Last May, Cabel Sasser, co-founder of Panic, announced that the team was pulling Coda, their highly regarded web development tool, from the Mac App Store, primarily due to sandboxing issues.

As we continued to work on Coda 2.5—a significant update that we’re really excited about—we continued to discover new corners of the app that presented challenges under sandboxing. Coda, to be fair, is a very complex developer tool and is something of a sandboxing worst-case scenario.

Apple, to their considerable credit, spent a lot of energy assisting us with ideas, workarounds, and temporary exemptions we might be able to use to get around some of the issues. Apple genuinely went above and beyond the call of duty, and we’re really thankful for their help. We got extremely close and jumped over a lot of tricky hurdles thanks to them.

Unfortunately, though, we’ve run out of time.

Yesterday, in a Panic state-of-the-union, Cabel published the results of this experiment.

So, how’d it go? After running the numbers, it looks like Coda’s sales have not suffered significantly since leaving the Mac App Store.

Coda was removed from the Mac App Store in mid-October, at the same time version 2.5 was released. Since new releases always generate a short-term sales spike and we wanted the numbers to be fairly representative of “typical sales”, we looked at one month on either side — September and November.

The results were interesting. We sold a couple hundred fewer units of Coda post-App Store removal, but revenue from it went up by about 44%.

Now, two explanations for that: in addition to keeping the 30% that would have normally gone to Apple, we also returned Coda from its sale price ($79) to its regular price ($99) alongside the release of 2.5. Even if those factors hadn’t been in play, though, I don’t think the decline in Coda revenue would have been as dramatic as we originally feared it might be.

Of course we have it easy — it’s an established app with a dedicated customer base. If Coda did not already exist or Panic was not well-known, ignoring the Mac App Store would’ve been a much harder decision with possibly larger ramifications.

Back in October, Rich Siegel announced that BBEdit was leaving the Mac App Store as well. BBEdit is also widely used by developers, has a strong brand and a rabid following. It would be interesting to see how BBEdit is faring.

Side note: You can release a Mac App on your own, without going through the App Store, but your options are extremely limited for iOS. You can build a web app targeted at iOS, but there’s no way to deliver something truly native without going through the iOS App Store.

There’s no technical reason for the two platforms to be treated differently. Apple could certainly tighten the screws on the Mac side to prevent unsigned apps from running natively on OS X. This is an inheritance issue. People have always had the right to self-publish on OS X. But iOS set its exclusivity rules from the get-go.

Different rules for such intimately tied platforms is a small force pushing iOS and OS X apart when Apple is trying to bring them together. A small example of dissonance.