Mac App Store and investing engineering time

I empathize with the message here. However, a friend pointed out that their screenshot shows a reply from Apple 26 minutes after their last reply. It seems they might have forgotten about that and just been sitting there for a month.

For me, the hardest and most frustrating part of all this stuff is that Apple acknowledges the shortcomings of their app sandbox model, acknowledges they even have exceptions if you demonstrate a need, and then when you clearly explain your situation and demonstrable need, they still refuse to grant you the exception because you're not popular enough or the reviewer woke up on the wrong side of the bed.

We have built a sandboxed app that supports being a native messaging host for a companion browser extension. To do this for Chrome/Firefox you need to install a manifest file in a well known shared location on the filesystem. Because Apple does not support setting up manifests for other browsers, and especially because Safari interop works out of the box with no configuration, one would expect them to be able to grant a filesystem write permission to a specific out-of-sandbox folder (and possibly even a specific set of file names that must include your bundleid in them or something, for security). But no, we can't have nice things.

Instead we have to do this rather non-apple-esk thing of asking users to allow us to write the file after which they get presented with a standard "save file" dialog. This is way beyond silly. It's an implementation detail. It is most certainly NOT a good user experience! But no, Apple prefers a degraded user experience because of sandbox limitations that they're unwilling to work around and through with you in their review process, despite stating they have the mechanisms and capability for doing so.

Ever year it seems to become harder to build a good product on Apple platforms, at least if you indulge Apple and do it the way they want you to. Maybe Apple is loosing touch with their software ecosystem. It would not surprise me if things like Apple One are taking the business spotlight.