Over the weekend, a rumour spread like wildfire through Apple and Mac circles which stated that starting with Mac OS X 10.7, Apple would introduce the App Store model to the Mac, allowing only Apple-approved applications to run. It became apparent to me right away that this was a load of nonsense, and for once, I was right: Steve Jobs has personally dismissed the rumour.
The rumour originates from Rixstep, and since I had never heard of these guys before, I pretty much assumed from the start that it was a bunch of nonsense. When I actually came to read the story they posted, it became even more apparent: this was a load of nonsense.
“Developers planning on marketing software for 10.7 will submit their products to the App Store as iPhone and now iPad developers have already done,” the rumour reads, “10.7 will have kernel support for (‘insistence on’) binaries signed with Apple’s root certificate. No software will be able to run on Mac OS X 10.7 without being approved and signed by Apple, Inc.”
The rumour fell apart right there, as 9TO5Mac notes, since Mac OS X’s kernel already has support for signed binaries (more here), and in fact, is already using this technology. You can spot signed binaries on Mac OS X quite easily: applications that ask you keychain access after being updated are not signed, and those that do not ask, are signed.
In any case, lousy rumour or no, the prospect of iPhone-style application control ever coming to Mac OS X is not a pleasant one. As such, Mac developer Fernando Valente decided to email Steve Jos at his usual address. “There’s a rumour saying there will be a Mac App Store and no software without authorisation from Apple will run on Mac OS X,” he asks, “Is that true?”
“Steve Jobs’ response” (I’m assuming a number of Apple people monitor this address) was as clear and to the point as can be. “Nope.”
Good. Mac OS X is a great operating system, and nobody wants it ruined by totalitarian and arbitrary App Store management.
Now they will spread rumors and exceed your expectation by not doing anything at all. I may be paranoid but I strongly believe Apple spread that rumor in the first place. If they didn’t, they would have sued the hell out of Rixstep or at least threatened them to stop.
Unlikely, Apple has sued websites for publishing leaked information on upcoming products, not for publishing false rumors. There are always a lot of rumors around Apple, some are proven false, and AFAIK Apple hasn’t sued anyone for publishing them.
It’s more likely that this rumor was created by anti-apple fanboys who hate apple’s customer lock-in.
Leaked(read: stolen or revealed breaking the NDA) information is not the same as rumours. Those bastards are litigious and secretive, but they don’t pursue rumour spreaders. Otherwise Gizmodo and Engadget would have been sued to the ground in the 3 months before iPad came out.
While I’ve no doubt that His Steveness would love to control the Mac the way he controls the iPhone OS, he’s not stupid. To do so would all but guarantee the death of the Macintosh user base and, from there, the product line. They were only able to do it with the iPhone OS because it was a new product and there were no expectations surrounding it regarding third party apps.
That being said, I would not oppose a package manager for OS X or at least a way to reliably remove apps. If you’ve ever tried to remove an app completely on OS X you know what hell it can be. OS X has the easiest method of installing apps (at least of the oses without a package management system) but there’s no functionality whatsoever for removing the files the app puts all over the darn place. It’s actually worse than Windows, at least *some* apps in Windows come with uninstallers that actually work.
Saying “Nope” to “app store and no software without authorisation” still makes an app store a possibility.
I really don’t think Apple will disallow apps from third parties that are not in their store, but an app store for OSX will come IMO.
Absolutely. I suspect there will be an App Store fairly soon, simply because it is too good an opportunity for Apple to miss because
1) It gives them an additional revenue stream
2) Software via the app store is “checked” so will be regarded as another feather in the cap of the “Apple can’t get malware” brigade
3) Smaller developers will relish the chance to get there application out to more mac users without having to worry about competing on google rank with windows and linux apps as well
I can’t imagine Mac OS X making this the only installation method, but I can see it becoming the primary one (I use Ububtu and I almost always install via the repositories rather than either compiling or using a .deb).
And then in a few years when people are used to it and all the key applications are available through the store ….
