Comment by Wowfunhappy
2 months ago
Any user who does not like Gatekeeper can turn it off on their machine in ten seconds by running this in a Terminal:
sudo spctl —-master-disable
People will say, no, that’s too big a hammer, it’s not safe… but then, like, what do you actually want? Either you keep Gatekeeper because you like the friction it introduces, or you don’t like that friction and you should go turn it off. Pick one, you obviously can’t have both!
Of course, you as the developer can’t make this choice for your users… but isn’t that as it should be? The user decides what code is allowed to run on their machines. And the default setting is restrictive because anyone who knows what they’re doing can easily change it.
P.S. Meanwhile, on iOS there’s no way to install unsigned software at all, and on Android (starting soon) the process takes 24 hours instead of ten seconds. That is actually ridiculous because it’s taking away user choice.
P.P.S. To be clear, modern macOS has plenty of other restrictions which can’t really be turned off and which I find super annoying. Gatekeeper just isn’t one of them.
Edit: I’ve just learned that as of Sequoia, you have to also tick a box in Settings after running the Terminal command. So maybe it takes 30 seconds instead of ten seconds. That’s mildly more annoying, but still doesn’t really seem like a big deal to me.
> what do you actually want?
Give me the ability to choose what I trust. “You can either trust Apple and nobody else, even yourself, or you can trust literally everybody” is obviously not a good faith implementation of this. Apple excels at steering the narrative with false conflation and false dichotomy, I’d also remind you of the came-and-went secure boot debate, which Apple successfully steered into Apple owns the encryption keys vs no encryption, and people just kind of forgot to ask, wait, why can’t I have the keys to my device?
Exactly, Apple is making this a black and white choice on purpose. To make it unattractive to bypass them, and introduce legitimate security concerns if you do so. But those don't have to exist if the options were more fine-grained.
The same with SIP (system integrity protection). You can turn it off but then you have to turn it all off.
There's no way to keep secure boot but bless your own changes and sign them in some way, that you have approved. You know, as the owner and admin of your own computer. It's either leave it to Apple or be completely on your own. And to make the choice even more uncomfortable they also disable some features like running iOS apps.
I think you should read up on how secure boot works with macOS and alternate operating systems before speaking this negatively about the implementation. Apple is already giving you exactly what you’re asking for.
It’s not really even that different than a PC motherboard that gives you “Windows UEFI” and “enroll my own keys” as options.
https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/security/
As far as code signing, again, what do you want Apple to do here? They already gave you a master switch to turn it off. You are free to turn it off then implement your own third party code signing solution if you’d rather choose who you trust. It’s not Apple’s fault if nobody else decided to make their own trust repositories and the only alternative on the market is to have no safeguard at all.
And let’s not forget who Apple markets their computers to. These features aren’t for you and me, they’re for the non-technical customers who will absolutely get pwned by unsigned code. Go to the MacBook Neo marketing page and try to find a single image of someone writing code or even being gainfully employed.
This is that false dichotomy.
You can turn off all protection, as you point out. So who Apple markets Neo's to isn't a factor.
> Apple’s fault if nobody else decided to make their own trust repositories and the only alternative on the market is to have no safeguard at all.
Does Apple provide a means for enabling third party trust systems, without disabling Apple's protections in general? If not, that is a serious problem of Apple's choosing. Nobody (to a first order approximation) want's to dispense with Apple's protection, or re-implement it, but to be able to carve out exceptions for specific classes of software.
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> I’d also remind you of the came-and-went secure boot debate, which Apple successfully steered into Apple owns the encryption keys vs no encryption, and people just kind of forgot to ask, wait, why can’t I have the keys to my device?
The Asahi Linux folks are building their own SecureBoot chain[1].
I guess you could argue they shouldn't have to do that. But it feels reasonable to me that that the party you're trusting should be the one who builds the trust chain.
1: https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/open-os-interop/#m1n1
I don’t disagree with your post but I’m still unclear on how you envision gatekeeper should work.
