We love the Mac App Store. It just makes buying apps easy. We love having our other Mac apps (Galleried and Launch it!) in the store. But, unfortunately, it looks like Concentrate won’t be allowed in any time soon.
Concentrate was denied (thrice) from the Mac App Store due to the fact that it requires root (admin) access to block domains (like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc). If apps have root access, the authors can write malicious code that could hurt your computer – obviously something we’d never do, but Apple doesn’t want to be liable for anything that could go wrong there.
Mac App Store
We feel that blocking domains is at the core of Concentrate, so we brainstormed and attempted three different ways to go about it, but no luck – rejected each time, citing the same issue. We ultimately appealed and talked to a (rather nice) Apple representative who said they are aware of the issue and the fact that it affects a lot of third-party software. He said they would take the issue into more consideration in the future, but for now remains a rule.
So, in all, we are very thankful for the positive feedback we’ve gotten from Concentrate users, which will only be available in the rocket store for the time being. If we have any ingenious ideas how to get around it, we’ll be sure to let everyone know, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. You’ll turn blue.
RSS Feed
I’ve been using the beta version of Concentrate (1.3b2) which didn’t seem to require root access, and does block domains. What happened to that approach?
@Masterleep – 1st, thanks for trying the beta! we appreciate that. That was actually rejection number 2
Turns out if you’re not an admin user, the command line tool we’re using, networksetup, still needs admin privs and asks. Even though that’s code in Apple’s control, they still squashed it. We even spoke with a dev relations guy about it and he said it is what it is. Our current plan is to try going the browser extension route. That’s a bit more effort though. But know we haven’t given up yet.
OK, thanks. At least 1.3b2 is working nicely for subdomain blocking!
I’ve been looking for exactly this app for a year now. Thank you so much for your hard work on it. I can’t wait to give the demo a spin.
Too bad about your trouble with the app store. Any chance you could offer the domain blocker as a separate, downloadable, free component? Just to get your foot in the app store door. Probably something they would frown on, but would they allow that?
Best of luck.
Rob
Brian,
Another reason that it cannot be in the Mac App Store is because it is a Universal Binary, after all, we can’t have any Power PC apps in there, it would prevent sales of newer Intel Macs (yeah right). Personally, I think you ought to put up Universal Binary versions of your other apps here on your sight, despite Apple. Their pig headed attitude is alienating other developers and users. BTW, don’t let them know you give educational discounts, as thats grounds for not having an app in their store either. They have too many stupid reasons for not allowing apps in their App store, way too many to list here. We had a discussion tonight in our user group tonight, just about that issue. Maybe with Mr. Jobs now gone, user and developer issues may become a concern of the corporation.
Tyler
12 months later from my request for this application to be on Windows. I’m disappointed as clearly you haven’t taken the opportunity to bring this useful application to Windows. Honestly you have lost many prospective customers by not offering this software on Windows. It’s a well known fact that there is a higher percentage of students who use windows computers than mac’s. Not everyone can afford a mac computer, I am disappointed as you have failed to create a window’s version of this software given how many months ago I requested this software for Windows as it would have clearly helped me tremendously.