App Store, so how about we take care of that right now?

Back in October, Apple mentioned the Mac App Store at their “Back to the Mac” keynote. This started gaining quite a bit of speculations among developers on whether or not they should use it. These thoughts emerged mainly for that fact that Apple is taking a good chunk of the money, just like that do on the iPhone’s/iPad’s/iPod’s App Store; how about 30% of it.

Whether that may not seem like too much, because the developers are left with 70% of their fair share, it can really add up over time. I was speaking with a couple of PR representatives over at some large software firms, and they’ve said their thoughts too. A big thing that almost every commercial Mac application has is licensing. How will the Mac App Store handle this? The answer to that right now, we don’t know. Many companies implement their own way of licensing, with Apple’s Mac App Store, I can bet we’ll be seeing the same process on the iOS devices. Getting the certificates, signing your application, and awaiting approval from Apple.

That may not be such a bad thing; the thing I’m scared about is remember what happened on the iOS devices? People are able to run official iOS applications without paying nothing. With the help of software that can crack the application automatically or prepackaged right now, you can download and install any application without logging into your iTunes account. Completely illegal of a process, but will we be seeing this same thing coming to the Mac? We have to wait and see.

One other thing that has to come up is how will updates work and people who already own an application in the Mac App Store? For many applications on the Mac, you need to pay around $30 or so to upgrade it. And for the people who already own an app from the store, are these software firms preparing to send out vast amounts of coupon codes for us to get the app from the Mac App Store again? I guess I should stop ratting on this, in fact, it’ll be coming in less than a day!

Anyways, gear up for that release of the Mac App Store tomorrow on January 6, 2011! There have been reports of saying it’ll be released around 12:00PM  EST. Whether or not if this is correct news, are you awaiting to see and download apps from the Mac App Store?