And sandboxing is completely orthogonal to the fine-grained revocation that notarization allows for. A sandboxed app could still be malicious: say, a weather app that asks for access to your Contacts ostensibly to show weather at your friends' location, but also uploads all the Contacts info to a malicious tracking service. With notarization, this app could have its notarization revoked once it's discovered.
Apple is rejecting anything by developers that don't pay them $100 a year, stifling competition in the process.
Apple has a history of conveniently rejecting apps if the rejection is in their financial interest[1].
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/31/18647249/wwdc-apple-paren...
I think by "user" it was meant the average user which by my estimation is not super technical and mostly sticks to larger apps anyways. Are smaller developers being held to a stricter standard though than larger developers on notarization?
I don't. As a user, I don't need Apple arbitrarily allowing big players' apps through their approval process while they hold smaller developers to a stricter standard. That will stifle innovation.
If security is the touted excuse, macOS already has sandboxd[1] which can be used with arbitrary apps that aren't in the App Store.
Linux solved the security problem with Snaps, Flatpaks and AppImages, which all use various layers of containers, kernel namespaces and isolation to provide a sandboxed environment for apps.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Se...