You want the ability to choose a different “authorities” that verify and sign binaries? That makes sense to me but is unlikely to relieve any of the issues in the post.
Also what do you mean by “even yourself?” What would that option look like?
Right next to where Apple's root CA is, you add your own.
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You could like, just trust a single binary. Have a button right there in the popup that already shows up.
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I want the ability to run any linux distro on my macbook, like I can with any other computer that is not a macbook.
Macs have enough open firmware to allow you to run any OS that you want. Linux Asahi only supports a certain subset of modern Mac HW, if you want to speed up development you should probably contribute to that project.
The Asahi team does upstream their work, so eventually this will be possible with the M1 Macs. But it's an uphill battle because it's a reverse engineering effort on undocumented hardware that has a different separation of duties between firmware, hardware, and operating system than other systems that Linux already supports. It's a wonderful project, but if you want timely Linux support, you have to buy from a vendor whose chipset makers more proactively cooperate with Linux kernel developers.
It would be wonderful if Apple shipped the Asahi team a bunch of docs hardware, and commissioned them to complete+productionize support for every single Apple Silicon Mac released up until now plus the upcoming gen. If they did that, maybe in one year support would be great and in two or three years, you coule use any distro you liked and get full support.
But that's not really who Apple is or how they position themselves in the market afaict. This wish is sadly barking up the wrong tree.
Easy, don't buy Apple, I don't.
Apple computers that I use are project assignments.
Rather than just having the options "Done" and "Move to Bin", give me an option to actually run it without having to manually go into System Settings each and every time without disabling security features?
The added friction feels more like a way to force developers to pay Apple an annual fee for distributing rather than for my safety. Not saying it doesn't help with safety, just that it's more weighed to the former.
I also have things I want to change in gatekeeper, but that feature is not one of them. Just gut feeling but I would say 110% of all users, would just click ”start” on every unsigned app if it was that easy.
Bingo. I know I would.
I am the king of knowing immediately when I have fucked up.
“Undo” has made us far too comfortable with mistakes.
they could do it like they do it for accessibility settings. you have to opt in for an app and you need to know damn well if it is a reputable app before giving those controls over. there's enough friction in that that it is not done by many apps but not hard enough that it's a huge ask to whitelist the app.
So have a buried option that power users can flip one time to add an allow button to opening untrusted apps.
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> give me an option to actually run it without having to manually go into System Settings each and every time without disabling security features?
People reflexively hit yes to these things.
Just make it a semi-hidden multistep option like browsers when you visit a site with a bad cert, just annoying to leave what you are doing go to system settings and fiddle.
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At what point does optimizing the experience for those who refuse to read or think stop making sense?
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> without disabling security features?
With Gatekeeper turned off, you’ll still get a warning on first launch which you can easily click through. (Unless Apple changed something in the last few versions—let me know if that’s the case—but it would be out of character for them to remove a warning...)
The “security feature” you don’t want to disable is precisely the thing you are complaining about, so I don’t understand why you’d keep it around.
> The added friction feels more like a way to force developers to pay Apple an annual fee for distributing rather than for my safety.
I don’t imagine Apple makes a substantial amount of money from $99/year developer subscriptions. The App Store is another story of course.
> I don’t imagine Apple makes a substantial amount of money from $99/year developer subscriptions. The App Store is another story of course.
It has a chilling effect on releasing free apps.
It's going to be an interesting time soon, when even your dog will have a vibecoded app he'll want you to use.
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> substantial amount of money from $99/year developer subscriptions
You actually do get some value, you can file two DTS tickets [1] a year which are (supposedly) looked at by a real apple engineer. Assuming they haven't outsourced it, that feels worth about $100 considering how badly documented their APIs are.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/support/technical/
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Posit it saves a decent number of folks who are unable to follow the scammer’s necessary instructions:
“Press command space, no no hold down the command key - gosh it’s in the bottom left - okay, now type “privacy”, now scroll, no you scrolled too far …”
Lol I would love to see a scammer try to get my mom or dad to do anything other than press the power button. He's in for a world of hurt.
