[waterhouse]

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.

[baddox]

> 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.

[waterhouse]

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.