When the Mac App Store first came out, any app that you already had downloaded onto your machine outside of the App Store was reported as “Installed.”
Apple’s made a new change to the way the MAS handled things. Now, instead of previous apps being unavailable to purchase because they are already installed, you get a warning that asks you if you want to buy the software all over again.
I still wish Apple would figure out a way to at least give devs the option of porting over their existing customer bases to the Mac App Store, but I guess this is nice: at least it warns me if I’m about to buy the same app twice.
[via MacWorld]
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
3 responses to “The Mac App Store Now Warns You Before You Buy An App All Over Again”
Forget about third party devs, I’d like a way for *Apple* to be able to indicate to the user that it’s own products are installed. Â
I bought iWork on a disc and throughout all the upgrades to Snow Leopard, the release of the App store and the upgrade to Lion, they still show in the App store as being for sale, even though I already own them. Â I’m going to be upset, (and a lot of other users are too), if we end up having to pay for this stuff all over again. Â Same goes for the FaceTime app. Â
Why should you have to “pay for this stuff all over again” ? .. the update 9.1 for iWork is available freely from http://www.apple.com/support downloads as offline installable dmg which brings iwork9 ( any version ) up to 9.1 – thus having the individual apps included at the very same version level that they are sold in MAS.Â
Factime is on the MAS for Snow Users, because FaceTime was never part of 10.6, so why care if it is not for you at all — because FT is part of Lion, it will of course be updated with future 10.7.x releases. ( which also by itself are downloadable for free and do not depend on using MAS at all ).
MAS is only a OPTIONAL channel to buy stuff, it is not needed nor does the usage of Lion in any way depend on it nor on the Apple ID ( skip that part of the setup assistant – that easy ) .
People tend to over-rate MAS. If a developer goes exclusive and only releases there, then  I have to consider if I am willing in. But not for the OS , not for ilife11 nor iwork09. Final Cut X is an exclusive there, but all purchasers want to go back to v7 or Express 4, which is all over ebay on disk. ( also to consider : you can’t resell any application that you buy from MAS, not even Lion itelsef.. )