Point 2 doesn’t really apply to desktop apps as it’s very hard check an entire desktop app (given the size and complexity of many of them) for malware. Even with access to source code, Ubuntu has had instances where malware has slipped through into the software repositories – so I can’t see how Apple could maintain a verified repository without browsing the source.
In fact, this very point might be the biggest reason why OS X wouldn’t see an app store. If Apple build an App Store for OS X, then indirectly they’re partnering themselves with the apps on there as people will assume that the apps listed have been “Apple Approved” thus safe. So if there’s any dodgy apps, then Apple’s image will in turn be tarnished. I could see that being one gamble too much for a company that’s as obsessed with public image as Apple are with theirs.
As things stand at the moment, because there’s no OS X app store, users accept that they install programs “at their own risk” (just as they would in Windows). Thus all Apple have to do is dictate a style guide to keep their platform (visually) clean but then deny responsibility for rouge software.
So as far as I can see, the only way they could retain a strong image whilst running a desktop app store would be to limit apps to the trusted professional apps and/or those from larger software houses – so basically everyone but the developers in point 3 of your post (ie the developers that would benefit the most would be excluded from the store). In fact, to a smaller degree, we already see this preferential treatment on the iPhone.
This is really not that hard of an issue to solve. You just have two classifications of Apps. “Apple Certified” Apps and Non-Certified Apps. In order to install the latter, you have to first enable them to show up and then click through a big, “AT YOUR OWN RISK” popup before installing. The average mom and pop user would never bother, but then again, they probably wouldn’t install too many non-big-name apps.
Apple could take their sweet time reviewing apps for the Certified section, and use some kind of user feedback (like a “report malware” button) in the Non-Certified section to give them a heads up regarding dodgy apps. Easy.
I agree that, in all likelihood, some kind of “App Store” is coming to OS X in the future.
All the app store is is a repository of applications that apple controls the difference between the linux repos and apples way of doing things is that apple will not let you add any third party repos to your own machine by way of leaving out that functionality in their app store (installer). And you cant install software any other way on these machines (unlike linux)
I would have no problem with apple having an app store for osx but at the VERY LEAST allow for third party repos!
Edited 2010-04-26 18:22 UTC
“Ubuntu has had instances where malware has slipped through into the software repositories”
When did “malware” end up in ubuntu repos??
Sorry, after a bit of Googling it appears I suffered from bit-rot. It was gnome-look not the distro repos:
http://www.osnews.com/story/22625/Malware_Hidden_Inside_Screensaver…
…brag about innoventing software repositories
We’ll see …
pica
Take away the silly ideas of ‘no third party software’, ‘only Apple signed binaries can run, or ‘can’t install software by anyother means’ and you are left with a pretty good idea.
Let’s face it a good App Store for OS X that makes installing programs as easy as the iPhone or any Linux repository will ba a major one upmanship against the horror of installing Windows software (next, next, next, good damn install aready!, next, lying progress bar, next, adware and finish!).
“(next, next, next, good damn install aready!, next, lying progress bar, next, adware and [reboot]!)”
Isn’t Valve Software’s “Steam” a type of App store for games? That’s coming to OSX…
– package manager providing search, install, uninstall.
– packages downloaded from central storage source
Yup.. I can’t really see how it wouldn’t be considered a repository.
The tools are obviously already free. This was the point at which I WTF’d and decided this was total FUD. It was already sounding ridiculous, but that was the clincher.
If iPhone business model keeps being a success (in terms of developers, rather than money), it’s not unlikely that move could happen, though I think it’s too early for that now.
That would of course be very bad for all, starting from consumers. Problems with IPhone AppStore should be enough to make developers (and customers) realize what danger we’re facing.
If Mac OS X share in global market won’t surge a lot in coming months (say 1 year), it’s not unlikely that Jobs might bet that house on a different business model which he could more tightly control. A small share in market would make such change not so painful. I doubt that Microsoft could do the same.