The other day my mom got a text saying she had a $399 charge on Apple, and to call the number if it wasn't her. So she called, because of course, why wouldn't you? Apparently the scammer finally got frustrated and hung up on her because she couldn't understand his accent.
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I remember you used to be able to right-click and then press open instead of double-clicking which would bypass gatekeeper just for that run. Not sure if it still exists though, I don't have any unsigned apps handy to test.
They removed it
adding a button means osascript driven malware could approve itself and you might not even see it happen
Hmm, I don't think that's true. How is the osascript running without getting past Gatekeeper itself? Also, how is it using UI control without TCC approval?
>give me an option to actually run it without having to manually go into System Settings
I've run several PiHoles for several years, primarily on latest versions (up to v5; current is v6.4.x) – recently updating to v6 has been extremely frustrating [0], e.g: realizing that even when you tell the pi's/en0 ("internet") interface to use a specific DNS server (in GUI/network settings), it still uses the DNS-server recommended by your local DHCP server [1].
[0] I am aware that this is a joint-issue between RaspbianOS and Pi-Hole teams
[1] which requires TWO sudo nmcli which newbs have no business configuring – what happened to -simple- ?
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If you ever want to consider how crazy DNS-capture is getting, realize that Firefox/&c are all dark-patterning the abilities to turn off "secure"-DNS. The latest Raspian/Pi-Hole defaults are terrifying... [2]
[2] another example: why doesn't v6 enable HTTPS localhost web-access, by default (like all previous versions?!)? Do the developers really expect us commoners to know how to generate localhost certificates – this is obviously behavior due to how the pihole useraccount behaves differently then the previously-root-blessed v5-behavior
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Thankfully, I've kept a local copy of my favorite distro of Pihole v5, and it is readily-cloneable.
When I attempted to pass a --version tag during a freshinstall (requesting v5 from remote installer), it went ahead and installed latest v6 (so why even.?!).
> what do you actually want?
I want to be able to right-click on an app and choose "Open" to run the program with an authentication dialog. You used to be able to do this, but Apple removed it in favor of an incredibly annoying process of having to go into System Settings every time.
...I guess I just don't understand why this makes such a big difference to you versus having Gatekeeper off? You're asking for a very specific flow, where you can run anything but only if you right click the app instead of double clicking the app.
I do not think this is the right way. The right way would be for Apple to allow for a free Developer ID for distribution if the app is free and has no in-app purchases.
This provides IMO all-around goodwill while still adhering to good release practices.
Or maybe lower the price to $1.
_Some_ barrier of entry I think is needed (and intended) to stop everyone and their mother from creating developer accounts.
I don’t think Apple needs or cares about the $99
> People will say, no, that’s too big a hammer, it’s not safe… but then, like, what do you actually want? Either you keep Gatekeeper because you like the friction it introduces, or you don’t like that friction and you should go turn it off. Pick one, you obviously can’t have both!
Refusing to let you open an app isn't friction, it's complete obstruction. How about warning you and letting you run it this one time or allow it to run normally from there on?
You can still open unsigned apps with Gatekeeper on, you have to go into Settings to whitelist it. I find this extremely annoying, but as I said, that's the point of Gatekeeper, if you don't like it then turn Gatekeeper off.
If you want to take the risk and install some unsigned software on your machine, go ahead, but don't blame Apple, who is gatekeeping for the entire ecosystem for making the decision to keep the restrictions in place so that the other 2.5 billion users don't fall victims to malware defenselessly. Also, as a rule of thumb in cybersecurity, never underestimate human flaws or overestimate your ability to overcome them. Even the most brilliant experts cannot possibly know everything and make zero mistakes, let alone "the users" you are talking about. It is pure illusion that "the users" know exactly what's running on their machine under the hood. We should be thankful that Apple is willing to hold the lines and go this far to tighten security up when nobody forces them to. It is probably one of the best thing coming out of Jobs' relentless push for privacy and security on the iPhone.
> what do you actually want?
