> And yet, it seems majority of HN wants to rewind from the App Store which was created as to assist users and devs with that problem.

App Store is fine, as long as it's not the only way to the platform. If it's a curated catalog of apps + a hosting service + payment processing for those developers who want it, there's no problem with it existing. There is, however, a problem with how Apple keeps tightening its grip lately, and how current versions of macOS with default settings treat apps that haven't been vetted by Apple as if they're radioactive. That's still better than iOS, which outright refuses to run anything that isn't signed by Apple, but this overall direction is still troubling.

But then we’re immediately in the anti-consumer user anxiety inducing situation we were in before — where you don’t know where or how to keep these things up to date or secure or remember where that license key is or how to cancel the subscription or etc.

I deal with this with several dozen other tools on the Mac each using random store and key schemes. Lately I throw in the towel and switch to inferior tools in the app store if I can’t dig up the secret codes to the legacy hoops their devs want me to jump through. Charge me 30% more, no problem, just stop making me waste my time for things that are now solved problems.

This overall simplification and end-to-end trusted curation direction is a minority but well heeled part of the market (happy to spend money on apps if it doesn’t waste their time), and a sort of grand experiment in what users want. If users want a free for all, the majority of the market is still buying those handsets. If not, the option to have a handheld appliance should be available to those who want it.

Seems a shame to appeal to regulation to stomp on user choice where customers speak with their wallets that “please don’t make me think”.

The problem is the operating system developers, instead of defining a standard component that could pull update lists from anywhere, just decided, "we shall make one store, and we shall be the gatekeepers"

Imagine if windows (or MacOS) had a control panel where you could paste "Update subscription URLs", and uses crypto to verify licenses (optionally), and implemented binary diffs and what not, and provided a standard operating system component for navigating, purchasing, and installing/updating software?

They were SO CLOSE with add/remove Programs, and it never went all the way.

IIRC there is the Install-Package Powershell commandlet that might almost be that? But, I think it's still locked to Microsoft's store.

Take it a step further maybe. Why have the user set up updating at all? Suppose they've downloaded an app form the developer's website and installed it. When the app first runs, it calls a special API in the OS to register its "update feed" URL that provides the update info in a predefined format. The rest is then managed by the OS itself. It refetches these URLs as needed, shows notifications, installs updates, and, most importantly, provides the user with a central place somewhere in the settings to control all this.

I don't know much about the money/license part UX because I've never paid for software myself. But developers probably won't want to delegate licensing to the OS because this would make it all too easy to crack — it would only take one very simple patch to disable license checks altogether system-wide.

edit: Sparkle already uses a standardized feed format (https://sparkle-project.org/documentation/publishing/). So basically the only thing that's left is to move the update checking and installation logic to the OS as opposed to every app containing a copy of it.

This is a much better idea than the parent. It would be great if MacOS included a default package manager and apps registered themselves like this. My only concern would be malware taking advantage of this and somehow figuring out how to persistently register itself. I'm sure there's a fix but I haven't quickly come to a solution in the 10 seconds that I've thought about it.

I absolutely would have expected that the API exists to do this w/o human intervention. And given Windows, A way to do it via Group Policy & Active Directory.

I'm a strong believer, however, in making sure the user has visibility and control into it, so both methods (manually add/remote/check status & API) ought to be available.

> I'm sure there's a fix

Make that API call pop up a dialog or something to ask the user for consent.

I don't think that's good enough, unfortunately. People just dismiss the dialogues or malware distributors just learn to provide instructions to bypass any consent dialogues. The benefit of the App Store is that it's impossible to install malware through it. Unless you can provide the better experience while still delivering on that point, it's not much better. As I mentioned above, it's better for techie people but not for the average user and certainly not good enough for my mother to use.

If you put it that way, then sure it more or less necessitates a walled garden and some trusted party that verifies everything (according to its own standards). But then I'm skeptical of this nanny approach. IMO it's okay for technology to require education. After all, locked-down devices have only been a thing for the last 10 years or so. Computers used to be open by default, and operating systems were much less secure in terms of what applications were allowed to do, yet somehow, people survived that.

It's like governments. It can be a surveillance state ruled by a dictator where everything is regulated and everyone is spied on for the sake of "safety". Or it can be something that offers all the freedom you could possibly want, including the freedom to shoot yourself into the foot, both literally and metaphorically.

Sure, but that's what PCs and Linux are for. Macs, macOS, and iOS are not for that purpose. They're meant to be straight-forward and immediately usable as opposed to customizable.

