You're not being serious are you? MAS holds such an insignificant role in Mac App development that any requirements it sets around the transition would weaken its cause.
Also mo, bitcode would not be able to be used to facilitate an Intel to ARM transition - bitcode is still fairly processor-specific. Bitcode is more for being able to adapt to minor changes in instructions in the same arch
Negligible? If you exclude Adobe and MS, most apps people use are available through the Mac App store. And more can be made available if Apple pushes more for it.
Valve would have to pull Steam because you can be as sure as hell they aren't going to give Apple a 30% cut of Steam sales. There goes Skype as well.
Without special deals with lots of developers, I doubt we would see many more apps on the App Store and instead we'll see the Mac be an unsuitable platform for many/most people. It would turn into a glorified Chromebook.
So, just like any technology adoption that comes from above those developers would just shut up and follow along.
Or do you think they would earn any money selling to GNU/Linux users?
Mind you, it would be a completely insane move for Apple (or Microsoft) and I can't see them doing this any time soon. It would be absolute suicide.
Adobe has managed to get thousands from users without any 'help' from Microsoft.
The only way will be the store, or why do you think Microsoft is making it easy to port Win32/WPF (legacy) applications to the store model?
When the applications that matter like Adobe are on the store, and Apple has proven the "my way or the highway" works, they will slowly disable the "legacy" model.
I have been through enough computing changes to believe this will indeed happen.
That says something
Serious question: Do you have any evidence to support that claim?
I could well be in the minority, but I don't publish through the Mac app store and I don't know anyone else who publishes exclusively through the Mac app store (except Apple).
Desktop developers have their own solutions in place and have for a long time. You'd be forcing them to give up a ton, in exchange for nothing of value. I'd expect many would just stop developing applications at all instead of comply with store requirements as they stand right now.
That's not to say those problems couldn't be resolved in the future.
Those developers can choose between stay in business or go broke, because I doubt GNU/Linux or *BSD users would pay for desktop software as their current Mac OS X customers.
And they certainly won't be too happy about having to rewrite, again, their applications (I think Office for Mac is not yet fully 64bits, but I could be wrong, haven't checked in a while.)
Microsoft must care somewhat because they have spent a lot of time fully sandboxing Office 2016. Since OneNote is already available in the MAS [1], I reckon Microsoft will eventually add the remaining Office apps at some point in the future.
> I think Office for Mac is not yet fully 64-bits
Microsoft released the first 64-bit version of Office 2016 for Mac (15.25.0) last month [2] [3]
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/microsoft-onenote/id78480155...
In fact, Battle.net, Origin, or SmithMicro would care more for Mac to do a rewrite than Apple would care to lose them.
Besides, Apple changed to Intel and didn't give much of a care about MS or Adobe apps having to be rewritten.
Also, isn't Apple already encouraging the use of some intermediary bitcode for iOS (and macOS?) apps? Wouldn't that already made apps architecture-agnostic?