Craig Grannell on why it's great to see Apple championing apps that cost a pretty penny
Apple recently ran a campaign on the Mac App Store that caught my attention: "Start something new." The premise was that whatever you can imagine, you can bring to life using Macs, primarily through the many third-party apps you can run on them. (After all, I'm pretty sure even the most innovative of creators isn't going to be fashioning the next Hollywood masterpiece in TextEdit or Mail.)
The selection of apps was broadly impressive. Even though quite a few big names (most notably Adobe) remain absent from the Mac App Store, there's plenty there for all kinds of creative folk. Illustrators are well catered for by the excellent Sketch, and photographers have a huge range of products for editing their pictures, including Pixelmator, Acorn, Analog and Intensify. When it comes to time-based fare, musicians can delve into Logic Pro X, Capo 3 and DM1, while filmmakers can get stuck into Final Cut Pro, ScreenFlow and iStopMotion.
On looking through the listings, though, it wasn't the names that really stood out, but the prices, in that they remain reassuringly high. That's not to say that there hasn't been a general reduction in the cost of OS X software since the opening of the Mac App Store -because there has. Yet the expectation remains that if you want some high-quality desktop software, you still need to spend a bit of money.
So Sketch will set you back 80 quid - not a small outlay, although a comparative bargain compared to Adobe giant Illustrator. Elsewhere, most of the feature-rich photo editors cost about 20 quid, while Apple's pro video and audio apps are a penny off of £230. Even the cheaper products in those last two areas mostly take a £20-plus chunk out of your bank account.
Given what's happened over on iOS, this is all quite heartening. On Apple's other App Store - for iPhones and iPads - the race to the bottom proved furious. In its earliest days, the likes of Super Monkey Ball and Рас-Man, respectively, arrived for eight quid and a fiver. Today, those would be considered insanely ambitious prices, reserved only for niche titles or those that are fairly direct ports of PC or console games. When it comes to apps, you so often see really great fare slugging it out, trying to convince punters to part with just a few quid.
Of late, it's become a thing for developers to reveal their earnings, and it often makes for sobering reading. When units sold across Apple's two platforms are roughly equivalent, earnings are anything but. Even if iOS makes up half of all unit sales, it may pull in a fifth or less of the revenue.
The thing is, software takes time to create, craft and hone. Even apps that appear simple may require weeks or months of development time. If developers can't make money supporting their output, the fact of the matter is that they won't - apps will simply be abandoned as they move on to the next thing. Additionally, apps will become bereft of ambition and depth, because it's not worth spending huge amounts of time working on something that won't make any money. And from the consumer standpoint, there needs to be the trust that their investment will be rewarded accordingly, with bug-fixes, support and possibly updates.
That's why when I see Apple saying to start something new. I'm happy to see that the actual starting point is spending a little money. People might hanker for free, doffing their entitlement hat and moan about barriers to entry, but that's better than barriers being torn down, revealing everything beyond as an app wasteland full of garbage.