Sandboxing

What is “Sandboxing”?

Sandboxing effectively isolates applications from system resources and other apps on your Mac. A sandboxed app can only access resources in its own “sandbox”, a limited area of storage space and memory that contains the only resources the program requires.

If a program needs to access resources or files outside the sandbox, permission must be explicitly granted by the user. This way if errors or security issues occur, there is an extra layer of security preventing other parts of your system from being negatively affected.

How does sandboxing affect the Mac App Store version of Transmit?

Glad you asked! Since Transmit is a file transfer client you’ll need to give it permission to access the files on your Mac that you want to transfer.

Fortunately, we made this process really easy!

The first time you try to view a local folder it will ask you to “Choose” the folder in order to make the contents accessible to Transmit.

Sandbox restriction example

You’ll only need to grant permission for Transmit to access a specific folder once, afterwards Transmit will be able to continue to access that location in the future.

Better yet, granting permission to a folder also gives access to all of the files and folders contained within it. This means that you can easily grant access to a specific folder, external hard drive, or your entire Mac.

Other limitations

Unfortunately, due to sandboxing restrictions both Transmit Disk and the Open In Terminal features are not supported in the Mac App Store version of Transmit.

This article was last updated on November 1, 2018