Apple will open the Mac App Store on Thursday, 6 January, in 90 countries.
Modelled on the hugely successful App Store for iOS, the Mac variant will let Mac users ‘browse new and noteworthy apps, find out what’s hot, view staff favourites, search categories and read customer ratings and reviews’, Apple boasts.
‘The App Store revolutionised mobile apps,’ said chief executive Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. ‘We hope to do the same for PC apps with the Mac App Store by making finding and buying PC apps easy and fun.’
The Mac App Store application will be available for Mac OS X Snow Leopard users as a free download through Software Update.
Mac developers set the price for their software and keep 70% of any sales revenue, with no hosting or distribution costs. However the store won’t allow for ‘beta’, ‘demo’, ‘trial’ or ‘test’ versions, or upgrade pricing, so many developers are likely to give the store a miss; some will also use other methods of sales and distribution.
There are also certain to be more than a few application that Apple won’t allow in, having set strict rules for developers to follow.
