The App Store is for the average user. Apps that don’t fit in the App Store guidelines are simply not for the average user. That matters because the apps that don’t fit those guidelines can/will/could cause a massive support headache for not only Apple, but for the resident family geek. 1 Users should be able to make the reasonable assumption that anything they download from the App Store cannot and will not mess up their computer in any way that uninstalling the app won’t fix their computer.

Ben makes some good points about the type of apps that Apple does and does not want to have available on the Mac App Store. Even with his reasoning, however, I am not happy about the direction the store is moving.

As a customer, I would much rather handle purchasing all my apps through the App Store. Only one company would ever have to handle my credit card information and I could receive all my updates from a simple source. It also makes moving over to a new machine much easier. Just sign in and install everything without having to dig up old app codes [1].

My personal wishes aside, I can understand why Apple would want to restrict the types of apps that customers can get here. If the Mac App Store had started off with these types of restrictions from the beginning, I would not have near as much of a problem with it [2]. My biggest problem is that a little over a year ago, Apple was encouraging these developers to put their apps into the Mac App Store and now they are banning some of those same apps.

It seems to me that Apple has pulled a bait & switch on their developers.