Maybe it’s because I’m not a casual user in any sense of the word, but installing applications on the Mac for me just seems so simple. Lukas Mathis at Ignore the Code disagrees:

Going with a ZIP file instead of a disk image avoids the issues created by people dragging an application from its mounted disk image directly to their Dock. A ZIP file also avoids the confusion caused by applications disappearing after a restart because their disk images aren’t mounted anymore.

This shouldn’t be a problem—browsers should be configured to open disk images by default—and well designed disk images that indicate to drag the app to the Applications folder should prevent all of the confusion. The thing that’s really broken in regards to applications on the Mac is the uninstallation of apps, something that many developers have tried to fix.

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