I was an AppKit engineer when the Mac app sandbox was introduced in 10.7. Much of our effort that release (and in following releases) was dedicated to making Mac features work within sandboxed apps. Think open and save panels, copy and paste, drag and drop, Services menu, Open Recents, etc.
We did our best but the fact is that sandboxed apps run more slowly, have fewer features, are more isolated, and take longer to develop. Sometimes this cost is prohibitive (see Coda 2.5).
IMO the app sandbox was a grievous strategic mistake for the Mac. Cocoa-based Mac apps are rapidly being eaten by web apps and Electron psuedo-desktop apps. For Mac apps to survive, they must capitalize on their strengths: superior performance, better system integration, better dev experience, more features, and higher general quality.
But the app sandbox strikes at all of those. In return it offers security inferior to a web app, as this post illustrates. The price is far too high and the benefits too little.
IMO Apple should drop the Mac app sandbox altogether (though continue to sandbox system services, which is totally sensible, and maybe retain something geared towards browsers.) The code signing requirements and dev cert revocation, which has been successfully used to remotely disable malware, will be sufficient security: the Mac community is good at sussing out bad actors. But force Mac devs to castrate their apps even more, and there won't be anything left to protect.
Not having a sandbox was acceptable in the 80s and 90s, when the software development community was reasonably trustworthy.
The software developers and software companies of today are on average not to be trusted: they will outright steal the customers' private information and sell it or give it away without a second thought.
Absent adequate laws, the success of the iOS permissions model and the complete failure of the Android permission model in protecting customers is perhaps the clearest proof of what a sandbox can achieve.
I am reasonably sure that I can download an iOS app - any app - and that my private information will remain secure.
The platforms of today must offer a secure, privacy-preserving running environment. The free for all is dead, and it has been killed by greedy devs and companies.
Apple's implementation of sandboxing actually makes computer users less secure. All the good software is distributed away from the App Store, because sandboxed apps are far too limited (especially regarding the filesystem).
So users have been trained to not use the App Store, where apps have to go through an approval process, and instead to install software from the wild west of random websites.
The fact is that Macs are not phones, the iMac Pro costs six thousand dollars, and expecting users to use the crippled selection of software from the App Store is unworkable. Nobody pays six thousand dollars to play candy crush.
The App Store wasn't made for the 1000 people with iMac Pros. It's made for millions of average Joes who just want to use their computer without having to worry about ransomware.
You are definitely not in that crowd, but most Mac users definitely are. Frankly, until the App Store came out, they were all terrified of installing anything on their computer without some well known brand attached to it (e.g. Microsoft, Google, Adobe).
The App Store has been a great way for Apple to turn a demographic who was traditionally scared of installing apps into a new market.
> So users have been trained to not use the App Store
Again, you and I have been trained. Most users crap their pants when they see anything happed contrary to the "blessed path."
Mac App Store is a fascinating topic! It seems to be a product nearly abandoned by Apple (not much improvement in years since the first release, unless you count sandboxing as one.) User experience is poor (takes seconds to load pages, also the HTML-based buttons need to be clicked multiple times and/or downloads get stuck). Abandonware/copies of copies of copies of "free PDF Reader"-type software from developers who re-publish 300+ apps of questionable quality abound.
Yes the App Store app is so broken and abandoned that it seems far more sketchy than downloading software from a website, which is quite an achievement!
what value is "safe" if your choices are all extremely limited in what they can do? And if you think you can't get malware past apple screening you're not thinking creatively enough.
It works fine for me, I don't have to hunt for updates to all sorts of apps, pay only one company and have some extra security from the sandbox.
Lots of awesome apps are available on the store.
I don't want to allow any app free access to the file system. And anyway, developers have found creative solutions to this problem also. E.g: by asking the user to open the target location from the app they can circumvent the protection.
The AppStore has its negative sides too: apps can disappear and be replaced by v2, forcing one to pay again and again.
> Apple's implementation of sandboxing actually makes computer users less secure. All the good software is distributed away from the App Store, because sandboxed apps are far too limited (especially regarding the filesystem).
