By just checking the Library/Logs/CrashReporter directory any app can detect if a crash log exists (ie. the app crashed the last time it was run). There is no need to install an Input manager without asking permission from the user.

All of this is stated right in Apple’s developer guide -

http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2004/tn2123.html

“There is currently no way for third party developers to access the reports submitted via CrashReporter. Apple is aware that there is strong demand for such a facility (r. 3356232). Regardless, your users can still submit crash logs to you manually. Moreover, there’s no reason why your application couldn’t look at its crash log on each launch and, if it has changed, ask the user whether they want to submit it to your bug tracking system.”

But it stands to reason there will be more bugs with beta software because it hasn’t gone through as many test cycles as release software. (the beta test is a test cycle). Honest developers (like Sandvox) are up front with that and make sure the users are aware that the software is incomplete.

As to users not knowing what beta means – well that basically means that developers should avoid public betas because the meaning of ‘beta software’ has been diluted by these long term betas (such as Google news). What are you suggesting? Developers should continue the confusion by releasing bug free public betas?

The whole Sandvox/SCR thing seems like a non-issue to me. A few vocal users have taken a mistake on the developer’s part (i.e. not informing the user they were installing SCR) during the public beta of a product and a have magnified the problem out of all proportions. The software was beta, the correct response would have been to inform the developers of the bug and see if/how they plan to address the problem. Sure, if the developers showed no signs of addressing the problem then knock yourself out, blog about it.

“It amazes me that people who are so keen to see their system be as stable as possible would even dream of running beta software.”

This philosophy makes sense to me, but there’s two things to keep in mind.

First, many people might run a beta and understand that the beta itself might have problems, but typically in OS X one app shouldn’t mess with other apps on the system. Yes, it’s possible an app may have a bad enough bug it causes a kernel panic, which might mess up work in other applications, but generally, a beta app might crash itself while other apps remain untouched.

Second, many users don’t really know what “beta” means. Most users aren’t programmers. They see something like Google News, which was in beta for ages until this week, and don’t understand how it’s different from the main Google page. A popular OS X application, Quicksilver, has been around also for ages and used by many people, and has not had an official 1.0 release yet.

Now as I said, I’m not a user of Sandvox, and perhaps there are numerous warnings by the Sandvox for the innocent non-programmer user, so that they would have been well and duly informed of what was at risk. But if that is the case, then certainly there would have been a disclaimer about the installation of the SCR, and from your text it seems that was not the case.

But heck, the “silent dial home” problem is still way worse than this. I run Little Snitch and am always amazed to observe the amount of net traffic applications think they can sneak in without my concern.