Apple's Mac App Store appears to have stalled, according to a new report from analytics firm AppFigures. Launched over a decade ago in 2011 with a thousand apps, the Mac App Store now offers just 31,000 apps for Apple computers, compared to nearly 5 million apps in the iOS App Store.
Even worse, there are only a handful of new apps added to the Mac App Store each month.
“If you're developing for a Mac, this can be a shock. The Mac App Store averages only 15 new apps every month,” said Ariel Michaeli, CEO of AppFigures. "It's that the App Store, which has about 1,000 new apps every day, is added every 20 minutes."
The main difference, of course, is that there are many ways to distribute desktop apps, while there is only one established, approved, and recommended way to publish and receive mobile apps, especially for iOS. Available on every Mac, the Apple Desktop App Store provides an easy, integrated way to get new apps. But app developers can also sell on the open web, where they don't have to follow Apple's rules or pay sales fees.
Another reason why there are far fewer apps for computers than for phones is that many features now only work in our web browsers, eliminating the need for a dedicated app.
That could change, Mihaeli suggests, which Apple is working on.
"I don't think Apple has a plan for the Mac App Store, but I still think Apple has potential when Apple starts hosting iOS apps on Apple Silicon," he says. : "I could be wrong."
iPhone and iPad apps can run on MacBooks using either Apple's own chips or Apple Silicon. This includes M1 and M2 chips. Apple's plan here seems to be to open up a universe of millions of mobile desktop apps.
"App Store apps for iPhone and iPad are automatically available in the Mac App Store on Apple's silicon Mac without any changes to the app," Apple's developer website says. “There is no resettlement process. The same frameworks that your iPhone and iPad apps use are only available and configurable for Mac, with the same general architecture for all three platforms.”
Mobile apps are not shown in the Mac App Store by default, but are visible through search.
However, there is one catch.
As Apple states, “These applications can be optimized for keyboard, windows, and touch gestures” (emphasis mine). But just because they can be optimized to run on computers other than the phones they were originally designed for doesn't mean the developers actually spent time on it.
Indeed, in one game I downloaded for my MacBook Pro, I had to use the keyboard to control the spaceship, literally holding my finger while I moved the ship around the screen for a minute of typing, which almost worked. just like the smartphone equivalent, the finger lightly touches the screen of my phone.
As Michael mentioned, Apple is not promoting these apps yet, so the user experience might not be optimal.
According to Michael, the most popular app category in the Mac App Store is Utilities, with over 5,000 apps. Services include VPN tools for greater online privacy, disk space and storage optimizers, and tools for archiving and extracting files. The next largest are the games with less than 5,000 games.
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