To me, that's the absolute worst possible outcome: All of the important software use cases become owned by the existing players forever, because no other competitor can gain traction without Apple's marketing help by being in the App Store, but then they can't become powerful enough to truly compete with the big players by being outside the sandbox.
That's exactly what happened with Pixelmator, and it's happening now with the Affinity Suite. Before the sandbox, Pixelmator looked like it would one day be a real Photoshop competitor, but now they're mainly for people who don't want to pay for Adobe's subscription.
And, the real Adobe competitors are more likely to come from somewhere else, like the web with Figma. The funny thing is that now Figma is usable on an iPad, because it's a web app, and Sketch, which is an all-Apple technology AppKit app, isn't. Because web apps can avoid the sandbox, even on iOS. Some of the biggest beneficiaries of Apple's security strategy are poised to be some of the apps least invested in Apple's platforms.
> Before the sandbox, Pixelmator looked like it would one day be a real Photoshop competitor, but now they're mainly for people who don't want to pay for Adobe's subscription.
Can you point to any evidence that the macOS sandbox is what’s holding Pixelmator back from dethroning the undisputed 20+ year king of professional photo editing?
I wrote an analysis of the most popular creative apps across various industries[0], none of them are sandboxed, and all of them support plugins of some kind, which is the main type of functionality that sandboxing makes difficult.
Also, Photoshop was once also the undisputed king of user-interface design, but they were dethroned by Sketch, an app that was first released one year before sandboxing came into effect.
Is any of this conclusive? No. But do I see a pattern sandboxing putting a ceiling on how successful a creative app can be? Overwhelmingly yes.
If that happens then interesting new applications and ideas will start appearing on these FOSS OSes since those will be the OSes where such things will be possible. People do not use computers for their OSes, they use computers for the applications they can run on them and if all the new interesting stuff comes out in the free FOSS OSes then people will start migrating to using those OSes.
Nowadays this doesn't happen much because there is no incentive.
I remember that speech when DX 10 was not available on XP, I also used to believe in Desktop Linux dream, nowadays I just use Apple, Google, MS desktop and mobile platforms.
Both of what you write have nothing to do with what i wrote. DirectX 10 might not have been available on XP, but DirectX 9 was, as was OpenGL that exposed the DX10 level functionality through extensions. If anything, DX10 pretty much failed to gain traction exactly because it was not available on the OS gamers wanted to use at the time. Very very few engines used DX10 and pretty much every engine skipped form DX9 to DX11.
Also as i already wrote above, currently there isn't really much of an incentive for people to switch (outside of ideological and/or very niche reasons) so the "Desktop Linux dream" doesn't apply.
> Pixelmator looked like it would one day be a real Photoshop competitor
I am, at best, a journeyman in the ways of graphic editing and someone who bought Pixelmator the instant it arrived but this isn't right - it might have become a real Photoshop competitor for people who needed basic graphic editing facilities once or twice a month, yes. Same with Affinity Photo. Without a laser focus on quality-of-life tweaks and jank removal (haven't seen it in either yet!), they're both doomed to GIMP-level "coulda beena contender!" existence.
Yeah. That's kind of the point. Don't expect to buy or write alternatives for the established, trusted apps. Just consume product and get excited for next product.
That's exactly what happened with Pixelmator, and it's happening now with the Affinity Suite. Before the sandbox, Pixelmator looked like it would one day be a real Photoshop competitor, but now they're mainly for people who don't want to pay for Adobe's subscription.
And, the real Adobe competitors are more likely to come from somewhere else, like the web with Figma. The funny thing is that now Figma is usable on an iPad, because it's a web app, and Sketch, which is an all-Apple technology AppKit app, isn't. Because web apps can avoid the sandbox, even on iOS. Some of the biggest beneficiaries of Apple's security strategy are poised to be some of the apps least invested in Apple's platforms.