Apple plans on a Jan. 6 launch for its Mac App Store, the PC equivalent of its mobile App Store. Apple hopes third-party developers will be drawn to the new platform.
Apple plans to launch its
Mac App Store, which will offer full-screen apps for the company's PCs, Jan. 6.
The storefront will operate in a manner similar to Apple's App Store for mobile
devices, allowing users to purchase and download apps in one click.
While supported by Snow Leopard, the current version of
Apple's Mac OS X, the Mac App Store will prove an integral part of the
company's upcoming Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, reportedly due in summer 2011. In
addition to the Mac App Store, Lion will include LaunchPad, an apps
home-screen, and Mission Control, which unifies Expose, Dashboard, Spaces, and
full-screen apps into a single viewpoint. In a research note following Lion's
Oct. 20 unveiling, Jefferies & Co. analyst Peter Misek termed the Mac App
Store "the single biggest takeaway" from the event.
Apple almost certainly hopes that the Mac App Store will
replicate the success of its mobile App Store, which features hundreds of
thousands of apps from a galaxy of developers large and small. The App Store's
size dwarfs similar offerings from Google and Microsoft, which have both made
their own app ecosystems a focus of their mobile platforms.
"The App Store revolutionized mobile apps," Apple CEO Steve
Jobs wrote in
a Dec. 16
statement posted on his company's corporate Website. "We hope to do the
same for PC apps with the Mac App Store by making finding and buying PC apps
easy and fun."
Mac App Store will be available for free via Software
Update. Apple is offering third-party developers 70 percent of any app sales
revenue, along with free hosting, in a bid to attract them to the platform.
Previous rumors had suggested that Apple would launch the
Mac App Store Dec. 13, along with an iOS 4.3 update with subscription-billion
APIs. However, that date came and went with no word from Apple. In addition,
the theorizing among tech blogs was that Apple and News Corp. would launch an
iPad-only newspaper, The Daily, sometime in that mid-December timeframe.
Apple has already posted Mac app guidelines on its developer
Website, including some restrictions.
"Your Website is the best place to provide demos, trial
versions or betas of your software for customers to explore,"
reads
one portion of those guidelines. "The apps you submit to be reviewed for
the Mac App Store should be fully functional, retail versions of your apps."
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