available in Mac App Store

Audacity Help Forum macOS
1

Hello,

First of all thanks to all people involved for their time & effort put into Audacity.
Are there any plan of making Audacity available in Mac App Store?
I would love to be able to install it from the App Store.

Thanks,
Ionel

2

I can think of one reason not to do that. You have to go through the Apple Certification and Acceptance process to get something into the store. Then when you do an update, you have to do it all again. Do you have time for that? Are you volunteering?

This isn’t a corporation. We’re all volunteers.

Koz

3

Others have offered to do the work before now to put Audacity in Apple Store. Audacity Team have ruled it out primarily because the Apple Store is assumed not compliant with the GPL Licence that Audacity is under.

See for example:
http://adium.im/pipermail/devel_adium.im/2011-January/007973.html
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-gpl-enforcement .

And apart from that there is no reason to believe Apple would wave Audacity through. It’s easy to find ways in which the Audacity look, feel and behaviour is not that of a native Mac app.


Gale

4

OK, I understand.
Thank for the answers!

5

Hi. Audacity should absolutely be in the App Store. The App Store is now the primary source for downloading applications on the Mac OSX platform.

We can’t say Apple wouldn’t approve Audacity if we haven’t tried.

There are over 700,000 applications in the App Store. How could it be so difficult if hundreds of thousands of developers have their applications in the App Store?

As a community we need to objectively look at this situation and figure out how it can be done.

6

The first task is to persuade Apple to make their terms of service compatible with open source software, and in particular compatible with GPL. To date they have shown no willingness to do so.

7

To give you an example, I asked Apple back in November if they would review Audacity with a view to listing it on their accessible apps page:
http://www.apple.com/accessibility/voiceover/applications.html .

I’m still waiting for a reply. :frowning:


Gale