Yesterday, Ulysses was released to the Mac App Store. We’ve set up a quick Q&A over here, which should address the most basic questions and concerns regarding this event.
In *this* post, I’ll go a bit more in-depth on some of our decisions.
1) App Store Exclusive? Really?
Yeah. We thought long and hard about this, and decided to commit ourselves fully to the App Store. There are some rough edges here and there, but we see this move as highly beneficial for both us and our users.
For one, we can close our own shop and cut all connections with third-party payment services. Everything will be handled in one place, so there’s a whole lot less to worry about, a lot less maintenance.
We won’t need to worry about distribution, installing, licensing, copy protection anymore. We can now send users to the App Store, and it’s all handled from there, so there’re less chances of messing things up on our side, and less hassle on the user’s side.
The App Store review process, painful and slow as it may be, actually injects another layer of quality management to our already rather high standard. It’s not that we won’t beta-test anymore, but it’s nice to have an independent entity (*g*) double-check for us.
In the future (long-term, really) we can fully focus on one version — the App Store version. We have not announced nor are we planning to release it anytime soon, but IF Ulysses 3.0 sees the light of day, we won’t keep two seperate builds alive. This mostly concerns update- and licensing-systems, but still.
Also, we can’t shake the feeling that the App Store will be the only way to distribute apps on Mac OS X in the long run. This has been on the horizon for some time, and whether you or we like it or not, it’s going to happen. So we might as well jump on the bandwaggon early, roll with it, and gain experience in the process.
