Gatekeeper in OS X will trash your apps

Gatekeeper is the new technology coming in OS X Mountain Lion on the Apple Mac that aims to improve security by restricting what you can install. In an earlier blog I expressed my concerns about this new feature and wondered whether in the future we will have to jailbreak our Macs just as iOS users do in order to install the software we want to use.

Gatekeeper is coming in Mountain Lion, but it is actually already here in Lion. It just isn't turned on. You can enable it and see what it is like. Well, I don't like it and the reason is that it will trash your apps.

As you can see from the screen shot, Gatekeeper will tell you to move apps it doesn't recognise to the Trash. Perfectly good apps. Great apps. Apps you will love. Well, you would love if it actually allowed you to run them.

If you are running OS X Lion on your Mac and want to see Gatekeeper in action then go to the Utilities folder and run Terminal. At the command prompt enter:

sudo spctl --enable

Quit Terminal and restart your Mac. Now download an application from the internet and try to run it. Gatekeeper will allow you to run recognised apps, so you need to find an unrecognised one. Searching for freeware for the Mac, I came across MiniUsage. Download it, install it and then try to run it. You will get the same message as displayed above. OS X will tell you to move it to the Trash. The severe warning that it may damage your computer is enough to frighten most users who will quickly do the recommended action and trash this dangerous app.

It's not dangerous. It won't damage your Mac. It's a great app and I think it's really cool. OK, it's a bit of a geek tool, but then I'm a geek and I love it. I recommend you try it.

This is why Gatekeeper sucks. There are lots of great apps out there that aren't recognised by Gatekeeper and there is a danger that they will quickly disappear when OS X Mountain Lion comes out.

It is bad enough that Apple makes billions of dollars and wants to make even more by making all apps only available from the Mac App Store from which it takes a large cut of developers' profits. Worse is that it could also spell the end for independent developers like the author of MiniUsage, which by the way is donation-ware - the author asks you to donate to the American Red Cross. Not only will the author lose out, so will the American Red Cross. Nice one Apple.

If you want to turn off Gatekeeper on OS X Lion then replace the --enable with --disable:


sudo spctl --disable