As the official release of macOS 15 approaches, an interesting new security change has been discovered in Sequoia. However, it’s one that may irk some people.
With this move, Apple makes it slightly more difficult for users to bypass the built-in Gatekeeper security feature when installing an application on macOS.
For those unfamiliar with Gatekeeper, it’s designed to protect your Mac from apps that could potentially contain malware. Essentially, Gatekeeper steers you toward downloading fully vetted apps from the App Store, rather than being lured by apps you can find anywhere on the web (which can be a bigger security risk).
To prevent Gatekeeper from installing an app that you didn’t download from the official store, you can Control-click to install the software at this point.
With this change, that shortcut to bypass Gatekeeper will no longer work. As Apple explains in a recently published support documentThe new way of working with Gatekeeper in macOS Sequoia means you can go to System Settings > Privacy & Securitywhere you must check the security information for software before you are allowed to run it.
While we can understand that this is a security measure and an attempt to keep macOS devices more secure, creating a shortcut to a slightly longer cut isn’t exactly ideal. It’s just likely to annoy some macOS users, especially those who know what they’re doing and trust that the app they’re installing is up to par.
New public beta has arrived
By the way, this change has nothing to do with the new beta version of macOS Sequoia that has just been released. This was previously spotted by a enterprising tester in an earlier beta version (and others picked it up too, like MacRumors noticed).
Unfortunately, this third public beta of Sequoia doesn’t really bring any major changes. There are certainly some fixes and tweaks under the hood, but the only minor addition we’ve seen so far is a new wallpaper (one that was already hidden in macOS 15).
That’s a little disappointing, but as we get closer to the official release of macOS Sequoia, we likely won’t see any other major additions to the beta, especially with iPhone Mirroring already released (it arrived in the second public beta). Apple Intelligence isn’t expected to debut on macOS until much later this year (there’s currently a macOS 15.1 beta where developers are testing the AI feature, but there’s no word on whether that will appear in a public beta).