Rumors could be originated by people getting to know Apple is building/experimenting such transition though that doesn’t mean they will actually perform it.
Well, with Apple’s lifetime limit of how much Ipad hardware related profit they are willing to extract from you is true, any madness is possible.
Well, to be honest nothing is impossible. When the whole IPhone madness started I thought “What sane developer could invest money and energies in such a business model??”.
Well, I proved wrong since thousands developers started to create apps for IPhones (apps… let’s say small-scale utilities…) while only now Apple is showing its true colors about that platform (ask Adobe, Google and I’m sure other big boys who weren’t that dumb to actually *try* to release something, even if I’m sure they thought about it).
So the key is around developers: until there will be enough developers willing to waste their time, nothing is impossible and also an IPad might look attractive.
Edited 2010-04-26 11:42 UTC
The key is actually around making money. Build a platform that makes making money extremely easy, and the devs will come.
There’s no point trying to turn the ship around when it’s already gone so far. Jobs knows that locking down OS X is fight not even worth attempting.
Apple will obsolete OS X and move everybody over to iPhone OS within the decade. That is how they’ll achieve it.
When they’ve added multitasking, made it compile on x86, added real keyboard and big screen support, maybe they can pretend to have a desktop OS there. But then what is different from Mac OS X? So far, the iPhone OS has only been a subset of Mac OS X that can compile on ARM and use multi touch. If you scale it up for the desktop, you end up with Mac OS X minus the hype. I think they will obsolete their desktop altogether instead. Move out of the low margin PC business like IBM did years ago.
In the ling term, I believe they will do more and more “service” (iTunes, app store and software lock in) and less and less hardware. They’ve never been that good at hardware anyway, even in the early days where the Amiga ruled.
Edited 2010-04-26 13:56 UTC
10 years dude. Remember computers in 2000? 32MB RAM and Win98 was all your average consumer needed.
Apple will already be working on the Next Thing internally. Don’t think that the buck stops with the iPad, just as it didn’t with the iPhone. The software isn’t there yet, but I’m certain that Apple are already, or will soon begin working on the replacement to MacBookPro, MacPro and so on.
Imagine a 27″ ‘animator’s desk’ tablet (like the Wacom Cintiq), running a higher res, more powerful iPhone OS that had a development suite for building iPhone/iPad apps built in.
10 years is a long old time remember.
— edit —
Remember when Steve stood on the stage and had a mock funeral for OS 9, declaring it dead? Clearly it wasn’t in the eyes of many (Classic didn’t truly die until Leopard was released, seven years later).
Steve will one day do the same thing with OS X. He’ll announce that OS X has had its day, but OS XI (iPhone OS family) is where Apple’s key focus is (if it wasn’t already).
Apple are always moving forward like this, they obsolete quickly. Unlike other companies they don’t come out with a product like the iPad and then stand around saying “Well, what should we build now?”.
Edited 2010-04-26 14:20 UTC
And a keyboard, a mouse and a screen.
Back in 1990, you remember? It was the Amiga with 512 kb or RAM, a keyboard, a mouse and a screen.
And the iPod before that. there was the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad (the big iPod?) and the desktop is still there.
Yes, multimedia all other the place, little embedded computer inside your body, computers in your fridge, whatever, there will still be a computer with a screen and a keyboard on my desk, because on my desk I do office stuff like writing documents, filling forms, etc. I’m not predicting the future with rolling balls like in minority report and if I have to, I prefer they just display the result on the screen instead of rolling a ball all other the building.
I believe they will eventually try to get out of the PC business because of the low margins. In the Phone business it will be harder and harder for them to keep their margin high so they will outsource and focus on service like IBM did. That is what I think but I’m not at Cupertino so I may be wrong.
Edited 2010-04-26 15:17 UTC
Amiga was only king for a few tasks by 1990. The rest of us moved to more flexible architectures by then. I was typing my college papers on my parent’s 286 with 1MB of RAM, a sucky copy of Win3.0, and using qemm. Seems like qemm was mandatory to see beyond the 640K limit back then. I do remember Win3 crashed about every hour so I got paranoid about saving regularly. Hard to remember some of that stuff we had to go through to be on the edge.
