It’s not strictly tied to app store functions, but it has the distribution that could be leveraged to give independent developers an extremely broad base of market penetration among Mac OS X users. It does a much broader range of notifications than the simple app updates notices of Sparkle, but it also has an even larger installed base. You can browse the list of apps that use Growl for yourself, but again, you’ve probably already got it on your system. Growl: Growl is a ubiquitous and enormously popular open source library for announcing system events on Mac desktops.If you’re a serious Mac user, it’s already on your system - from Transmission to Stuffit to Adium to TextMate to NetNewsWire to Evernote and on and on, many of the most popular apps on the Mac desktop all use the same tech for the critical app store functions of updating and alerting users to new versions. Sparkle: Andy Matuschak has made a library called Sparkle, which allows any independent app to automatically announce and install app updates. So, who has the ability to change the balance of power here? Their quiet ubiquity among third-party applications could create an emergent app store, turning a broad base of already-distributed and successful independent apps into a force with a lot more marketing and bargaining power in their discussions with Apple. It’s actually quite doable, if two unheralded but influential independent projects coordinate their efforts, or even merge. So, now that we know that it exists, how do people who are concerned about the openness of the Mac OS X ecosystem for third-party developers make sure that Apple doesn’t get a total stranglehold on app distribution on the desktop? Apple took the not-very-surprising step of announcing an App Store for Mac OS X, an idea I was ruminating about earlier today in looking at all the app stores available today.
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