Nonsense. The vast majority of users don't need software that does wacky stuff with the file system. They need software that opens documents they made, which all software in the app store can do. I'm a pro (the kind that currently owns the Mac Pro and will likely own the next one or the iMac Pro next), and I basically avoid all software that's not from the App Store. Your ranting sounds delusional to me.
> Nonsense. The vast majority of users don't need software that does wacky stuff with the file system.
Uhhhh, what? You're justifying a company you PAID thousands of dollars to remain in control of your device? We're fighting this sort of inane thoughts where these ideas are already executed. Look up John Deere, and the Freedom to Fix.
> They need software that opens documents they made, which all software in the app store can do. I'm a pro (the kind that currently owns the Mac Pro and will likely own the next one or the iMac Pro next), and I basically avoid all software that's not from the App Store.
Ok. You can choose to or not to.
> Your ranting sounds delusional to me.
You're calling someone else delusional for calling bullshit on Apple's faux-security? And you're calling for the app-ification of all computers? The person calling bullshit on Apple-faux-security isn't the delusional one here.
“You're justifying a company you PAID thousands of dollars to remain in control of your device?“
This is the bit that you FOSS diehards don’t get. Nobody really cares. What they want is something that they can switch on and go to Facebook or edit their documents on. They don’t want to tinker with kernel exstentions or run servers. For most, computing appliances are far more convenient.
Nobody really cares? You know, we're on this forum called hackernews?
You might want to pack up that opinion and take it to some place called "consumernews" or something (they might call it "productnews" these days). That is where nobody really cares.
While most of the "FOSS diehards" get it just fine. People want convenience. It's not that hard to understand and you're making yourself look like a fool if that's your claim. Doesn't mean convenience is the right way forward, even if people want it or don't care.
Since when is "people don't care" a viable argument for anything, the people that don't care, don't understand this.
The fact is that Macs are not phones, the iMac Pro costs six thousand dollars, and expecting users to use the crippled selection of software from the App Store is unworkable.
Keep in mind that professional users that buy the iMac Pro use pro apps, like AutoCAD, Final Cut, Logic, ProTools, Creative Suite and the like; these apps are mission-critical to their workflows and are not crippled.
> The software developers and software companies of today are on average not to be trusted: they will outright steal the customers' private information and sell it or give it away without a second thought.
This is an 'unintended side effect' of the software-as-a-service model. When software was licensed the software itself was what made the money, and there was no way that someone would buy a piece of software if it did not at least try to keep the data safe, in one piece and on the users' computer. But with software-as-a-service the user expects to see their data moving elsewhere and once that has happened all bets are off on how it can - and will - be monetized.
I agree that the idea of a sandbox and Mac App Store is still a vision worth continuing. The problem is that like macOS itself, it seems to have been sidelined for the past few years in favor of iOS and other endeavors.
The performance and limitations can definitely be improved, if not eliminated, if Apple focused on it. The question is: Will they?
> The free for all is dead, and it has been killed by greedy devs and companies.
I agree with you but think there should be more emphasis on connectivity.
In the 80's and 90's (less so of course in the 90's) if you got a computer virus it was probably from sharing software ... on a floppy disk. I used a Mac during those decades and like other software viruses were rare on that platform. :-/
The internet changed everything. Not only does the internet serve up compromised software it provides the back-channel so the malware can phone home.
I don't have any suggestions or any sort of panacea. It's nice sometimes just to reflect on how computing used to be. Back before passwords, sandboxes....
I agree, it's terrible. As a user, I often go to pains to avoid getting the App Store version of an app, if an alternative exists, because those apps are crippled to such a degree that they aren't worth using.
If I'm using the App Store stuff, then my text editor can't edit all my files, my video player can't open videos when I double-click them, my Evernote can't print to PDF, my disk usage analyzer can't analyze my disk because it can't ask me for authorization to do so, and so on.
At the same time, though, in theory I do want sandboxing, at least by default. I do want to have to explicitly authorize some random app before it can install a printer system extension, or before it can scan my entire disk.
