Thursday, October 18, 2018

App Bundles Now Support Mac Apps

Apple:

App bundles make it easy for customers to buy up to 10 of your apps in a single purchase. And now, you can create app bundles for Mac apps or free apps that offer an auto-renewable subscription to access all apps in the bundle.

This is 4+ years after iOS apps could be bundled. It would be interesting if companion iOS and Mac apps could be bundled together, but as far as I can tell all the apps in the bundle have to be for the same platform.

Previously: App Store Bundles as an Upgrade Path.

Update (2018-10-24): Jeff Johnson:

Mac app bundles appear to be live now but only available in Mojave App Store.

How do you even advertise that when pre-Mojave customers click on the link and get “Cannot Connect to the App Store”??

Update (2018-11-01): Jeff Johnson:

I submitted my Mac app bundle on October 16, the day Apple announced bundles. It went into review the next day. However, the bundle sat in review until the evening of October 23, when it was rejected for metadata. App Store review didn’t like the name of the bundle “Please Pass The Madness Pack”, which was based on the idea “PassTheMadness, please” suggested by a friend. I thought this was clever and amusing, but apparently App Store review has no sense of humor or whimsy. So I changed names to the boring “StopTheMadness Underpass Bundle” and re-submitted within a couple hours. The next day, bundles went live in the Mac App Store, but mine was still waiting for review, so I requested an expedited review. Three days later I received an email denying my request for an expedited review. The day after that, though, on the evening of October 28, my bundle went into review again, and it was approved within 10 minutes. Despite being approved, the bundle did not appear in the Mac App Store the next day. Or the next day.

1 Comment RSS · Twitter

That's just ridiculous. My FIRST thought upon reading "App Bundles Now Support Mac Apps" is that it would be Mac app + iOS app bundled together for a special price (like Fantastical, Omni Focus, etc). Mac app bundles alone don't excite me much. I think I've only ever bought 3 apps on the MAS, and none of them are from the same company. It seems like the Mac apps that I rely on the most don't sell via the MAS (for good reason).

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