It seemed at the time that Sparkle was part of what made Apple realize this was a legit pain point.

Sherlock, Sparkle, Growl, if you demonstrate a gap in what should be built in, Apple will admit it and fill it in.

Sparkle is great but, for some reason, it never works on the apps that I have that use it. I check the box to automatically update apps in the future and I still get prompted every time there's an update. Even then, I hit the update button and the update fails and then I have to restart the app, try again, and then it succeeds... until the next time there's an update and the process starts all over again. At least with the App Store, all my apps update at night and they're ready to go when I need to use them.

> Well, to be fair the App Store isn’t really a viable solution to these problems to a fair bit of applications.

This used to be true, but every new release adds mechanisms to securely enable more capabilities.

What examples are you thinking of that still can’t be done?

> The sandbox requirement makes a large portion of ‘useful’ apps unable in the App Store.

I don’t think this is true any longer.