Today, the Mac App Store opened its doors for customers. The Mac App Store should give Mac owners a convenient way of installing applications onto their computers.
Physically the Mac App Store looks very similar to the App Store for iPad and iPhone. The similarity of the App Stores however are more than just the looks. Like on the iOS App Store, developers get 70% of the revenue made, while Apple gets 30%. The available content also shows overlap with iOS applications.
Looking at the top free and paid applications in the Mac App Store, we already see some names of applications familiar to the App Store for iOS. Free applications like Twitter, Sketchbook and Evernote and paid applications like Chopper 2, Angry Birds and The Incident are top 10 applications in the Mac App Store at the moment that are also available on iOS. Of the applications from the top 10 which also have and iOS version, prices are similar to their iPad counterparts except for Osmos, which increased its price 100%.
The Mac App Store currently holds 1,604 applications (assuming that, like in the Apple App Store for iPhone and iPad, games appear in two categories). The Books and Navigation categories from the iPhone App Store don’t make their appearance in the Mac App Store. On the other hand, the Mac App Store features Developer Tools, Graphics & Design and Video categories which the iOS stores don’t. When comparing the relative sizes of the categories both stores have, we are able to make a comparison between the iOS stores and the Mac store. Like on the iPhone and iPad, the Games category is the largest category in the Mac App Store. Most notable difference is the fact that the Mac App Store has much more of its applications in the Productivity, Business, Photography and Utilities categories compared to the iPhone App Store. On the iPhone and iPad especially the News and Travel categories are much more crowded than on the Mac. In 10 of the 18 categories, the proportion of applications in the Mac App Store is closer to iPhone than iPad.
It will be interesting to watch how the Mac App Store develops. We will be closely watching top applications, pricing of applications and the differences and similarities between the Mac App Store and other application stores.
Update: there are reports (e.g. this one) that there are less than 1,000 applications available right now (in the UK). We assumed that, as Apple indicates in the iTunes Connect Developer guide, Games can be published in two subcategories of Games and all other applications are published in one category only. We are working on uniquely identifying applications and will update this post when we have additional information.
Hendrik Koekkoek