Darren Steadman

Just after Apple first announced they were going to do a Mac appstore I posted the following article outlining what I thought they could do with it.

Well since then Apple have released Lion and have introduced app sand-boxing which will become a requirement for all applications in the appstore by around March next year, it should offer a degree of safety from malware and viruses as each developer will have to give their application a profile that determines what system resources it requires to do its job and anything after that is denied by the OS.

I see this as being a good thing generally for consumers as it gives that extra level of confidence and security in an application and the system as a whole, however I imagine there will be some applications out there that are already on the store that might not be able to be squeezed into the sandbox and it could mean that developers can no longer use the store to distribute their applications which would bring the obvious disadvantage to them of losing probably the best distribution channel available on the Mac currently. I’m sure over the coming months there will be plenty of activity and discussion online about all this so should be interesting to see where it all goes.