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There’s a Mac App Store?

9 January 2011

“I love my Mac,” said the woman sitting opposite me. “But I wish I could find apps for it. You know, like the ones on my old Dell.”

“Have you heard about the Mac App Store?” I said. “There are some pretty good ones on there.”

It’s not hard to see why the Mac App Store is being celebrated in the indie developer community. But it’s easy to undervalue the biggest benefit it brings. My conversation with a friend who bought her iMac about a year ago made me see how big a hurdle the discovery process is.

The greatest benefit of the Store is not the streamlined purchase, installation, and updating process — it’s in training users that when they have a problem to solve, they can buy the answer in the App Store. Conditioning Mac users to see the Store as a solution to their everyday computing problems empowers users and developers, because the discovery process is the hardest part for both groups.

Solving the discovery process for the Mac App Store itself is another challenge. But, as more developers sell apps exclusively through the Store and collectively train visitors to go there first, there’s a good chance we’ll hear, “There’s a Mac App Store?” less often.