When I was younger, I would probably have loved an Android phone but my 2 attempts with Android phones (like the Nexus) recently were terrible compared to my iPhone. I was constantly messing with things to try and get them working, I had to stop tasks and apps constantly in the app manager (and even had to download a different app manager), and was constantly waiting for things. Now, I care more about just being able to pick up my phone and know that it works to do what I want to do at any given point. I'm done messing with things.

> Imagine if windows (or MacOS) had a control panel where you could paste "Update subscription URLs", and uses crypto to verify licenses (optionally), and implemented binary diffs and what not, and provided a standard operating system component for navigating, purchasing, and installing/updating software?

I imagine that being completely unusable for a lot of people, and a total disaster of social engineering and malware exploitation.

Don't get hung up on the "copy and paste an url" technique. It could easily be a digitally signed "RepoData.pkgsrc" file that is opened by some aspect of the built-in windows installer mechanism. It could include branding and all sorts of other ways to verify it's identity.

The real win is empowering developers to reliably communicate these updates to users, and make it simple to update, w/o inundating the user's system tray with 5 different bespoke updaters that act out in different ways.

This has nothing to do with copy and paste.

It’s trivial to suggest a mechanism for consolidating update notifications. That’s a solved problem.

On its own, it does nothing to solve the trust problem.

There's not been nothing stopping anyone developing exactly this on MacOS or Windows for 30 years. In fact you could go and develop it right now. If both platforms can support third party stores like Steam, if it's so easy to do then this should be entirely doable.

I suspect the reason something like this hasn't been done is that it's actually a heck of a lot harder than you think.

TBH, I think it's less "hard", and more "network effects".

And given Microsoft's Monopoly nonsense in the 90's they probably did not have the stomach to wipe all the bespoke installer generator products off the map in one stroke.

Package managers have existed on Linux since... I don't know but I've never used a Linux distro without one.

The difficulty isn't technical, it's social, if you build a third party store you have something like Homebrew or Cocoa. It works, but it's never going to be used by the majority of users.

This would work great for technical people and be an absolute nightmare for my mother.

Lmao, Linux package managers allow applications to _install_ custom repositories. The update mechanism is a solved issue.

The Mac App Store has multiple reasons for existing, but the whole gestalt of it is a mixed bag with both blessings and curses.

Also the Mac App Store updating system is just damned terrible compared to the Sparkle updater. The only advantage it has is that it is centralized, but I have found it to be one of the slowest and buggiest parts of using the Mac App Store.

I remember it like it was yesterday. Before App Stores and widespread Internet access software had to ship relatively feee of bugs. There was no “We’ll fix it in post”. When you bought a game you got a physical copy of it, not a revocable license to an online service. Software wasn’t blocked from running on your device because the creators’ political views differed from the manufacturer.

Best of all, when you purchased software it went directly to the developer instead of a rent-seeking middle-man like Apple or Google. Even security was better, because you weren’t forced to connect your computer to the Internet to use it. Yes, I’d say those days were an improvement over what we have now!

> And yet, it seems majority of HN wants to rewind from the App Store which was created as to assist users and devs with that problem.

Well, to be fair the App Store isn’t really a viable solution to these problems to a fair bit of applications. The sandbox requirement makes a large portion of ‘useful’ apps unable in the App Store.

Looks like most non-App Store apps use Sparkle[0] these days though, so it’s much better than before.

[0]: https://sparkle-project.org

It seemed at the time that Sparkle was part of what made Apple realize this was a legit pain point.

Sherlock, Sparkle, Growl, if you demonstrate a gap in what should be built in, Apple will admit it and fill it in.

Sparkle is great but, for some reason, it never works on the apps that I have that use it. I check the box to automatically update apps in the future and I still get prompted every time there's an update. Even then, I hit the update button and the update fails and then I have to restart the app, try again, and then it succeeds... until the next time there's an update and the process starts all over again. At least with the App Store, all my apps update at night and they're ready to go when I need to use them.

> Well, to be fair the App Store isn’t really a viable solution to these problems to a fair bit of applications.

This used to be true, but every new release adds mechanisms to securely enable more capabilities.

What examples are you thinking of that still can’t be done?

> The sandbox requirement makes a large portion of ‘useful’ apps unable in the App Store.

I don’t think this is true any longer.

> And yet, it seems majority of HN wants to rewind from the App Store

It’s definitely not the majority of HN.

You’ll notice sentiment varies a lot from thread to thread.