The Mac App Flea Market
Jim Nielsen (via Hacker News):
Have you ever searched for “AI chat” in the Mac App Store?
I have. It’s like strolling through one of those counterfeit, replica markets where all the goods look legit at first glance. But then when you look closer, you realize something is off.
For the query “AI chat”, there are so many ChatGPT-like app icons the results are comical.
[…]
The funny thing is: the official ChatGPT desktop app from OpenAI is not even in the Mac App Store. It’s only available from their website, so it won’t show up in the “AI chat” results.
827a:
The odd thing about the Mac App Store is how needlessly embarrassing this is for Apple. The Mac App Store doesn’t need to exist, but because it does Apple is lending its authority to these apps, and every day its customers, who come to Apple expecting a level of safety and authenticity, are fooled by them.
Previously:
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I've noticed that the Mac App Store has stopped updating my apps, and apps don't even show that an update is available unless I go to the app's page in the store.
Also, for some reason the Mac App Store isn't even showing most of the Mac apps I've downloaded or purchased from there. The list of iOS apps it shows is much more complete. Maybe that's because I'm on Apple Silicon now, I don't know.
@Jon H
My experience with the Mac App Store has been that apps only disappear from their if you manually hide them, or if the developer shuts up shop entirely.
I was amused to see that I still have the old iWork apps listed in my purchase history (this was before I got a new Mac and had them 'bundled' with the purchase.)
Confusingly, the summary of my iOS app purchases seems uncertain on which ones will run on my M3 MacBook Air. Clicking through to the app listing _usually_ helps, but sometimes it's a case of try it & see. I'll a little sad that WTForecast doesn't appear to work, because I usually need cheering up when I check the weather forecast.
The Mac App Store is generally bad at noticing when updates are available. If you use the sadly moribund MacUpdater app, you'll see that it usually lists about twice as many App Store apps with available updates as the App Store itself does.
The Mac App Store is bad. That sums it up. Everything it attempts to do, it does poorly.
I've found success with an app called Latest. I don't have much installed, and very little from the Mac App Store, but it found all the updates prior to upgrading to Tahoe, managed to one-click update all of them.
Seems we really have never moved away from the package manager model. Things like that, winget on Windows. The "App Store" concept has run its course. It's just an especially bad, proprietary package manager now.
