Make Money Outside the Mac App Store
Make Money Outside the Mac App Store
How to Sell Your Mac App with FastSpring, Secure It With License Codes Against Piracy, and Offer Time-Based Trial Downloads
About the Book
To sell outside the Mac App Store doesn't have to take more than a couple hours.
Save days of research and start selling your app before an Apple review person would even notice your upload to the App Store.
Selling in the Mac App Store is easy. But it also cost you 30% of the revenue. And you can't provide a demo. And you can't provide upgrade pricing. And you don't get to know your customers.
FastSpring is a very well established ecommerce platform where a lot of big indie developer studios sell their applications for years.
It doesn't take much to jump onto the bandwagon and get all the flexibility of selling outside the MAS with next to no effort. You're in good company – and I've collected quite a few case studies of reknown indie teams like Smile and Ironic Software to show you what they do.
You can make more money per sale and integrate a time-based trial and license code verification into your app within the hour!
This book includes every step to get your app out there.
You'll learn how to perform the following tasks:
- Set up a product for sale at FastSpring, including license code generation and professional order confirmation e-mails.
- Guard your precious app against software piracy, requiring license code and name to let users pass.
- Implement a registration handler in your app which verifies the license information. You can copy this well-tested code right into your existing app!
- Add a time-based trial to your application which expires even when the application is running. This, too, can be copied right into your existing app!
As a bonus, you'll learn a few things about Mac software architecture through well-written, fully functional sample applications which are thoroughly tested. There are more than 200 test cases included in the code repository!
License
About the Author
Bundles that include this book
Table of Contents
-
So You Want To Sell Your App Outside the Mac App Store …
- Goal of this Book
- Structure of the Book
-
Copy Protection with License Codes
- Terms Used Throughout This Book
- Licensing Is All About a Big State Change
- Download the Code
-
Set up Your App for Sale on FastSpring
- Setting Up Your App as a Product Listing
- Configure License Code Generation via CocoaFob
- Create and Customize Online Storefronts to Sell Your App In Style
- Test the Checkout Process
- Setup Instructions for the Classic Store
-
Sample App 1: How to Verify License Codes in Your App
- Embedding CocoaFob
- Writing a License Verifier
- Persisting License Information
- Encapsulate Verification and Persistence
- User Interface to Enter License Information
- Check for License During Application Launch
- Unregister Again to Test the App
-
Sample App 2: How to Add a Time-Based Trial
- Store and Read Trial Information
- Obtain and Work with Current Time
- Ending a Trial
- Persist the Trial Information at First Launch
- Wrapping Up the Time-Based Trial Changes
- What Could Come Next
-
Appendix
- Bundle Sales on FastSpring
- Self-Hosted License Generator
- Conceptual Details of In-App Purchases
- Embedded Web Store for Purchases Within the App (Classic Commerce)
- App Activation Links in Your Order Confirmation via E-Mail
- CocoaFob and Objective-C
- FAQ
- Notes
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