• 3 min read
I launched ColorCopy on May 18. It was my second macOS app, but the first one I launched on the Mac App Store. Today, I decided to pull it.
The app isn't a new idea, but it bakes four color tools into a single menu bar app: an eyedropper, a color picker, a palette manager, and a contrast checker, each one a hotkey away.
I made it available for free, with a one-time in-app purchase to unlock unlimited use. No subscription, no recurring fees. It's simple, stable software with the lowest possible barrier to entry…exactly the kind of utility the App Store seems made for.
I wasn't sure what to expect, so I ran an experiment to answer some questions:
Is there any real benefit to having your Mac app on the App Store? Is the Apple tax worth it? Will customers just come flooding in?
For ColorCopy's release, I did zero marketing. No Product Hunt launch. No Hacker News post. The only things I published were this blog post and a tweet. If the App Store delivers on its promise of discoverability, that should be enough to see some kind of traffic…right?
You be the judge. In nearly three months on the App Store, ColorCopy got a little over 1,000 impressions, 149 product page views, 85 first-time downloads, three in-app purchases, and $21 in proceeds. Not per day. In total.
Broken down over 81 days, that averages out to:
- 13 impressions per day
- 1.8 product page views per day
- 1 download per day
- 0.04 in-app purchases per day (about one per month)
- $0.26 in proceeds per day
Extrapolated to 12 months, ColorCopy would have earned about $95…not even enough to cover Apple's $99 annual developer fee.
If discoverability isn't a part of the App Store deal, what exactly is the benefit? Why limit your Mac app to the sandbox?* Why spend hours in App Store Connect filling out metadata, screenshots, and localization information? Why wait an arbitrary number of days for someone to review your app with the consistency of a coin flip?
It doesn't seem worth it for Mac developers.
As of today, ColorCopy is self-distributed and sold through Polar (the new Stripe, which I highly recommend). This is the same way I sell TongueType, which makes pretty much everything easier on my end: one dashboard, real customer relationships, no finicky review process, and updates ship the moment they're ready.
The move required swapping out in-app purchases from StoreKit to Polar, and updates now ship through Sparkle instead of the App Store's built-in update mechanism. Both are tried and true solutions for self-distributed Mac apps.
To be fair, you can't really do this on iOS. Most users aren't jailbroken…walled garden and all. But on Mac, where self-distribution is still a first-class option, there seems to be zero incentive to be in the App Store, especially if you're counting on discoverability.
In three months, the App Store sent me barely a trickle of customers. Had I marketed the app myself, the traffic would have flowed the other way. I would've been sending my customers to Apple and paying a tax for the privilege.** Self-distribution gives me the freedom and control over my apps that the App Store's sandbox never will.
If it's on me to drum up all of my own traffic, I'm going to send it to my own website.
*I originally used a third-party library for the eye dropper because NSColorSampler is meh, but the sandbox forbids it so I was forced to remove it. Yes, I had to make my app shittier in order to put it on the App Store.
**I fully acknowledge this may not be the case for every app, but it was my experience and worth sharing. Your mileage may vary.
Aside: ColorCopy was available in 10 languages on the App Store. For some reason, the listing always showed FR as its primary language (it wasn't). The app is available in many languages, including English.