Really? I can absolutely see that. It seems OSX has been creeping towards that for some time, and now they're moving to ARM and stuffing their machines with "security" chips, it's getting more and more locked down. Macintosh computers are steadily becoming iPads with hardware keyboards.

That is just not backed up in the actual events of what they are doing.

If there was ever a time to do this it would be right now as they undergo changing Mac to ARM, but they're not.

I don't think the right time to make that transition is while they're trying to switch to ARM. Right now, they're probably trying to get things switched by making as few changes as possible. That eases the transition for everybody. I'm not sure why they would want to deal with both things at the same time. They are both huge undertakings. Not to mention, the two things are really unrelated. Besides, how does CPU architecture affect the ability to lock the OS into only running App Store apps?

You think Apple could make Adobe, Autodesk, and countless others go through the Mac App Store?

Yes, yes they can.

The real question is if they can convince all the professionals those companies cater to to adopt an ecosystem where software providers have to go through an arbitrarily and closely controlled App Store.

If their hardware and base OS is too attractive to those professionals relative to the loss of freedom Adobe, etc. will follow.

Thankfully, though, I don’t think Mac users will actually be ok with that. There’s been quite an exodus of professionals from Mac to windows based on much smaller things so far.

They've been already doing that for all the iOS version of their apps (which are now way past a simple player or viewer).

Why not ? It's probably only a matter of time.

A couple of points:

1) Apple has much more leverage on iOS because it has a bigger market share and many more iOS users than macOS.

2) macOS has traditionally been an open platform

3) Many desktop app developers wouldn't be able to keep installing and running the products the way their do it now. For example, Adobe has an app called Creative Cloud that manages installs, licenses, active computers, and other things. It's practically malware at this point, but if you want to use Adobe apps there is no other way.

you can't really stop a desktop computer from running arbitrary software. If users can install compilers (which you pretty much have to allow), then all you can do is make them go through extra steps.

> I really appreciate having the MacOS app store as a sort of "trusted" alternative to downloading off the web.

But it's not, the Mac App Store is a dumpster fire.

How come?

Because there's a vibrant marketplace outside the store and Apple provides little benefit but takes 30%.

> provides little benefit but takes 30%

I understand the MAS is not a great fit for all use cases, but IMO this statement is wrong for the use cases where the MAS is a good fit.

I used the MAS as a dev, and it adds other benefits such as updates, cloud storage, etc.

I used it specifically for an education app and it was just great to tell macOS users to simply download it from the MAS and let it handle the updates from there.

Implementing updates on your own is not trivial in a desktop app. Before using the MAS we used Electron with Squirrel. We had to manage a server exclusively for the updates. Squirrel worked great in macOS but in Windows it was a nightmare. Also the Electron apps were huge, as you probably know.

For the MAS app, we kept the web UI but moved to Swift + WKWebView. The app went from a 50MB download to about 4MB. Memory consumption also decreased dramatically, I think the Swift version used something like 10-15MB of RAM.

It’s still far more trusted than buying on the web. That’s a significant benefit for developers.

It's only a benefit for Adobe and Microsoft and Slack who can call someone up at Apple and ask them to hand over the appropriate entitlements so their apps will function.