Wil Shipley, of Delicious Monster fame has written an excellent post concerning the issues surrounding the lack of an option for paid upgrades in the Mac App Store. Go read it and then come back since it would be a waste of time for me to duplicate everything in the article and you need all of it to make sense of nuances of the issue.
This is something I’ve been wondering about since the advent of the store as it goes counter current to today’s standard software development and sales practices. New customers pay a premium for a product, but are generally assured that they will get preferential pricing on the next major release, something that is unique to the software world, as you can’t buy “upgrades” for your physical goods.
John Gruber points out that the same issue exists in the iOS App Store, but here I have a different take. Aside from the fact that apps have (generally) much lower prices (a 50 cent upgrade for a $1 app?) than their desktop equivalents, each store is reaching a very different customer base and ecosystem.
Based on the numbers crunched by Horace Dediu over at Asymco the Mac App Store has a potentially addressable audience of about 122M potential clients as of the end of 2011, and is growing at a rate of about 20%. In actuality the number is much smaller since this includes all Macs ever, and only those sold in the last 3-4 years are App Store compatible.
The iOS App Store has a potentially adressable audience of 316M and growing at a rate of over 100%. Granted, the rate of obsolescence is faster than for Macs, but the majority of the devices can fully participate in the iOS App Store.
The difference is that the Mac environment is working from a relatively saturated market with a slow growth curve, while iOS is creating the equivalent of the entire Mac marketplace every six months. The question will need to be revisited once iOS platform growth starts slowing and reaching a saturation point, but that’s not something we’ll see for at least a few more years.
But in the Mac marketplace, I think that it’s a real issue that needs to be addressed in the near future. Application sand boxing will increase the importance as new, separately identified versions of an application will not necessarily have access to the data files of the previous version.