Michael Tsai - Blog - Dogfooding the Sandbox
[..] after the June 1 deadline, Apple issued non-bug-fix updates such as iPhoto 9.3 and Aperture 3.3, yet they remain unsandboxed. Meanwhile, I’ve heard from at least one developer that Apple deemed a third-party 0.0.1 bug-fix update to not be a bug-fix, and so rejected it for not being sandboxed
Apple have an interesting problem with their app stores. On iOS, they’re (very) gradually relaxing conditions towards a hypothetical glorious future state where everyone is both happy and secure. There are still random annoying rejections, but for the most part it feels better now than it ever did.
On MacOS, though, they’re going in the opposite direction. It appears that Apple’s vision of the glorious future of MacOS apps is a lot more restricted than the current state, so every time the conditions change, they change to be more restrictive, not less. Sandboxing is just the latest instance of this.
Every time Apple relax the iOS restrictions a little, or makes the platform more powerful, they enable better apps. The platform’s backwards-compatibility is superb, and apps I bought on day 1 of the store being open still work.
But every time they squeeze the MacOS restrictions tighter, more apps that used to be permitted can now no longer fit. This isn’t a situation that gives me great faith that things I buy from the Mac App Store will continue to work in the future, or get bug fixes.
Of course, in practice, I’m going to keep buying from the store. It’s far more convenient than anything else.