Apple just sent me and thousands of other developers a mail, stating that our apps on the Mac App Store (in my case, that's
WebsitePainter and
CopperCube) will have to be sandboxed until June 1st. That's in one and a half week. Nothing new here, they already said this long before, and actually, this is the third time the deadline has been prolonged. I think the fact that they are sending the mail again as reminder shows that they are a bit nervous, and probably means that not a big amount of developers, such as me, haven't sandboxed their apps yet.
Well, I'm probably not going to sandbox my apps for as long as possible. I can only speak for me, but I guess other people have similar reasons:
- The sandbox feature can only be implemented when you are using XCode 4, the latest version of Apples development tool. XCode 4 introduced a major change in it's user interface, and also a lot of annoying bugs. It even crashes frequently when programming.
- The sandboxing feature only works on Mac OS X Lion. No support for Snow Leopard or older versions. This means that in order to make your app sandbox-ready, you have to update your operating system, and, if your Mac is too old, you even need to buy new a Mac. And since Mac hardware isn't that cheap, lots of app developers simply don't do that. Or even can't do that.
- Sandboxing cripples your apps and makes them in some cases even unusable. In my case, it's for software and website development. Doing things as simple as manually typing a file name into a text box and letting the app then read that file won't work anymore in the sandbox. Developers have complained about this to apple numerous times, but Apple didn't listen, as it seems. Apples own software, such as XCode for example won't work with the Sandbox either, for this reason.
We'll see what June 1st will bring. :)