On the Omnigroup blog today: We’re unable to offer upgrade pricing for Mac App Store purchases.
My apologies: I’m afraid we will not be able to offer upgrade pricing to our Mac App Store customers after all. So long as we continue to sell our apps through the Mac App Store, we are not allowed to distribute updates through other channels to apps which were purchased from the App Store.
The reasoning is basically Apple says they’re not allowed to offer upgrades “out” of the App store while continuing to sell apps in the App Store. So either you are in, or you’re out. They are allowed to continue to sell their apps both in the app store and from their own online store, but they can’t offer to let people upgrade from the App Store version to their own version.
This is the sort of crap that Apple fans deal with all the time. 90% of the time everything in the Apple World(tm)(r) is happiness and unicorns, but the 10% of the time that Apple does their thing, they really make people mad.
Please Apple, just offer upgrade pricing in the store already!