Non-Payment for Bundle Sales
When asked for more details, Ryan told us that “several developers (including Mariner) participated in his bundle last year. It did relatively well, from what we could tell. After the bundle ended, Samuel/Dan/Isaac (he goes by many aliases) was to have paid said developers their share. That didn’t happen. We pursued him (and continue to), but since he is in the UK, the probability of ever getting funds is small.”
Additionally, Charlie Monroe, the developer of movie cataloging app Rottenwood, spoke to us about the matter as well. Monroe said that he had his app in one of the bundles: “I supplied licenses to the guy, everything. Never heard back from him, never got a response to any of my emails after the sale.”
MacNN has reached out to nearly all of the developers associated with MacBundler and Bundlecult offerings. We’ve received responses from eight other developers who have confirmed non-payment from Bundlecult-related bundles.
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Mayer from CoreCode discovered that Bundlecult, Macbundler, creativeloots, mightyloots, oyoyo, poplytics, printplum, smugcase, futurestaff, and 99closets are all related to the lessprices.co.uk domain -- which was suspended Thursday morning for reasons as yet unknown -- but has returned since.
Update (2015-10-14): Mark Munz:
MacNN didn’t contact me, but I can confirm MacBundler’s stopped paying app developers as far back as Apr 2014.
Update (2016-04-10): MacNN:
There have periodically been bad actors among software bundle creators, and it has come to MacNN’s attention that there is likely another that has been running bundles for some time under the BundleCult and MacBundler names, amongst others. Does this all sound familiar? It should -- MacNN originally ran the story about the group and issues paying developers in October, and we’re reminding readers now about it, because another bundle by the same group has gone on sale today.
We have periodically since October tried to reach out to the organizer to get their side of the story, but have never gotten a response until now. MacNN has finally received an email, and had a brief exchange earlier today from Dan Kingsley, the self-proclaimed “curator” of MacBundler. In the response, we were given some information by Kingsley discussing the situation, but in doing so, it raised more questions.
