I have said it before.

I pulled my app from the mac app store after 5-6 months and haven't looked back since.

My sales were quite good but the sandboxing made it impossible to do any real innovation on the OS X platform which my app is trying to do. Getting any help from support was impossible and so I decided to sell from my own website instead.

Whether pulling it was the reason why my sales have gone up I don't think there is a way to validate but it had no negative effect on my sales quite the contrary.

I was in the top 10 on the app store for a while and it had no effect on my sale. Only getting featured means anything for your sales which makes me conclude that the mac app store add no value what so ever to either user nor developer.

Apple should shut it down and simply focus on featuring apps they think are worth featuring instead of creating an app store which create a million apps with no value to anyone not even the developers yet they still create a lot of noise.

If not that they they should at least allow the user to decide whether they want to give access for the specific app to things outside the sandbox.

Anecdotal evidence but…

I've been a Mac user since almost forever and an iOS user since also almost forever. I never use either store for discovery, largely because I can't imagine any way to do that and get good results. If I open the App Store on iOS and see something neat, I'll check it out. If I open the App Store on macOS, then either I'm going to my 'purchased apps' or 'updates', or I'm following a link from someone's website.

Both stores are terrible places to find apps; I think it was John Gruber who said that the Mac App Store is a warehouse, not a storefront, and I think that's only become more true on macOS. People find good apps on the webs via Google and then click through to the app store.

Getting featured is neat, but beyond that you have to do all the hustle yourself, and if you're doing all the hustle I don't see the point in paying Apple a 30% cut if you can avoid it.

Agree about warehouse vs discovery and finding links elsewhere.

But contrary anecdata -- if I have a choice between a great app not in App Store and a just ok app in store, I buy from the Mac app store.

The experience across multiple Macs and new Macs is too convenient to give up.

I'd imagine this is even more true with a multi-Mac family with family purchasing enabled.

I will happily pay 2x for "don't make me think" features like one stop updates, purchase history and new machine restores, etc. Time is money, in the long run this convenience is cheaper.

OTOH, I buy a ludicrous number of apps so maybe my problems aren't typical.

For hackers like ourselves, I recommend brew cask for installing GUI apps.

If I am setting up a new computer, I have a shell script that installs all of the programs i commonly use, both CLI tools and GUI apps. The only caveat is that this won't work for Mac App Store apps. For that reason, I always get the non-mac app store app. I guess App Store is somewhat convenient, but IMO not as convenient as:

$ brew cask install 1password

or

$ ./install-all-my-stuff.sh