Keith Smith - My Blog

Mac OS upgrades removes the Allow apps downloaded from anywhere option

Friday, September 27, 2019 - by Keith A. Smith

I decided to do a macOS upgrade, I went to install my apps and noticed that the "Allow apps downloaded from anywhere" was missing. This is important because not all Mac apps are made in Xcode. I believe this feature was removed in macOS Sierra 10.12. I wanted to share a few ways to deal with feature modification: 

  1. You can also selectively allow apps you trust without turning off code signing entirely by doing a sudo spctl --add --label "It's OK, they're with me" /path/to/Good.app
  2. Right click the executable and click open to add it to the approved list without disabling app quarantine
  3. You can also right-click -> open to one-off an approval without changing system settings (Mojave too).  It saves the approval, so just need to do once.
  4. Or you can do 'xattr -dr http://com.apple.quarantine /path/to/app' on a case by case basis, which is potentially more secure.




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