The VS Code Flatpak is useless

I’ve been learning Mac app development for fun and one interesting part to me is that apps by default can only read and write files inside a “app sandbox” in ~/Library/Containers/com.your.app.Name

But the process to request access to files is totally seamless to the user. If you present an “open” or “save” dialog, they can pick any file or directory and the system returns a URL object with a capability attached that allows R/W access to that URL. Then you need to save the URL+Capability in app storage if you want to access the file or directory again without prompting.

The system will also pop up authorization dialogs if you use syscalls to look around at the desktop, etc saying “AppName is requesting access to the desktop” etc. For those grants to well-known paths I don’t think you need to explicitly save a capability; the “App Sandbox” is seamlessly extended.

I haven’t needed to interact much with $PATH and subprocesses but it seems like you can spawn subprocesses from $PATH, and they inherit the app container permissions.

I looked at Flatpak and it seems like they do a similar thing with file open dialogs seamlessly granting access, but maybe totally ban executing process paths outside the flatpak container? Or maybe flatpak always runs in a chroot which makes it awkward to make subprocess spawns work because the subprocess would have unexpected stuff where it expects to find its support files?

I don’t think VS Code is a sandbox app on Mac either but I wonder if it’s more workable than Flatpak