Amiga was misunderstood, mis-sold, written off as a games machine and certainly not bettered by any OS until long after it’s death.
We had to wait for Windows ’95 and BEOS before anyone else reached the loft standards set by the Amiga let alone eclipse them.
Apple were still struggling to get close to AmigaOS 3.1 with MacOS 9 – There was a good reason for them buying out NeXT, MacOS was at an evolutionary dead end.
Media developers and Media consumers do not necessarily need an OS. If I am working on a LAN with a collaborative project – like a web magazine, do I really need to know or be able to see every file in the Local HD? The desktop is dead. Even for a corporate LAN, I need only my current project path and while it looks a lot like a any similar project that is a function of the content.
Personally I Disagree And I suspect that if you shoot film and need a solid relationship between what you have shot and edited … Actually that is also likely handled with some of the new SW packages. I rarely need -whoops- never need and rarely want to look in my iTunes Library, and that is a transparent folder tree and my Aperture and iMovie Libraries are ‘Opaque’ “Bundles” I don’t need to know and name every subfile or edit point. Hmmm I think that the only reason that I need a ‘Desktop’ and that means Late-Model MacBookPro is to write small programs. See if the hardware is portable then so is the ‘rich data’ and at some point likely within the next ten years the data pipe will be wide enough so that all of my data is portable. Ten years ago computers were *great* and 20 years ago computers were *great* (and even then that was still 1990 When a Whole ‘OS’ fit on a small box of floppies) Hell 30 years ago computers were *great* with the mono displays and RAM measured in KBs but none of these older worlds gave me the ability to STFU & GTD. It required that I know something or at least be able to put in a disk.
I suppose that in ten more years my whole point of view and keyboard centric fixation will seem as dated as OS 9/ Win 98 – both billed as – The Most Internet Connected Operating System of All Time
Horse s***.
While it’s possible that Apple would do an App Store for the Mac it’s almost certain that any apps listed thereon will have to be approved by Apple and fit certain criteria, so it’s highly improbable that they would make it the only source for OSX apps.
Also, the iPhone is a device with integrated mobile internet access that could easily be hijacked by a rogue app and potentially incur significant data costs for the device’s owner with no method of stopping it other than turning off the device, so personally I’m happy that apps for that OS have to undergo an approval process. That level of checking is not necessary for OSX because Mac hardware doesn’t have cellular data capability built in.
Unfortunately as those features become standard in Mac hardware this whole argument will become a lot more complicated.
I have 3G built into my netbook currently running Windows 7. Guess how I prevent rogue programs racking up a bill?
1. I use common sense, and
2. I look at the network icon in the corner
Geez, not to berate you, but let’s not drink the Apple kool-aid that they are somehow protecting us from a threat so great that we can’t be trusted with our own devices.
I am CONSTANTLY asking my wife to turn off her limewire when she is done downloading something. For me, walking past the living room and noticing router lights blinking like mad is like a gigantic neon sign telling me something is up. She however, is completely oblivious to such things.
Spank her. She’ll thank you for it later.
An App store for OSX will atually bolster sales for Mac developers. At the moment mac developers have a lot of obscure smaller apps that you may or may not find on Apple’s downloads page with the rest being known by word of mouth. With a decent appstore on the smaller developer can gain more exposure with less work. One would hope that if Apple were to make an Appstore for a desktop OS they would be more lax with the rules. It would certainly make if easier to upgrade/update these apps.Your app info can be stored in a central repo somewhere so system update should go flawlessly. Devs also save on packaging if they don’t already distribute digitally.
That’s kind the direction that Ubuntu is taking with their software center. Its an easy to use accessible place where users can just open the store and see what they have available.
