[klodolph]

I'm not sure I quite understand your complaint about the Mac's App Store. I want to have free reign on my workstation, but part of that is I want to be able to limit the amount of access that programs have. The big difference with the App Store, from my perspective, is that I know that the applications are sandboxed, signed, and someone out there can revoke the code signing certificate.

This is basically what I want, most of the time, and it's hard to achieve it outside the App Store.

[saagarjha]

Fun fact: not all apps on the App Store are sandboxed. Some older apps, that were released before sandboxing was a requirement, were "grandfathered" in.

[walterbell]

Any examples?

[marmshallow]

Things that run on your mac are not required to go through the App Store. I think what the OP means is that the adoption rate has been lower than what they wanted/expected.

[_bxg1]

It briefly looked like they would move towards requiring software to come from the App Store. They did add the warning you see the first time you open any application that you downloaded from the internet, which is still there. That alone isn't problematic, but if they'd truly locked down macOS they would have alienated all of the programmers who use Macs. Thankfully, they seem to have dropped that idea.