Lightroom 4 Now Available on the Mac App Store

Adobe has the expected list of caveats:

• Updates will take place through the Mac App Store, not via Adobe.com for this version of Lightroom. When we update Lightroom for new camera support (about 4 times per year), the Mac App Store version may be released at a different time than the update on Adobe.com
• There is no upgrade pricing available on the Mac App Store for Lightroom customers who own Lightroom 1, 2 or 3.
• Because there is no upgrade pricing or upgrade validation currently available on the Mac App Store, there is no guarantee that upgrade pricing will be available to Mac App Store Lightroom 4 customers when Lightroom 5 and future versions of Lightroom are released.

I’m more interested in what will happen to Lightroom 4 purchases when version 5 becomes available. If there’s still no upgrade functionality, Adobe will have to remove version 4 from the store when it adds version 5. My understanding is that apps that are removed cannot be redownloaded. You can make your own backup, but the Mac App Store receipt will be tied to your Mac’s unique ID. So it seems as though if Lightroom 5 comes out and you get a new Mac, you will not be able to continue using Lightroom 4 at all. To be clear, this situation is not unique to Adobe. It is just one of the higher profile companies that is working around Apple’s lack of support for multiple versions of a product.

Secondly, this is bad for scripting and for other applications that integrate with the product. A new product in the Mac App Store must have a new bundle identifier. So any code that was using the old bundle identifier to, well, identify the application will break.