On: The Mac App Store’s future of irrelevance

[coderdude]

>Besides, if something has passed app store verification then surely Apple are happy that it is not malware?

I'm not so sure. What is their process for verifying that an app is not or does not contain malware? If it's simply to run the software and see what it does then they can really only verify that apps aren't immediately misbehaving. What if the app is set to do its misdeeds after the 100th time it is run, or after being installed for a month? There is really only so much a reviewer can do in order to push an app out within a reasonable time frame.

Sandboxing in a way is just as much protection from liability for Apple as it is protection from malware for its users.

[tanepiper → coderdude]

I'm pretty sure Apple has some form on introspection they run on binaries - that's how they find out who is using non-public APIs for example.

[jiggy2011 → coderdude]

I assume they do some form of reverse engineering on analysis on the binary also.