Ofcourse Apple won’ disallow 3rd party applications from installing. A lot of Mac users are music and graphics design professionals. I doubt Avid (Protools), Autodesk (Maya) or Adobe (CS Suite) will want o distribute via Apple, eve its more convenient for the user. Adobe seems to love installing updaters on your machine that nag you everyday to update your software.
Lets face it, saying no usually means yes in Apple-country. This ‘Intel-thing’ was such an example …
I gotta admit – Apple are good in PR and marketing balloons – every second news of every tech site is about Apple’s product. I’m getting a bit annoyed eventually, however, especially with the tailored story about Gizmodo and the lost iPhone, this was hilariously funny. Did anyone actually believed ?
Pfft! No, of course no one believed it. Everybody knows that there is no company named apple. Its just a secret division of Microsoft that does all of the things that Microsoft legally can’t do any more.
I bought my little MacBook to have a nice computer with a nice UNIX inside it.
If they start their AppStore model in the Mac world, the Mac would not have any reason to me and for a lot of UNIX fans.
Very entertaining answer! As if the reasons speak by themselves.
I would love an app store for osx. Despite what people on internet forums think, installing software is hard. It is too late for apple to make it exclusive, but an app store would make live much easier for the average person.
Compare (picture you mom doing the steps):
1. Google for the software you are looking for
2. Sift through the matches to try and find out which program is good. Be careful most online review sites are full of lies. Danger: horrible shareware masquerades as something useful. Extreme danger: many apps come with system damaging parasite apps, tootbars, and services.
3. Download the software
4. Figure out where the package downloaded is
5. Open the dmg and manually put the software in the correct location
6. Manage upgrades. Different each app, rarely automatic. How many times do you see someone with multiple msn clients strewn around with people running them straight from the dmg?
With:
1. Type what you are looking for in the app store.
2. Look through the matches. Reviews and ratings are built right in. Know the software is at least not deceptively labeled and not full of parasites.
3. Tell it to install.
I think the difference can best be summed up by:
I have never had a relative ask for help installing software for an iphone/android platform. And I know they install a lot of apps because they are always showing me their latest cool app. But pretty much every non technical person I know has needed my help installing software on other platforms. Or worse needed help cleaning up the mess when they tried to do it themself and chose wrong application from google.
If Apple would simply provide a repository of free or commercial software to make installations easier (though I do not find something easier than the current way actually), it could be relatively good.
But if Apple provides such repository, they will also provide a huge set of rules, constraints and lawyers on top of the “store” arguing they want to protect me and they wanto to protect the quality of the software I use. And no matter what the Apple fanboys can tell: I want MY computer running whatever I want, with no artificial restrictions on the software it runs and still being the nice POSIX box it is.
Edited 2010-04-26 23:02 UTC
Sure, Apple will not block third-party apps in OS X, but we’ll see what happens whenever OS XI appears.
OK before the app store and all I remember reading how some people would’ve liked Apple and/or Microsoft to have a repository/apt system for installing and finding software. Now that the app store has been here a while, and we’ve seen it play out, I was wondering how the app store software distribution model of Apple compares the repository model of Linux. Especially with regards to submitting apps for inclusion in repositories.
For the record I like the idea of convenience these two models provide. At this point as far as Apple goes, I think they could do a better job with their approval process. I really think the only apps that should not be allowed in the store are those that contain malware.
Rixstep is a pretty reliable website. They dig around in Mac OS X internals (legally, AFAIK) and find security vulnerabilities, some of which Apple takes a very long time to fix after being notified… Rixstep also writes a couple of utilities for OS X users, including some that fix or work around those OS X vulnerabilities.
While going so far as to create a locked down app store and prevent third party apps would clearly be very bad, having a system wide package management system where applications can be bought, acquired for free and centrally updated would make a LOT of sense.
Apple could take an existing design like apt and build a store on top of it.
Having a single location to acquire applications is great for users, no more having to run the risk of acquiring apps from potentially dubious sites… All your apps updated centrally from one place… And provide the capability to use third party repositories for power users to take advantage of.
Linux seems to get this right, although the feature is not nearly advertised well enough.