To make gatekeeper happy without paying a large amount of money and own Apple hardware (same thing).
I just wish Homebrew was not planning to remove packages because of this.
> $ brew doctor
> Warning: Some installed casks are deprecated or disabled. You should find replacements for the following casks:
> alacritty
> librecad
Is there workaround? Probably. But macos lost benefit of OS X's "it just works". Time to move elsewhere I guess.
Yeah, I think this is a terrible decision on Homebrew's part. Lots of people said that to the Homebrew maintainers and they refused to budge.
10 seconds or 30 seconds, it's just too much friction to ask end users to do. I actually develop on a Mac, but I've written off Apple as a target system for hobby/open source projects. Between quarantine, code signing, and notarizing (which requires $99 a year), it's just not worth it. Good for Apple users if they like this shit--I'm just not going to bother with distributing to the platform anymore.
macOS is slowly getting like Windows, where, on a fresh install you have to go through and turn off all sorts of unwanted software just to have a sane environment where you, the user, are actually controlling your computer.
Are there any groups of open-source developers who have gotten together to share a group account and the $100 cost per year? Forming an informal-ish organization, with just enough formality to be a legal organization in whatever jurisdiction they live in, so that they're legit enough to satisfy Apple's requirements? Not trying to hide anything, just trying to pool resources in an open and above-board way.
Or would Apple categorically reject an application like that?
I don't develop on Macs myself so I wouldn't know where to start looking, but I can't help but wonder if that would be a viable answer for many people who don't want to pay $100/year to give software away for free. Get twenty people together and $5/year doesn't feel like too much.
I pay Apple $100 a year and I'd be happy to sign anyone's open source project provided it looks broadly reasonable.
Isn't code signing even harder/more expensive on Windows?
The extended validation code signing certificate you need to avoid having your installer blocked by Windows SmartScreen is quite a bit more expensive.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48946680/how-to-avoid-th...
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For Open Source Software, you can use SignPath for free: https://signpath.org
That's what we did for DB Browser for SQLite (sqlitebrowser.org), and it works well: https://sqlitebrowser.org/blog/signing-windows-executables-o...
SignPath also does stuff for commercial places too (https://signpath.io), but I have no idea of the pricing.
Signing on Windows is a pain in the arse and gets more expensive every year. I dread having to renew my certificate. Also they keep reducing the maximum certificate length, so you can't just do it once every 5 years, like you used to be able to.
I can't remember how difficult it was to set up my initial Apple developer account (trauma related memory loss, perhaps) but it is dead simple to renew. Just pay the $99. I did it yesterday. Took about a minute.
Well, you can still run unsigned software (by clicking through to a bit of a hidden option in the popup dialog), and they also even remove that through "reputation" if enough people approve said binary (exact bitwise binary, so every new version released will go through the same issue).
Yes, Windows is terrible, too. The entire desktop software world has lost its collective mind and the platforms are turning themselves into locked down game consoles just so that grandma doesn't accidentally install malware.
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It's expensive. I don't agree that it's harder, in the sense of TFA's technical struggles getting it to work. If you've got the money for the certificate, passing OV and signing the binary is easy. The difficulty of signing isn't the big problem we face on Windows. The main issue is that signing barely does anything: you still get hit with SmartScreen blocks even though it's signed. The return on your investment of time and money is just showing your name as the publisher in the SmartScreen prompt. The only way to avoid the SmartScreen prompt is by building reputation with lots of installs.
I still prefer this over having a Microsoft developer account and publishing in the store--I hate having to put my software through arbitrary store review processes--but it's not a good situation. SmartScreen is just about the worst thing ever to happen to indie developers on Windows. We're right there in the thick of it with macOS developers: different details, same struggle. Both of our corporate overlords want you to distribute software in their store, and you get the sense that they would end self-distribution entirely if they thought they could get away with it.
I note that TFA's author edited the post after-the-fact, changing the line about Windows. It originally claimed that Windows worked fine and they got "just an EXE" and that was that. I assume they finally tried it for real on a civilian computer and saw the SmartScreen block.
