State of the macOS Developer Platform Choices

2019 is a weird year for developer platforms.

Microsoft App Center will incorporate HockeyApp. HockeyApp is discontinued in November 2019. The App Center will be supporting Sparkle feeds in the future, too. So Microsoft will offer a service that may be useful to deploy macOS apps, soon?

Google Firebase will incorporate Crashlytics/Fabric.io. Fabric.io will be discontinued in March 2020, too. Using Firebase for macOS apps was possible, but iOS was the real target platform. Fabric seemed to be popular, so I was surprised by the news of this.

DevMate is sunsetting in December 2019. So you’re left with Paddle, which are going to focus more on software-as-a-service than indie developer apps, according to a source. As long as they stay afloat and keep the existing native app libraries functional, that’s not bad news per se, though.

I don’t know of any other rady-made solution for indies to sell apps. Do you?

Is there just not enough money to be made to warrant the cost of support and hosting?

Update 2019-09-17: Even the Open Source dinosaur PLCrashReporter (previously at https://github.com/plausiblelabs/plcrashreporter) is now stewarded by Microsoft, I guess as part of the HockeyApp integration.