The Mac App Store just lost Sketch, an application for professional digital design for Apple. This is expected to have a negative effect on the company, even though it is not the first application to be pulled from the store. However, other developers have started to voice their discontent.
Sketch has been pulled from the store by Bohemian Coding for several reasons. First of all, the time required for an update to be submitted and approved was very long and unprofitable. Secondly, there are not many pricing options for updates. Lastly, the guidelines on sandboxing have a lot of technical limitations from Apple, like the access an app can have to programs or systems.
However, users who have bought the Sketch application will have the option to download it from the official website of Sketch, in order to receive further updates.
Bohemian Coding is a very important partner for Apple. It has already won two of its awards for design. Furthermore, Apple was relying on the developer for wireframing WatchOS apps, as it was also providing them with templates.
The team from Sketch stated in a blog post that they have been thinking about their options and this is the conclusion. As the application recorded great progress over the last year, the same cannot be said about the customer experience for the Apple Store. By selling their application directly from their website, the company will remain easily-approachable and responsive, and will ensure a better experience for its customers.
Sketch is not the first app to be pulled from the Mac Store. BBEdit from Bare Bones Software was removed because of the sandboxing restrictions, as well as the lack of pricing options for updates. The App Store support provided by Quicken also left for pricing reasons, while Coda, a web development tool from Panic was pulled from the store because of the restrictions regarding sandboxing. But the list doesn’t stop here. Parallels Desktop, TextExpander, Paragon NTFS and Hazel were removed for similar reasons.
As the Mac App Store just lost Sketch, we can expect other developers to remove their applications. Apart from the reasons mentioned above, the developers are also quite upset about the fact that they have to give 30% of their revenues for apps to Apple. Maybe it is time for the company to make a change.
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