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This is what I scrolled all the way down this thread for - to see if anyone thinks this is a good design/security decision on Apples part. I’m trying to underst

This is what I scrolled all the way down this thread for - to see if anyone thinks this is a good design/security decision on Apples part. I’m trying to understand what the reasoning is for this particular decision and if it actually makes the OS more secure in any meaningful way? Or does it actually- just degrade performance with very limited benefits? Are there any real benefits to this VS current security design in popular Desktop Linux distros at this point?

HappyDreamer 6y ago
Couldn't this have been a business decision? Not about security? (just what they say?) To make non-App-store apps annoyingly unusable, so the App store will sell more apps, instead of people downloading in other ways? Just like Apple cripples the Safari browser and PWA apps. Long term, maybe Apple wants to be able to remote-forbid apps if Apple is developing their own competing app? Whilst most developers working at Apple understands this, and don't like it? Maybe the developers even feel happy about people here at HN being disappointed, and think that "now the business people here at Apple notice that this causes disappointment" ?
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I don't think the people at Apple are actively trying to make non-App Store apps unusable because they want to make more money from the App Store or anything. It's just that they want code to pass through them, and as a by product making code that has been vetted less or does things that could potentially be abused is made more annoying to run. Such a change is divisive, as you may have guessed.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    That vetting will come at the cost of 30% of money paid for your software and any money earned within the software.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- fluffything 6y ago
  Most of the apps that sell well originate from a developer solving a need they had, on the system they were using. If this drives developers from OSX to other OSes, chances are they will develop apps for those OSes first. Apple is too big to fail at this point, but driving developers away from your platform isn't a very clever strategy. You never know when you are going to hit a tipping point, and after you notice and people stop using macosx for development its already too late. It took me ~150 hours to migrate to Linux, but my user and developer experience on Linux is much better than on MacOSX (emacs daemon "just works"!!!), so after all that work I wouldn't consider switching to OSX in the next 5 years at least. I had a Macbook air 2012, and because Apple still hasn't released a laptop that isn't a downgrade from that in some sense (keyboard, magsafe, ...) I've went with a think pad instead. Tiny details, like having a webcam that doesn't suck now prevent me from going back to OSX.
saagarjha 6y ago
It checks that executables have been notarized by Apple? I can't say I really think notarization is great, but I think it's clear from their perspective how it would be beneficial?
- drvdevd 6y ago
  Sure. But as Brendan Gregg pointed out in his comment - doing this at the level of exec() on a UNIX-like OS is ... a questionable technical choice to say the least. What’s the Linux equivalent of “notarization”? I’m not sure. Of course there’s probably more than one answer to that - let’s just taking signing packages as an example. In theory Apple could put their weight behind vetting some of the popular open source packages perhaps? Or delegate that to the maintainers of those repositories and make them trusted? Like homebrew, for example (maybe a poor example, but you see how I’m trying to compare this with Linux...) This is after all, what actually makes macOS useful to people on the command line 99% of the time, anyway. So anyway, I agree on the surface it seems like this might be beneficial to Apple, but it doesn’t appear to be well considered. They could invest more time in better sandbox and/or container type features that let people define some of their own more granular security boundaries. But they aren’t I guess? What are they doing here?
  - john_alan 6y ago
    Watching the notarization video from WWDC last year they explicitly said it wouldn’t affect command line apps.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      I believe that some of the problems here have actually started affecting command line apps in Catalina.
      - john_alan 6y ago
        Only if you don't specify your terminal as a dev tool

HappyDreamer 6y ago

Couldn't this have been a business decision? Not about security? (just what they say?) To make non-App-store apps annoyingly unusable, so the App store will sell more apps, instead of people downloading in other ways? Just like Apple cripples the Safari browser and PWA apps. Long term, maybe Apple wants to be able to remote-forbid apps if Apple is developing their own competing app? Whilst most developers working at Apple understands this, and don't like it? Maybe the developers even feel happy about people here at HN being disappointed, and think that "now the business people here at Apple notice that this causes disappointment" ?

saagarjha 6y ago
I don't think the people at Apple are actively trying to make non-App Store apps unusable because they want to make more money from the App Store or anything. It's just that they want code to pass through them, and as a by product making code that has been vetted less or does things that could potentially be abused is made more annoying to run. Such a change is divisive, as you may have guessed.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  That vetting will come at the cost of 30% of money paid for your software and any money earned within the software.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
fluffything 6y ago
Most of the apps that sell well originate from a developer solving a need they had, on the system they were using. If this drives developers from OSX to other OSes, chances are they will develop apps for those OSes first. Apple is too big to fail at this point, but driving developers away from your platform isn't a very clever strategy. You never know when you are going to hit a tipping point, and after you notice and people stop using macosx for development its already too late. It took me ~150 hours to migrate to Linux, but my user and developer experience on Linux is much better than on MacOSX (emacs daemon "just works"!!!), so after all that work I wouldn't consider switching to OSX in the next 5 years at least. I had a Macbook air 2012, and because Apple still hasn't released a laptop that isn't a downgrade from that in some sense (keyboard, magsafe, ...) I've went with a think pad instead. Tiny details, like having a webcam that doesn't suck now prevent me from going back to OSX.

saagarjha 6y ago

It checks that executables have been notarized by Apple? I can't say I really think notarization is great, but I think it's clear from their perspective how it would be beneficial?

drvdevd 6y ago
Sure. But as Brendan Gregg pointed out in his comment - doing this at the level of exec() on a UNIX-like OS is ... a questionable technical choice to say the least. What’s the Linux equivalent of “notarization”? I’m not sure. Of course there’s probably more than one answer to that - let’s just taking signing packages as an example. In theory Apple could put their weight behind vetting some of the popular open source packages perhaps? Or delegate that to the maintainers of those repositories and make them trusted? Like homebrew, for example (maybe a poor example, but you see how I’m trying to compare this with Linux...) This is after all, what actually makes macOS useful to people on the command line 99% of the time, anyway. So anyway, I agree on the surface it seems like this might be beneficial to Apple, but it doesn’t appear to be well considered. They could invest more time in better sandbox and/or container type features that let people define some of their own more granular security boundaries. But they aren’t I guess? What are they doing here?
- john_alan 6y ago
  Watching the notarization video from WWDC last year they explicitly said it wouldn’t affect command line apps.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    I believe that some of the problems here have actually started affecting command line apps in Catalina.
    - john_alan 6y ago
      Only if you don't specify your terminal as a dev tool