Leaving the Mac App Store
Today, we’re announcing an important change in how you receive updates to Sketch. After much thought, and with a heavy heart, we’re moving Sketch away from the Mac App Store. If you’re a Mac App Store customer, all you need to do is download Sketch from our website, launch it and enter your email address to receive your license.
Why Is Sketch Leaving the Mac App Store?
We’ve been considering our options for some time. Over the last year, as we’ve made great progress with Sketch, the customer experience on the Mac App Store hasn’t evolved like its iOS counterpart. We want to continue to be a responsive, approachable, and easily-reached company, and selling Sketch directly allows us to give you a better experience.
We don’t expect this decision to be unanimously popular, but we want to share how we arrived at it. We take your satisfaction and support seriously, and hope you can understand the choice we have made.
There are a number of reasons for Sketch leaving the Mac App Store—many of which in isolation wouldn’t cause us huge concern. However as with all gripes, when compounded they make it hard to justify staying: App Review continues to take at least a week, there are technical limitations imposed by the Mac App Store guidelines (sandboxing and so on) that limit some of the features we want to bring to Sketch, and upgrade pricing remains unavailable.
We should also add that this move is not a knee-jerk reaction to the recent certificate expiration problems that affected so many Mac App Store customers. However, in light of what happened, we can’t help but feel vindicated in our decision that the Mac App Store is not in our customers’ best interests right now.
What You Need To Do
If you bought Sketch on the Mac App Store, you can continue to use your copy of Sketch for as long as you have it on your Mac. However, we will no longer be issuing updates via the Mac App Store.
Moving to a direct version of Sketch does not require a re-purchase. Simply download the latest copy of Sketch here, replace the old version in your Applications folder, and we will issue you a license for Sketch absolutely free of charge. Just follow the steps in-app to complete the transfer. We will also migrate your presets and templates across, so you won’t lose any data in the process. We’ve made it as simple and painless as we possibly can.
What about my iCloud documents?
iCloud Drive is available to any app on your Mac—regardless of whether the app was downloaded from the Mac App Store. This means that if you store your Sketch documents in iCloud Drive, you can continue to do so.
I want to install Sketch on a new computer
When you move from the Mac App Store, we’ll email your Sketch license to you. When installing Sketch from our website in the future, simply enter this license to unlock Sketch on your new Mac.
Will Sketch ever return to the Mac App Store?
We know there are a great number of people at Apple who care deeply about the Mac, and if things change, we’re not ruling out a return in the longer term.
Thank You
We know that today’s news brings a brief interruption to your workflow, and we’ve done everything we can to ensure the migration is as easy as possible. We’re incredibly grateful to everyone who’s bought Sketch on the Mac App Store, and look forward to bringing you more Sketch updates in the future.
Thank you for using Sketch!