In an amazing short period of time after the opening of the new Mac App Store, news spread that some paid applications were able to bypass the copy protection by simply copying the receipt files from a free program into the resources. This was A) not surprising and B) inevitable.
Apple’s goal here was to provide a solid, secure, and hacker-free environment to protect developers from being robbed out of their own store. This was attempted and failed with iOS on the iPhone and iPod Touch, where it is a back and forth battle of hackers “jail breaking” their devices to run pirated applications. With OSX, the bar was already set low because there is no inherent chain-of-trust for a secured environment. The whole concept of having an App Store on OSX is, itself, problematic.
What this is leading to in the 6th “minor” update of the 6th “major” revision of the operating system, is an attempt to dumb-down the Mac experience to that of the iOS devices. This is very problematic for people who actually use their laptops to work rather than run occasional programs like a web browser and games. The 7th “major” revision of the operating system that is due out later this year, will represent a further migration of the Graphical User Interface towards an integration of what I would call a ‘single focus’ visual environment. For those of us who run multitudes of applications and constantly flipping back and forth between windows, tabs, and spaces (screens), reverting to something iOS-like is more time consuming for us to get what we want done. The beauty of OSX is its flexibility. Reducing this in any way, only hurts productivity.
Pushing third-party developers to the App Store to give up 30% of their revenue to Apple (plus the $100/yr developer certificate tax), is interesting, considering you don’t even get a reach-around. The only ONLY benefit is that you may get ‘advertised’ on the App Store itself, but will undoubtedly have the app buried and found with creative searching on a user’s part. With the iOS App Store eco-system, there is no way for apps to be put on the devices without it being ‘jail broken’ (which is a violation of the End-User License Agreement, as well as voiding the warranty (supposedly)). On OSX, any one can put any application on it without being forced to go through the App Store.
So one has to wonder what the effect of this really is going to be, especially after it being compromised so quickly on some level. It’s only a matter of time before it is “jail broken” as well, and the battle for security on OSX matches the iOS one. It’s much more difficult considering that on OSX, you can just compile a new kernel, or wait for Hackint0sh to crack it.
I think this would have been better on Apple’s part to have done this with 10.7 and built a better security model right off the bat with the new major version of OSX.