There’s a number of threads about this topic since Apple announced OS X Lion and the app store for Mac. And that definitely changes things… especially if you can run iOS apps on your desktop.
It changes things because of cost. iOS apps, despite their surprising abilities, are less expensive than their desktop equivalents. Since they often seem to work just grandly for people, it makes you wonder whether people haven’t been living with bloated, feature crazed software. It also makes you wonder whether a “pro” app, or a development environment will ever be sold through that store.
And it changes things because you give Apple a say of whether your app “qualifies” with all the pain that has caused developers. (Code signing is mess. In the words of the governors race “the pain is too… damn high!”
But what of the long tail effect the store generates? That is, dev’s are “gaming” the current store by updating often (leaking the most minor improvements drop by drop) because it brings you to the fore of various marketing efforts. (Think a “recently released” list). It may not be best for their users, but if the only channel to sales is that store then marketing efforts are significantly limited to how people find things in that store.
So far the iOS store seems to generate high sales for the top items and virtually no attention for the vast majority of offerings. First in category, timing, etc. play a large part of this type of sourcing and the tools to find gems hidden in the dust are slim at best.
But that’s inside the store. On the Mac there’s no reason why other stores couldn’t compete, at the moment, although you’d have to find a way to bootstrap that store. But it’s not harder than what dev’s are doing now.
Let’s just be more tasteful than the average Mall though. ‘K?
turnings :: daniel berlinger 
I think the issues with a store are easily addressed in lion, and that apple knows apps are hard to find. I think that’s a reason the app store will be it’s own app. They didn’t announce iTunes 10.3 with app purchases. I envision a way to browse iOS apps, mac apps and books in one place and have them cloud sync via thT big server farm like whisper sync does.
But the mac, as we know it, is in the beginning of it’s final stage. At some point an iOS and mac OS x are going to have to come to terms. Only ttys people who do design really need a desktop OS driven tool. The iPad isn’t quite an office machine yet, but most cube farmers only need browser, word proc, email, presentation and spreadsheet.
When 10.7 comes out I think things like the MacBook air will be more valuable. Think of the enterprise with people using touch powered laptops with small, tightly written apps and cloud storage. the air, I bet will work great running iOS apps in 10.7, so much so that you might forget OS x.
But there’s still large segments that this make’s no sense for… Photoshop/Illustrator? AutoCAD (recently returned), Logic Pro? I’m sure there’s plenty of others.
It’s not that I can’t see buying those apps through the app store (download size aside) but that I hope that there’s more than one ecosystem. As much as I enjoy Steve’s taste in hardware, I know I don’t like the code signing process because, frankly it sucks.
And while Steve likes everything integrated… sometimes it’s nice to be able to integrate for your circumstances.
So I continue to hope for more than one store… with only one of them controlled by Apple.
Yeah well apps like cs5 and office won’t even meet the TOS forthe store, so they’re not going to be in there.
I think the goal isn’t to sell mac apps more conveniently, it’s to make mac OS x an alternate place to eun your iOS apps.
Buy a program and run it on the phone, iPad or desktop. Certainly helps their cloud video and music rumored services.
So if the iOS apps run everywhere (and that’s not clear to me) it’s a significant change (and has some real upside). But I’d still like to see other stores…
BTW, I think the new Air is very compelling already ;)