Yup. In the Mac OS security settings window, for "Allow apps downloaded from:", you can only choose "App Store" or "App Store and identified developers". The workflow is now:
1. Try to open the application. Get a window that says "APPLICATION can’t be opened because it is from an unidentified developer.", and below that, in a smaller and non-bold font, "Your security preferences allow installation of only apps from the App Store and identified developers." The window only has an "OK" button. (There is also a small "?" button in the lower left, which is present in lots of notification windows and presumably points to a generic help page.)
2. Open Security & Privacy in System Preferences. There is now, magically, a line in it saying "APPLICATION was blocked from opening because it is not from an identified developer", and an "Open Anyway" button.
I only discovered that workaround by accident. Before that, I believed that Mac OS had completely removed the option to run such applications. (As I recall, back when "Allow apps downloaded from: Anywhere" existed, if you did choose it, it would show some kind of warning and also revert itself after 30 days; it seemed obvious they wanted to remove the option entirely.)
I'm tempted to bring out the word "gaslighting" to describe this. Because that line about "Your security preferences allow ..." is in a context where it should be an explanation of why "APPLICATION can't be opened because it is from an unidentified developer", yet your security preferences about apps have only two choices and neither one would permit opening the application; and because a System Preferences pane now shows different options depending on what unrelated user applications you've opened recently, which is insane.
... Turns out there is a second, faster workaround. Right-click (or control-click) on the application, and click "Open". Then, instead of getting the liar window with only the "OK" button, you get a window that has an "Open Anyway" button. This workaround is, in fact, documented in the generic help page that the liar window's "?" button points to. This is also insane because it makes "Open" in its different forms (double-click, command-O, command-line "open", and the right-click "Open" option) no longer a single, uniform operation.
For the sake of argument, is there a limit to the number or kind of extra steps before you'd call it unusable? If "downloading VirtualBox and running a VM of an earlier MacOS version" became necessary at some point, would that be over the line?
I suspect there are corporate users who have policies that forbid running non-notarized software. That probably shouldn't apply to a game like Fortnite—most companies wouldn't consider it important, or perhaps even a positive, for their employees to be able to run Fortnite on their company laptops—but it would apply to other apps.
> For the sake of argument, is there a limit to the number or kind of extra steps before you'd call it unusable?
Surely this comes down to what reasonable expectations are held by the customer. There are microcontrollers you can buy that require a soldering iron and USB breakout board in order to run your own software on them. I think that's pretty reasonable, but it would be a ridiculous requirement for a desktop PC purchased at Best Buy.
The question becomes: what are the reasonable expectations for installing third-party software on an iPhone. Personally, I think the overwhelming majority of iPhone owners expect and even highly value the fact that Apple (supposedly [0]) vets all third-party software on the iPhone, and it's generally more difficult to accidentally install malware or break your device than it is on other computing platforms.
[0] As I've said before, I think Apple actually needs to be more restrictive, because a lot of useless/broken/scammy stuff makes it into the App Store.
Well, this subthread is about running non-notarized software on Macs. And my expectations on that, which I will proclaim to be reasonable, come from using Macs since before Apple notarization existed: i.e. I could run whatever I damn well wanted.
Apple changed behavior on that at least twice. (I skipped several Mac OS versions, so I may have missed intermediate changes.) First, it switched to requiring you to choose, in security preferences, an option to allow apps from anywhere—which, I think, would show a scary warning, and would also revert itself to the default after 30 days. Later, it switched to removing that "Anywhere" option, and instead shows a misleading "you can't open this because of your preferences" error, and provides a couple of insane hidden workarounds. I consider the first change reasonable, if unnecessarily annoying; I consider the second change unreasonable.
It's technically possible yes, but Epic's position is much much worse than that. They won't be able to legally build any app because the SDK is proprietary and only available to registered developers.
https://it.nmu.edu/docs/allowing-third-party-applications-in...
Amazingly it then lets me run all the open source I want that I download from the internet but am too lazy to build myself.