On Mac it's significantly more locked down and judging from recent comments by Tim Cook they still aren't happy with it. Presumably they see iOS as the gold sta

On Mac it's significantly more locked down and judging from recent comments by Tim Cook they still aren't happy with it. Presumably they see iOS as the gold standard internally and would love to make OS X work the same way, but can't without breaking too many apps. The recent stance taken by the judge on Epic v Apple re: Gatekeeper will certainly push them further in the lockdown direction :( On OS X Intel the operating system will basically refuse to run unsigned code unless you know an ever-shifting series of magic undocumented cheat codes. You have to do weird things like hold down certain keys then use the right click context menu to open unsigned apps, you need magic CLI commands to disable notarization checking, you have to go into the system preferences window to enable drivers to be approved and then reboot etc. The UX is atrocious and gets worse all the time - it's barely acceptable even for developers. That's for usermode. Kernel mode drivers are dead now, more or less. On OS X ARM unsigned code will not run. Period, end of story. The magic cheat codes are gone. All code must be notarized, which is a server-side approval process of the type Microsoft only use for kernel drivers. There are a few silver linings to all this. One is that getting a cert isn't actually that hard. You need a credit card, basically. It's not like getting an EV cert where you need a company and for a CA to verify the corporate identity. Likewise their "notarization" process is not a manual app store like review, it's fully automated and is mostly just checking that the app is well structured and properly signed. It probably does other things like checking you aren't using internal APIs, and they presumably archive all the binaries they notarize so they can go back in time to investigate malware and so on. But it's not being used for political or commercial purposes, at this time.