What the fuck? This is a really bad technical decision. As written, it sounds like they're planning to reject garbage collection in-general, which would be a ban on most major programming languages. If you assume they only mean garbage collection in Objective C, it's still a head-scratchingly stupid decision. Modifying an app to not use garbage collection is, in many cases, a major project that will introduce a lot of bugs. And the benefit is... very dubious at best.
I'm pretty sure this notification is only meant for apps using the Objective-C garbage collector, as the notification mentions that the GC was deprecated a while ago. I don't think a lot of Mac developers used the Objective-C GC anyway.
Finally Apple mentions the following in it's migration document [0]:
Is GC (Garbage Collection) deprecated on the Mac?
Garbage collection is deprecated in OS X Mountain Lion v10.8, and will
be removed in a future version of OS X. Automatic Reference Counting is
the recommended replacement technology. To aid in migrating existing
applications, the ARC migration tool in Xcode 4.3 and later supports
migration of garbage collected OS X applications to ARC.
Based on the above statement, my guess is that's Xcode has some build-in tools to convert GC code to ARC code, making the transition easier.
Perhaps, but I see no reference to 'Objective-C apps', the current wording of this summary is broad enough to include other languages as well. Do you have additional information that exempts Java, Mono, etc...?
All Mac native apps need an Objective-C Wrapper at minimum to give them an executable entry point (all apps are actually directory structures). You also on the App Store need to vendor in your dependencies. There's no language restriction in play. You can even still use the old GC if you want - just not on their store. The Mac App Store isn't the only game in town.
Er, what? Transitioning from GC to ARC doesn't make code cleaner or reduce bugs. It eliminates GC pauses, which is a slight speedup, but the set of bugs that a garbage-collected program has are roughly a subset of the bugs that a reference-counted program can have.
