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Apple To Require Sandboxing For Mac App Store Apps
mario_grgic writes "And so it begins: Apple will require that all Mac apps submitted to the Mac App store stick to strict sandboxing requirements. This means you must ask Apple for read or read/write entitlements for additional folders outside your Application Support folder before your app is approved. There are also restrictions on direct hardware access, communication to processes your app did not start, or even something simple as taking a screenshot. All that is needed after this to turn your Mac into an appliance is to only allow app installations from App Store."
If they chrooted Darwin to the point that every app had to have Apple granted permissions to do *anything* on the list of AppStore sandbox privileges, then Apple would indeed be dead in a very short time.
iOS is already stagnant in the Smartphone marketshare reports while Android keeps growing and gaining new product platforms. Granted, iOS still has a huge install base, but the day that Apache can no longer access the internet and PHP/RoR scripts can't access the file system or make network service calls, it's game over for OS X as a web developer platform.
Since Mobile Apps and Internet Services go hand in hand, a substantial amount of developers who write for iOS also write Web Services in some non-Apple controlled language such as Java, PHP or Ruby. To take that away would make OS X essentially an iOS/OS X only development box -- and you'd be looking at another 1995 era for Apple all over again as their development base switched back to Windows or to Linux and focused chiefly on Android development and writing their Web Services on those other platforms.
With this sort of change to a MacBook Pro being a $2,5000 iOS compiler, the development community would noticeably decrease after the first year. By three years time, their development base would mostly consist of large corporations who have already invested in iOS apps and need to maintain them, die hard loyalists and consultants who are "forced" to have a Mac for iOS/OS X development for contract work. New iOS App development would drop off dramatically since the iOS marketshare would have fallen to 20% or less of the mobile market as user perception switches away from iOS, seeing it as a dead or dying platform for lack of Apps as compared to Android.