I feel like the problem is more political/cultural: Apple prioritizes their low-information, low-computer-literacy users (hi, Dad!) so dearly, that they aren't willing to expend resources to find any compromise for their technically proficient ones. And through the sandboxing requirements, they force their third-party developers to either tell their power users to fuck off, or to give up on the App Store.
Or, I don't know, perhaps they just don't have enough engineers left for the Mac after moving so many of them to their higher-volume Candy Crush console business.
Regardless, though, if there were mechanisms for the user to control the sandboxing enforcement to a greater degree, I would be all for it.
If we could tell our Macs "yes, dude, I hereby authorize DaisyDisk to see all the files" and "Computer, hey bud do me a favor, overrule this restriction that says CotEditor can't ask me to authorize modifying root-owned files", then I would actually not only be happy with, but even prefer, the App Store versions.
The problem though, if you allow for user overrides, then the next TotallyNotShadyVideoPlayer will kindly ask you to add the manual override for "can't read the screen" and, if you agree, it'll steal your credentials. That is, regular users will be easy to selfpwn.
I don't think this can be solved on the software side. It's "security vs. usefulness, pick one" kind of situation. Maybe we need to tackle the human factor - make it easier to prosecute malicious code authors - but not sure if that's any more possible to implement than software that's both useful and secure.
Yep, that's what I meant: Apple's stance is, We can't let veidr override sandbox limitations, because then his dad might get pwned.
That's true, as far as it goes. My view is, maybe you make the dialog to do that scary enough; maybe you have to go enable some security setting to even make the dialog possible; maybe, even so, you have to accept that some users like my dad will get fooled and exploited.
OTOH, it's already a slippery slope; even more secure would be to completely prohibit all third-party software entirely.
> If I'm using the App Store stuff, then my text editor can't edit all my files, my video player can't open videos when I double-click them, my Evernote can't print to PDF, my disk usage analyzer can't analyze my disk because it can't ask me for authorization to do so, and so on.
I fail to see how the macOS sandbox prevents this. Disk usage analyser can ask you for disk access, sandboxed video players can surely open files double clicked in Finder, sandboxed apps can print to PDF.
A few example: QuickTime Player is sandboxed, Pages is sandboxed.
Ok, that's a limitation. What about the other ones you described? I wrote a bunch of sandboxed app, and it's good enough for a document based app (when working on a single document).
How exactly is that a problem? You can open an open file dialog that is in the user's home directory and you can even select ".bash_profile" for them. All they have to do is click "OK" to start editing it. This gives them the security that your app can't just go and erase or overwrite or add malicious stuff to their .bash_profile without their consent, which seems like a really good idea!
Which is a good thing for most users, just not the power users that would potentially want their editor to open ~/.bash_profile (although the downside is that if they were allowed to do so, they could do so silently as well... which is the problem Apple is trying to solve for).
I'm a bit confused - if I explicitly want my text editor to open ~/.bash_profile, then I need to tell it that, which I would do through the Open dialog for GUI apps (or as a command line parameter for command line apps); and if I don't explicitly want to do so, then it probably shouldn't be opening it behind my back.
This sandboxing would be a problem with editors that naturally work with multi-file projects (e.g. an IDE where you'd want to open a whole Java project of linked files), but in the text editor scenario this limitation seems to make sense.
That's not true either. You can definitely save PDF in Evernote on the Mac (btw, there's only the App Store version of Evernote if your discount the web version).
To save PDF into Evernote on the Mac:
- if it's a file- use the share option (right click>Share>Evernote)
- if it's in a browser- in Safari click on share (top right hand corner of the browser) > Evernote. If it's in Chrome, AFAIK, you have to use Evernote Web Clipper (extension) which is also available for Safari.
- Of course, you can also copy/paste or drag and drop PDF into Evernote
I am talking about the feature whereby any app that can print can print directly to Evernote, as a PDF. This feature is very useful, though web clipper and the Sharing extension offer workarounds for some applications.
I personally am happy with subscription based applications in the App Store. I feel more confident that Apple will manage my credit card information better than unknown application developer.
