Nik Rawlinson
Let’s look at the positives, of which there are two: security and variety. You know when you install an app on your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad that the chances of it going rogue are slim. Very slim. Apple’s rigorous and sometimes ponderous reviews process might not always be seen as fair – especially by those whose carefully crafted work has been rejected – but you know that it has been tested, reviewed and passed as safe. That feels good, doesn’t it?
Likewise, how many of the apps you use every day, for everything from navigation and communication to photo editing and picture posting, would you ever have found if you had to rely on trawling the web yourself? Having one central stop-off from which you can download any and all apps compatible with a non-jailbroken iDevice saves us all a lot of time, and helps deliver a richer iExperience in our pockets.
Rather worryingly, however, both of these aspects could be bad news for the Mac.
Steve Jobs went to great lengths to reassure us that the Mac App Store would be just one option for buying software to run on the Mac, and I’m sure he’s telling the truth. That doesn’t mean I can’t envisage a very different future to the present reality, though.
Apple has long been championing code signing, a process that lets end users verify the application they’re about to install and check that it hasn’t been corrupted, changed or otherwise tampered with since it was first created. A Mac App Store would be the ideal way to do this. Once Apple has passed an application, it can stamp it as approved and digitally sign it as free from bugs. I know that would give me great peace of mind, and perhaps it would you, too.
What I don’t want, though, is a future in which the Mac will only run code that has been signed by the Mac App Store approvals team. With broadband speeds climbing ever higher the idea of downloading a 4GB Final Cut Pro or Creative Suite installer won’t be quite so ludicrous as it seems right now, and when that happens, there will be no reason not to turn to the Mac App Store as your only point of purchase.
So, why shouldn’t the Mac be locked down just like an iPhone, at which point you have to ask yourself, would you jailbreak your MacBook just to run Flash, Silverlight, Java or any other technology Apple would rather you didn’t touch?
