driverdude, I don’t think you got my point. Apple has developed guidelines for their personnel who review applications submitted for posting on the App Store, as well as each update of App Store applications. They have a right to do that.
Apple’s initial announcements about those guidelines sounded pretty Draconian. They raised, for example, concerns about the future of AppleScript, which is used not only by developers but by many individuals not only to automate actions on data but to enable communications between applications.
There are other issues concerning which applications DEVONtechnologies includes on the App Store, and which it does not. For the present, I’ll just mention scripting capabilities.
Scripting isn’t available in DEVONthink Personal, but it is in DEVONthink Pro and Pro Office. If you look at the scripting section of our user forum you will see that many users make use of AppleScript to enable communications between their DEVONthink database and the data of another application, such as Bookends. See, for example, this recent thread: Linking Bookends entries and pdfs in Devonthink
That example seems innocuous at first. A user can make DEVONthink Pro and Bookends collaborate with each other, by means of a scripting platform developed by Apple. The user benefits by this ability. In principle, it violates the concept of sandboxing. The user is unlikely to want to write a script that would damage the data maintained by one application or the other, but it might be possible to do so.
Users often post scripts for the benefit of others, often with a caution such as “use at your own risk, as I didn’t include error checking”. So here we go; DEVONthink Pro has a very large AppleScript dictionary, enabling users to do many things not directly offered by the application itself, including the ability to “talk” back and forth with other applications, especially those that are also scriptable (and of course to make mistakes, some of which could threaten data). DEVONthink Pro enables users to do things that, if directly included in the application, would get it denied from the App Store.
We believe that DEVONthink Pro would have to be significantly dumbed down to allow its acceptance on the App Store. I don’t know how you use DEVONthink Pro, but are you really sure you would want to use the App Store version? I know that I wouldn’t want that.
I see that you are concerned about the quality of code written by developers, by their measures to protect their source code, and so on. Yes, everyone makes mistakes. There are still a number of bugs in OS X. DEVONthink makes a great many calls to OS X, as it uses Apple’s file system to store files, PDFKit to display PDFs, WebKit to display HTML, Apple’s plain and rich text to display/edit text files. DEVONtechnologies encourages bug reports and when those are verified they are corrected in a maintenance release. I’m not aware of any that have been serious security issues. Personally, I have the highest regard for the code written by our principal developer, Christian Grunenberg. He’s one of the best. I’ve been a heavy user of DEVONthink since its introduction in 2002, and it works for me.
In sum, if you think that inclusion on the App Store is the best criterion for selection of all applications, I must politely disagree.
Would we like to see Apple’s App Store review procedures enable us to put DEVONthink Pro and Pro Office on the App Store? Yes, but only if they don’t have to be dumbed down in functionality.