There is no technical reason or requirement for Apple to be the ultimate gatekeeper of their walled garden just to sandbox file access. But I'm sure they are more than happy to conflate these things in the name of "security".

People loathe Apple for locking down their own access to their computer, not for security measures. Signed app distribution solves an entirely separate problem- making sure you get the app unmodified. This is a problem with sandboxing. Apple also does have sandboxing, but mostly that’s not what people complain about.

You can have signed apps and sandboxing without Apple being the sole arbiter of what you install. For example, Linux has multiple options available to solve this. Signed repos combined with SELinux, or flatpak, and snap all solve the same problem.

Doesn't Google Chrome do that already (log everything) and still many people use it? And wasn't there a recent article about how programs couldn't be run on Big Sur because some server somewhere could verify the hash before it was ran? It was discovered because the OS slowed down to an unbearable speed except when running Apple programs.

Signed app distribution won't solve this problem.

I guess the people who loathe it (not me though) are very well aware of this particular benefit and still think isn’t enough justification to enable it by default.

I respectfully disagree. Apple prevents that kind of behaviour by requiring user to explicitly grant permission to a program trying to access certain parts of file system.

It has nothing to do with signing.

> This is the type of behavior Apple intends to prevent with their signed app distribution, loathed by so many here.

Just because something is a solution, it doesn't automatically make it good. I can _at the same time_say that it is problematic that people die in the traffic _and_ loathe banning cars altogether.

Letting Apple act as the internet court might help on some problems. But letting a commercial entity act as legislative, executive, and Judicial power in the software distribution realm is simply not a good solution.

Signed app distribution did not prevent this. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25810526

This is an argument for putting more control in the hands of users, in the form of better sandboxing and permissions. It is not an argument for taking away control from users, as Apple is doing.

Not loathed here. As an end user I am consciously paying for the sand boxing and permissions features of iOS and the app review process. With so much shitty behaviour out there it’s a trade off I’ve had to make.

No, decent app sandboxing would prevent that.

That's why most people here agree it has a purpose but that it should be opt in rather than opt out

This is a smart phone practice. It's not acceptable or done anywhere else. Smart phones are terrible computers that say they have to restrict their users to protect them from themselves but they consistently fail to do so.

Something like this doesn't happen, and would not be acceptable, on a desktop computer.

Why can't QQ sign their app?