HighDesign on the App Stores
Learn about our plans for HighDesign R8 on the Mac App Store and the Microsoft Store.
The Mac App Store and the Microsoft Store are convenient places to find software for your Mac or Windows PC. Their icons are easily accessible, the catalogues are wide enough for the average needs, and they offer a good customer experience. We know that many users feel more comfortable purchasing from those stores and have many reasons why they would prefer those channels over the Ilexsoft Store, so we want to improve and expand the channels where you can purchase HighDesign.
The Mac App Store
HighDesign has been on the Mac App Store for more more than eight years and over the time we have expanded our offer to include all three editions, LT, SE and Pro.
With Apple's distribution rules, offering cross-upgrades between different products is very hard if not impossible. As developers, we have some limitations that prevent us from providing an upgrade path from one edition to another. For example, if you purchased HighDesign LT on the Mac App Store, the only way to upgrade to SE or Pro would have been to purchase the new edition at its full price, whereas on the Ilexsoft Store we are able to offer our users the upgrade options by only paying the price difference.
Another limitation of our current distribution is that it does not offer a trial version, making it harder to evaluate the product.
For those reasons, we want to improve our Mac App Store offer in 2024 by providing one product, HighDesign, with in-app purchase options for the various editions and a 30-day trial option. That will bring several benefits:
- The offer will be more in line with Apple's model and will allow us faster deployment of the updates by reducing the approval processes on Apple's side from three products to just one.
- In-app purchases will allow upgrades from one edition to a a higher-level edition and down-grades as needed.
- We will be able to offer a 30-day trial period.
Given the structure of the Mac App Store, it makes sense to offer HighDesign there as a subscription. The Ilexsoft Store will continue to offer the permanent licenses as usual, but the App Store will also offer yearly subscriptions. We are currently working to explore the possibility to also offer permanent licenses along with the subscriptions, but that depends on the technical options we have.
We have been working on the new Mac App Store version for some time and plan to release it as soon as possible. In the meantime, we temporarily removed the three HighDesign versions from the Mac App Store. If you want to upgrade to HighDesign R8, and we strongly encourage you to do so given the great new features and speed improvements, please contact us.
The Microsoft Store
In recent years Microsoft has greatly improved the experience on their store, both for users and developers. The catalogue is now much wider and offers some of the big names, and the listing and update process for developers are much simplified.
We plan to release HighDesign on the Microsoft Store very soon. All the technical requirements have been met and we only need to do some testing before announcing it.
We believe this will greatly improve the overall experience for HighDesign users!
As always, if you have any comments, requests, or suggestions, we are happy to hear from you.
HighDesign is the architectural design software that bridges CAD and BIM. For Mac and Windows.