My Mac App Store Debate

The question of publishing NetNewsWire on the Mac App Store won’t be decided until the minute that it’s actually published there.

If it ever is, that is. I go back and forth on it.

Here’s the thing to remember: our goal is to get as many people using RSS readers as possible. Period. Keep this goal in mind.

Seems Obvious

Publishing on the Mac App Store would mean that some people would see the app who might never have seen it otherwise.

There are also people who, due to personal or workplace policy, download apps only from the Mac App Store.

Publishing on the Mac App Store seems like a no-brainer, then. We’d get more people using RSS readers — we’d further our goal.

But it’s not so simple.

Trade-offs

As with everything else, there are trade-offs. There are costs and benefits.

The benefit is reaching more people. There are several costs.

Some are right up front: we’d have to sandbox the app and test it. We’d have to do a set of screenshots for the Mac App Store; we’d have to write the description text for the page.

But I don’t mind one-time costs that much when there’s a solid benefit.

There are ongoing costs, though: we’d have two configurations of the Mac app, one for the Mac App Store and one for direct download, and we’d have continue to maintain and test both. This is kind of a pain, but not terrible.

The Real Cost

There’s a cost that’s worse than the technical and testing costs: I would have to deal personally with the stress and uncertainty of a second App Store. The NetNewsWire team is amazing and does a ton of great work — but the team can’t do this part. It’s on me.

The issue with the default feeds reminds me that, at any time, even for a small bug-fix update, App Store review may decide that an app can’t be published as-is for some reason.

You‘d be right to think that, with an issue like this, it would come up the same on both App Stores — solve it in one place and you’ve solved it in both. It’s not like I’d have double the issues.

But sometimes the issue actually is platform-specific. For example: NetNewsWire Lite 4.0 for Mac was held up by Mac App Store review for three weeks due to a bug in WebKit. (Yes, this was nine years ago.)

This is supposed to be fun. It’s work that I love doing for a great cause. And I just keep thinking that dealing with the iOS App Store is enough to ask of me, and there’s no requirement that I go through this with the Mac App Store too. The personal cost is just too high.

Other Ways to Achieve Our Goal

We can achieve our goal in other ways: ship Feedly syncing on the Mac, ship iCloud syncing on both apps, continue making the app more appealing to more people. Do more marketing.

In other words, publishing on the Mac App Store is not the only lever we have, and I’m leaning toward just not doing it. At least not this year.

We’ve got other, better things to do — and I’ll enjoy those things a hell of a lot more, and I think you will too.

🐣🎸