I'm a big fan of desktop sandboxing, so thanks for the hard work. I dreaded running the unsandboxed Office:mac 2011 with its constant stream of "critical" security updates. That was definitely my worst experience using native apps.
I think I would prefer a security model were you could just download and start any .app, but upon first opening it, a dialog would inform you about its code-signing author and the permissions that the app has (with striking red/green color coding). Because right now, there is no way to tell which apps even use sandboxing without opening Activity Monitor, and there is no incentive for non-App-Store-apps to use sandboxing. (There is a dialog when opening a downloaded app for the first time, but it's grey and boring and not helpful at all.)
The only thing required to get a Developer ID signing certificate is a valid credit card (and I guess is not so hard o stole one)
Tranmission malware was signed, Eltima Player malware was signed.
I agree with the need of a better first launch dialog.
If the burden for authentication is on the developers anyway, then code-signing shouldn't require a 99€/year subscription. 99€ is a sum that doesn't help Apple, doesn't hinder criminals, but causes headaches for open-source projects and casual developers.
It does strike me as something that is very difficult to retrofit.
I'm not sure Apple should give up on it though, I don't want any old application I download to be able to read through the spreadsheets in my Accounting folder.
Perhaps the emergence of Electron is a wake up call for Apple and Microsoft, there is clearly a demand for creating applications with web technologies, OS developers need to respond to that rather than letting a third party eat their lunch.
It's a hard UI problem. The Mac sandbox overcorrects to requiring capability resources for all file accesses, while on the other extreme we have e.g. Windows UAC which trains users to roll their eyes and click through.
But Apple doesn't enjoy the luxury of solving this problem in a nuanced way, because Mac apps are not acting from a position of strength. I suspect you aren't downloading lots of Mac apps today, and the reason is not insufficient sandboxing, but instead the limited selection, annoying install experience, etc. These are the problems that Apple must fix first.
> Perhaps the emergence of Electron is a wake up call for Apple and Microsoft, there is clearly a demand for creating applications with web technologies
34 years ago, the Mac was new and generated developer excitement. But Apple was afraid the Mac would be dragged down via shitty DOS ports of apps like e.g. WordPerfect. Apple's response was to set a high bar via first-party "killer apps" like MacWrite, which would embarrass any such DOS ports. It worked: the Mac set the desktop publishing standard for years, decades even, and arguably still dominates.
Yes, there's a demand for developing apps with web technologies, but embracing that is a losing strategy for Apple. Why should I buy a Mac to run web apps that run equally well on a Chinese Chromebook? That's ceding any software advantage.
Instead Apple should leverage the Mac's unique software strengths. Aggressively evolve the Mac's unique "UI vocabulary" and application frameworks. Empower, not punish, the dedicated and passionate developer community. Ship love to the userbase (perhaps the only one in existence) that's willing to open their wallets for high-quality desktop software. And yes, tolerate web-tech apps too - but embarrass them!
Can you elaborate on the "annoying install experience?" I find that is completely opposite, most apps are drag and drop install (and finish their set ups on first launch, if any). Others are a very simple to click through installer. I find the installation experience to be much more .. annoying in windows sometimes. In OS X most apps are installed by dragging and dropping (well, not even required) to /Applications (usually by a folder aliased right to the right of it) and getting a "Installation Progress" in the form of how long it takes to copy data to the disk out of a compressed dmg. In Windows, most installers I run into still do the near straight run to 99%, then sit there for however long the actual installation took, or circles back 15 times.
I believe they are saying installing from the Mac App Store is an annoying experience, which I agree. It’s an inexplicably slow and clunky piece of garbage. It’s almost impressive how bad it is for a “first party” application.
Best case, installing a non-MAS app involves downloading and extracting a zip file, mounting and then copying from a disk image, and then clicking through the "application downloaded from the Internet!" dialog.
Yes it's still much better than the typical Windows installer experience, but zero-install web apps are now setting the bar.
We're not talking about simple, zero install web apps here. We're mostly talking about Electron apps, which are "web apps" but still downloaded in the traditional sense though.
