Apple Mac App Store Sees Success and Struggles In 1st Day

The new Apple Mac Store for Mac OS X that went live on Thursday saw over a million apps downloaded in its first day in business. That was a significant success, but there were a few glitches dealing with already installed versions of some of the apps included and some security issues for apps that did not implement Apple’s anti-piracy methods.

First, Apple announced that in their first day over a million apps were downloaded through the new app store. There are about a thousand apps presently listed including Apple’s iWork apps and amazing deals like the popular photo editing/organization app Aperture for nearly $130 off the regular price. And the best selling app is the incredibly popular Angry Birds. This means some significant profits for Apple since they take a 30% cut of every paid app that is purchased.

Not all was good news for users, however. TUAW and other reported that some received errors when trying to access and download apps from the Mac App Store. As a result Apple finally posted a support page to help people with issues.

One of the issues being reported is that some apps that users already have installed are not showing up as installed. For example, we tested this and found that despite having iWork ’09 installed on our system, the Mac App store did not show it as installed. At the same time iLife ’11 was shown as installed. Some third party apps are shown as installed, some have reported. But we tested this out and neither Evernote nor Mars Edit were shown as installed in the Mac App Store despite being installed on the system.

To take advantage of the convenient purchase once and download any time feature of the Mac App Store users will have to either purchase the app again from the app store or wait for a work around. It seems possible that developers could provide buyers with a redemption code, but we are not sure if that will happen or work. It is possible that the issue is in the versions of the software. One report said that if a version in the app store is different from the one installed on a system, it will not be found as installed in the Mac App Store. Updating manually might solve this. We have not been able to test it yet.

The final issue is more of a problem for developers and those who are tempted to illegally share apps that they didn’t purchase. Some apps in the Mac App Store were not developed using all of Apple’s security standards and therefore do not have the proper copy protection. As a result copying the app from one computer to another, regardless of the owner, might allow users to share these apps. According to BetaNews, the popular Angry Birds is one such app.