mac app store: fucking fail

all right. ready for this nonsense? so i’ve bought about 14 things through the store- almost all of them paid. ranging from oh… 5 to 40 dollars. yay developers!

i haven’t been able to update ANY of this software- and multiple releases have gone out for individual applications already. why? who the hell knows! apparently this is a documented issue for multiple people, all of which have received NO help from apple. the store tells me there are no updates, but when i view my “purchases”, there are “update” buttons next to the appropriate software. what happens when i click on one?

that happens. doesn’t matter if i’m signed in, signed out, signed out and back in again. restarting, relaunching…. none of these things assist. i’ve gone through all of the troubleshooting that hasn’t worked for anyone else. apparently, the people who’ve emailed apple about the issue get some canned response with a bunch of itunes and ipod links.

helpful right? the app store has two main functions: sell software, update software. for me, it can only do half of that. how sad. i should also mention: updating has NEVER worked. i thought updates were going out slow-as-hell until i realized that it was just effing broken.

what has been established is that if you uninstall the application, and re-install it, you can receive the update. but really- do i have to set up my FTP client ALL over again every time it updates? no way. no. fucking. way. oh and for some people, having spotlight scan Windows installations was causing the issue. i’ve excluded all of my VMs AS WELL as my entire harddrive (lol) from spotlight. no such fix for me.

so i email apple… using their “problems with the app store? contact us!” web form/flow. and even though i stressed “not iTunes, this is for the Mac Desktop App store”, i also got a canned response from someone who works for the itunes store. along with a most unhelpful list of links to ipod support.

is there a single employee at apple in charge of this shit? seriously? the guy responded back with links to support for the APPLE store. for hardware purchases! i didn’t know whether to laugh or break the screen.

i am at my wit’s end and ready to contact a few of the bigger development companies and ask about switching licenses. has anyone else run into this issue?