The answer is quality. As a Mac user I always prefer a native Mac app to some cross-platform app, even one with nominally more features.
More specifically:
1. Superior performance. Native apps are just faster. They launch faster. They use an order of magnitude less memory. Multithreading via GCD is much much nicer than Web Workers. Large files are better supported. You can have very large tables. etc.
2. They properly implement Mac UI idioms. By comparison even the nicest Electron-like app (VSCode) violates many longstanding expectations: it doesn't properly highlight the menu bar when typing a key equivalent, menu items don't disable properly, the text highlight color is wrong, text selection anchors incorrectly, no column selection, text drag and drop is badly broken, undo doesn't know what it's undoing, undo coalesces incorrectly, hell even arrow keys sometimes go the wrong way. It's an island app doing its own thing.
The theory of the Mac is to establish a set of UI conventions. When you launched a new app, you would already know how to use most of it, because it was a Mac app. It looks and behaves like other apps, so you feel at home already. And as a developer, you get the right behavior now and in the future, for free.
But if every developer builds a cross-platform app with a custom framework and appearance and behavior and UI, then the OS loses its role in defining the platform conventions. In that event, what's the point in having more than one OS?
I fully agree with you. I love 3rd party Mac apps that look and act like Mac apps (Like Sequel Pro) but you still didn't answer my question.
From a developer point of view, it's just better to make a Web App or a Electron App that will be used by everyone irregardless of their OS. Not only it's less of a hassle to develop but also guarantees that more people are gonna use it.
I doubt that Web Workers vs. GCD makes a difference in user-visible performance. Parallelism matters more for domains that are the responsibility of the platform: image decoding, media playback, vector graphics, etc. (Web browser engines are starting to run away from the Mac system libraries in some of these areas, by the way: Skia and even Cairo/Pixman significantly outperform Core Graphics in many cases at this point, for instance.)
I'd also argue that VS Code isn't much worse off than most native code editors. Most code editors outside of Xcode don't use NSTextView and so have to implement all of the behavior themselves anyhow. For example, as far as I'm aware Sublime Text pretty much implements just as much of the core editing logic as VS Code does.
I'm not denying your complaints, of course--they're valid--but I don't think the gap between native and Web/Electron is as big as you're implying.
Don't know where this is coming from because in my experience developing for the web is much easier. There is tons of up to date documentation out there.
Whereas developing Mac apps seems to rely on a set of arcane knowledge and having been in the scene for years. The documentation for AppKit is vastly outdated and there is almost no blogging/tutorials scene so as a newbie you are basically going to be going through a lot of trial and error.
And then most of the documentation you will find is in ObjC while everyone around you is telling you to develop in Swift, but then Swift changes every few months. You open up a project from a few months ago, it doesn't compile anymore, and you basically have to work at Apple or be a dev god to fix it.
The trade-off is that they’re much shittier to use. Faster to develop, worse experience.
That’s an okay decision to make if it fits your product and market needs, but it’s important not to forget the cost.
Native apps perform better, integrate better with other system services, are more power efficient, use less storage space… usually technically superior in every way, with the exception that that are less portable and in some cases more time consuming to build.
One way to isolate applications, common for server daemons, is to run them under their own user. The real "human" user can sudo into any application account, and does so on application execution. Marketing would have to rename things and slap a GUI over the feature, but I don't see why it wouldn't work for arbitrary Cocoa apps. (And the screen-capture API should be limited to capturing parts of the screen the application is currently drawing to, with overlaps clipped out, etc.)
That's clearly not viable, as displayed in the linked article. One of the examples of a good use for this was 1Password reading QR codes from a browser. Additionally, how would screen capture software work?
One thing I quite liked about the sandbox is running marginally (un)trusted code either interactively or as part of some process, and for that sandbox-exec(1) is great. Security best comes in layers and it's a worthy addition to the toolbox.
