VersionTracker

» see versiontracker.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

versiontracker was the kind of bookmark mac users in the us shareware world opened weekly. i was not on that side of the fence. my software-update layer in the late 90s was the windowsupdate icon in the system tray, plus whatever donanimhaber forum thread had a fresh download link for some driver i needed. the version-tracking habit existed for windows people too, but it lived in different places: tucows, download.com, snapfiles, a few german mirror sites.

kurt christensen started it in 1995, in sacramento, as a place to list which version of which mac shareware app was current. that was the entire pitch. for some reason it worked. shareware authors started submitting their updates directly so users would see them surfaced the same day. the database got big enough that browsing it became the canonical way to keep a mac up to date if you ran anything beyond what apple shipped in the box.

i would have known the name from reading macworld online or stumbling across it through a download link. the actual usage pattern was alien to me. i did not have a mac at home until much later, and by then the app store had eaten most of the categories versiontracker indexed.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

the business model was the soft kind. browsing the database stayed free. the paid tier, versiontracker pro, gave you a desktop app that scanned your installed software, compared it against the catalog, told you what had a newer build. there was a windows version, a palm os version, eventually an iphone version. the mac side was always where the money came from.

the company also ran macfixit, a separate troubleshooting site with its own following. honestly the two together formed a small pre-stackoverflow help cluster for mac users in the kernel-panic era of os 9 and the rough early years of os x.

~ what it became ~

cnet bought versiontracker, macfixit, and iphone atlas together in august 2007. the buyer was already running download.com as the giant generic catalog. for a couple of years the brands kept their own urls and editorial. then in september 2010 cnet collapsed everything into a unified techtracker product on download.com and quietly retired the versiontracker name. the discussion forums went read-only first, then offline.

~ the long tail ~

the mac app store launched in january 2011, four months after the brand died. that was the actual end of the category. apple's storefront ran its own update channel that did not need a third-party catalog to mediate it. the shareware authors who had submitted to versiontracker for fifteen years either moved into the app store or kept selling outside it from their own sites, with sparkle handling the auto-update from inside each app. nothing centralized replaced versiontracker because nothing needed to. cnet is now part of paramount skydance, the versiontracker url is parked, and the catalog itself is gone from the indexes.

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