Apple announces a major change to their Mac App Store taking place as of March 1, 2012. As of that date, all applications will be required to run in an “App Sandbox“. Similar to existing requirements in iOS today, this amounts to a partitioned area where applications can only access system resources explicitly allowed by Apple. Even direct access to attached peripherals or the network connection are off-limits.
Just like the iOS situation, this also means developers will occasionally find themselves having to beg Apple to make exceptions to a rule, to allow their software app to perform a specific function they feel is necessary.
Interestingly, it doesn’t currently appear Apple can play by its own rules, because many of their own applications are now marketed via the Mac App Store, including the XCode software used to develop applications!
While I certainly see the upside of such a decision (ensuring the software people buy from the App Store and use is virus-free and not using programming techniques liable to cause system crashes or instability), it also runs counter to the landscape the personal computer has operated in since its conception. Computers have traditionally given software developers free reign to write code that can perform any instructions the processor is capable of understanding. Over the years, this encouraged creativity and innovative methods of overcoming obstacles a given system created for programmers. Examples of “thinking outside the box” that come to mind include memory managers (QEMM and 386 To The Max, for example) created to overcome the 640K memory barrier imposed by MS-DOS. Even further back in time, I remember owning a Radio Shack Color Computer 2 that supported only a limited number of video modes. The highest resolution mode only supported two real colors, but a quirk in the NTSC television standards was taken advantage of to achieve four “artifact” colors. Unfortunately, the video chip could power up on either the rising or the falling edge of the CPU clock, resulting in the bit patterns used to represent red or blue randomly reversing themselves. Developers got around the issue by drawing a solid colored screen when a program was first run, and asked the user to repeatedly press the reset button on the back of the computer until the screen was blue!
If Apple goes through with this, they’re effectively relegating the Mac App Store to a place where only generic, uninspired (but safe) software will be found. I can see it being a perfectly good place to purchase a program to manage your bank accounts with or to purchase Apple’s own software (because they seem to make an exception to all the rules for their own offerings). Casual games similar to what’s commonly available for smartphones would work here too. It surely won’t encourage a “one stop shop” for all of one’s Mac software needs, and more creative developers will avoid it in droves.
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