It's used by homebrew[0] during the build steps, I hear it's in progress for Nix, and I may make use of it in the future for archmac. Unfortunately it's been marked as deprecated in the man page:
SANDBOX-EXEC(1) BSD General Commands Manual SANDBOX-EXEC(1)
NAME
sandbox-exec -- execute within a sandbox (DEPRECATED)
I think this is really flawed logic. Sandboxing adds some development cost, sure, but the implication here ("grievous strategic mistake") is that it's the key reason developers are building web apps instead of native Mac apps. That just defies common sense.
Clearly the key reason Mac apps cost so much to develop is the platform-specific codebase they require. Mac apps have little in common even with iOS apps, so it's a huge cost. Against that baseline, adding sandbox entitlements is an extremely minor incremental cost.
It's not like eliminating the sandbox would drop the cost of Mac apps by some huge factor. Developers are writing web apps because they can use a cross-platform codebase, plain and simple. That's why I am much more optimistic about the rumor that Apple will lower the delta between Mac and iOS codebases, letting devs leverage their iOS investments. There will always be a cost to adapting a touch-based app to the desktop, but there's orders of magnitude more efficiency to be gained there than in blowing away a whole layer of the security model.
The rumor is that Apple wants to unify the iphone, ipad and mac platforms [1]. So my guess is that they will keep the sandboxed apps because ios apps are also highly sandboxed.
I'm not sure Cocoa's dev experience is a plus right now though - isn't Marzipan intended to fix that?
I mean, you were on the AppKit team, so I don't think I need to list out the oddities/issues/etc it's currently got. Just curious if the general attitude in Apple was akin to "it's fine", or "we know it needs work, but we'll get there eventually".
Mac Cocoa dev has been evolving slowly and incrementally due to the small team size and strong backwards compatibility culture. It's fallen behind as a result. But fundamentally a platform-specific API and toolset can move much faster than a standards-limited web API.
That said it's easy to overextend yourself, as Microsoft demonstrated with their API treadmill. The art of engineering is to set the right evolutionary pace.
Your question is very good, and above my pay grade. In 2013 I had lots of opinions about how ObjC was evolving too slowly, and I was floored the next year when Swift (a well-kept secret within Apple) was unveiled. Apple is full of surprises, even to its own employees.
I don't disagree re: the pace, but I think it's important to note that when it's really just Electron (Chrome) that people are shoving everywhere, it's not _really_ a standards-limited web API... it's whatever Google opts to give them. Electron is sadly the first really approachable "build your app in a virtual machine and it'll just work" approach.
Anyway, not looking to derail the discussion, just wanted to say thanks for commenting - wasn't sure if anyone ex-Apple would be comfortable doing so.
I really don't think shrugging and giving up on security for desktop apps is a viable path.
> their strengths: superior performance, better system integration, better dev experience, more features, and higher general quality
These are important, but you generally do not want to sacrifice security to get them. The sandbox is opt-in on the Mac so where you have an app you believe cannot live in it, you have that choice. Saying Mac devs are forced to castrate their apps isn't accurate or fair.
Thanks for you effort. I prefer Mac app store apps, when they're at parity with non-store releases, because there's fewer licenses to install and manage (even if they all go in my password manager), and because I can upgrade all the app store apps at one go instead of being nagged by each one separately.
We did our best but the fact is that sandboxed apps run more slowly, have fewer features, are more isolated, and take longer to develop. Sometimes this cost is prohibitive (see Coda 2.5).
IMO the app sandbox was a grievous strategic mistake for the Mac. Cocoa-based Mac apps are rapidly being eaten by web apps and Electron psuedo-desktop apps. For Mac apps to survive, they must capitalize on their strengths: superior performance, better system integration, better dev experience, more features, and higher general quality.
But the app sandbox strikes at all of those. In return it offers security inferior to a web app, as this post illustrates. The price is far too high and the benefits too little.
IMO Apple should drop the Mac app sandbox altogether (though continue to sandbox system services, which is totally sensible, and maybe retain something geared towards browsers.) The code signing requirements and dev cert revocation, which has been successfully used to remotely disable malware, will be sufficient security: the Mac community is good at sussing out bad actors. But force Mac devs to castrate their apps even more, and there won't be anything left to protect.