Open Radar

 
As the sandbox is in flux and constantly (quickly!) evolving, it's producing a conundrum for app developers who support 10.7 but also support 10.6.x. For these developers, it's difficult to handle the scenario where a user installs and launches the app on 10.7, 10.7.1 or 10.7.2. On these systems, the app is technically "capable" of running, but will fail to behave as expected because of reliance on sandbox technologies that are not available until a later OS release.

My proposal is to provide some kind of versioning mechanism for sandbox compliance, starting with a new key that sandboxed apps can adopt to ensure that sandbox will not be imposed on them unless they are running a particular OS release or later. This will allow an app to say "I'm sandboxed from 10.7.3. on", for example.

Ideally this versioned sandbox compliance would encourage more apps to go "sandboxed" than otherwise would, and the App Store review teams could consider the version dependency when evaluating an app. Perhaps the version compliance could be considered along the same lines as a temporary exception: you have to cite a radar explaining why you were not able to embrace the sandbox of an earlier version.

As time goes on down the line, it will matter little to Apple whether a particular app embraced the 10.7, 10.7.3, or 10.8 sandbox environment, as long as they ultimately did embrace it. Providing this kind of versioning option will be a way to smooth the user experience for many apps who are only able to adopt sandboxing at a particular version where it becomes palatable to the app, and where a single non-versioned sandboxed key will produce terrible behavior on earlier implementations of sandbox.