Apple Confirms January 6 Launch For Mac App Store

Apple on Thursday confirmed its Mac App Store would launch on January 6, 2011, two-and-a-half years after the original, influential App Store debuted for Apple mobile devices. The Mac App Store will be available in 90 countries at launch, and will be available as a free download to Mac OS X Snow Leopard users. Like the iOS Apps on the existing App Store, Mac developers set the price for their apps and retain 70 percent of the sales revenue. They also do not incur hosting, marketing or credit card fees, and Apple does not charge developers to distribute free apps. The original App Store for Apple mobiles launched in January 2008. The service quickly became an extraordinarily popular destination for developers, with the store now hosting more than 341,000 apps, over 56,000 of which are games, according to Mobclix. The Mac App Store will have similar features to the mobile App Store, such as customer ratings and reviews, and sorting by categories. The Mac version of the App Store was originally announced in October this year. "The App Store revolutionized mobile apps," said Apple CEO Steve Jobs. "We hope to do the same for PC apps with the Mac App Store by making finding and buying PC apps easy and fun." Developers can find out more about the Mac App Store at the official website.