Apple’s new notarization process will now begin on 3rd February 2020 after it brought forward the deadline for developers to upload their software to the service.
Notarization was announced back in June as a means of controlling or ‘gatekeeping’ the quality of apps that users can download away from the Mac App Store.
Developers will now have to submit their software for notarization if they want it to run by default on macOS Catalina.
Notarization will protect Mac users by preventing them from interacting with any apps that may be suspicious or malicious.
It does this by checking for a Developer ID certificate, which is granted after developers sign installer packages and disk images and upload their apps.
“Beginning in macOS 10.14.5, all new or updated kernel extensions and all software from developers new to distributing with Developer ID must be notarized in order to run,” Apple noted earlier this year.
“In a future version of macOS, notarization will be required by default for all software.”
The push to make apps safer for users may frustrate developers as they will now have to pay an annual $99 fee, while submissions need to go through Apple’s integrated development environment, Xcode.
However, developers will still be able to distribute apps from their own websites and through other sources.
The new deadline is around five weeks away, which should give developers enough time to get everything up and running.
Those who do not wish to enter the notarization process and attain Apple’s seal of approval may lose out to competitors, so it makes sense to join up before early February.
In other news, Apple’s new iPhone 11 was named as the ‘most-loved’ product in the company’s line-up in a Counterpoint survey, while the previous gen XR has been the top seller globally for every quarter since late 2018.