> what do you actually want?
A UI option would make sense. That is what most users are comfortable with.
> Any user who does not like Gatekeeper can turn it off on their machine in ten seconds by running this in a Terminal
For now. Enjoy it while it lasts.
> The user decides what code is allowed to run on their machines.
Apparently Apple disagrees, Apple decides. Typical users aren’t going to find their hidden 5 step process to enable non-blessed apps and obviously they know that. Gatekeeper is an appropriate name considering the user themselves are on the outside of the gate. It’s the culimination of everything Stallman and the FSF warned everyone about for decades. By its logic we should install police officers in our living rooms for safety.
> Pick one, you obviously can’t have both!
Obviously you can, and you actually could earlier where you could click a bypass button for a specific app without any of this terminal nonsense
> turn it off on their machine in ten seconds
You forgot to add the time to learn that it's possible and to find the right command
> So maybe it takes 30 seconds instead of ten seconds. That’s mildly more annoying, but still doesn’t really seem like a big deal to me.
That's because you keep ignoring the actual effort/cost even after you've learned your first simplistic estimate was a mistake
> but then, like, what do you actually want?
As an author of some homebrewed Go software in the past and trying to distribute in all 3 big OSes, I completely understand the blog post author's points. The problem is not Gatekeeper per see, it is just the combination of things that makes everything infuriating:
- I could justify going for the whole "Apple Developer Program" even with all the bullshit things you need to do to get certified if this was a one time payment like in Google Play Store. But it is yearly. Like the author, I would probably get 0 (or close to 0) dollars in recurrent revenue for those apps, I could justify a one time payment but a yearly one is ridiculous, it is not like Apple needs this money to be profitable (they probably get a much higher margins on selling things on Apple Store)
- Gatekeeper UX is infuriating. The equivalent on Windows (SmartScreen, as the author also cited) is still basically the same as Gatekeeper as far I understand (e.g., you need to have a valid certificate on your app or SmartScreen will deny the app execution until you clear the safety bit). But SmartScreen, different from Gatekeeper, has an actual good UX, as the error messages are clear and actionable (and also don't require a command line command to bypass)
- The author was still in a more "happy path" than me since their app seems to be a CLI only app. In this case just removing the quarantine bit with `xattr` works fine. In my case I was trying to distribute a desktop app, and I needed some special permissions to show notifications. This means I need to package my app in a proper `.app` bundle, include the required XML requesting the permissions and I am now required to sign the app. And since I am required to sign my app, I either pay the yearly payment fee to Apple to get a certificate to sign my app or I ask the users to resign the app with a self-signed certificate before launching
So really, I don't want that much actually. I can definitely handle all bullshit Apple wants, but I want at least a cheaper way to develop apps in their ecossystem. Maybe a new basic certification program that you have a one time fee and you can sign your apps but not notarize them. That way Gatekeeper would still complain, but at least my app would work without resign.
Or limit notarization to X amount of users (non-stabled notarized apps talks with Apple servers during the app first run, so they could just limit the amount of allowed tickets to X amount of users). If my app ever pass X amount of users, I will gladly pay the Apple tax, but 99USD/year for something that I will never see it back is too much.
Edit: BTW, I know, maybe 99USD/year doesn't seem too much for some. But Apple also doesn't do any regional pricing as far I know, and 99USD/year is crazy expensive in the country where I come from for example.
Edit 2: I am sure things are better nowadays with Claude/ChatGPT, but also trying to understand how to do the correct thing for your app is very difficult, especially if you're not using Xcode, since Apple assumes you're using it so all documentation refers to Xcode.
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This is not the developer choosing what software can run on their computer, this is Apple choosing for you and then you having to go disable protections (with what implications?) to then be able to choose what software you run.
This has more to do with putting up a scary dialog for normies than it does protecting anyone. A non-technical user isn't going to go bypass this in the terminal, they're going to run back to the App Store where Apple can collect that sweet 30% and analytics.