Apple warns developers about changes to Gatekeeper

by jc / August 6, 2014 1:42 PM EDT

After the company released the OS X Yosemite update, today the company surprises us with an important announcement to its developers.

And through this notice, Apple warns developers that with the release of OS X Mavericks 10.9.5, the way OS X recognizes signed applications will change.

This is undoubtedly a feature we mentioned with the recent Yosemite Preview 5 update . However, it now appears that changes have been made—important changes that will be visible in future OS X versions.

And in accordance with what was specified in the company's statement. The purpose of this technical note is to provide developers with a deeper understanding of the new code signing feature, established as a new specification in the OS X Developer Preview 5 update.

How and when will this function be executable?

Users will receive a Gatekeeper warning. This warning will notify developers that they need Apple's digital signature, a digital identity signature that must be assigned to each of their programs for them to be compatible and reliable with the OS X system .

It's important to note that code signing in macOS is an integral part of the development process. In short, code signing is a technology that allows you to validate the mechanisms that will interpret your code.

Considerations included in Gatekeeper:

Signed code should only be placed in directories where the system expects to find signed code.
Resources should not be located in directories where the system expects to find signed code.
The Resource Rules indicator and ResourceRules.plist are not compatible.

Finally, and according to Apple, developers can only verify the correct functioning of their applications through Gatekeeper in OS X Mavericks 10.9.5 and OS X Yosemite 10.10 Developer Preview 5 or later.

Here are more details: Gatekeeper for Developers