Apple responds to gatekeeper issues: Here’s what it has to say

Apple, last week, rolled out MacOS BigSur on its personal computers and laptops. However, when users started opening third-party apps, they were greeted with a range of issues ranging from slow launches to no launches at all. The issue arose from a technology called Gatekeeper that Apple uses in order to prevent users from downloading malicious apps posing as legit apps. Now, the company has updated its support document explaining the steps that it is taking to prevent the issue from occurring again.

In the document titled ‘Safely open apps on your Mac’, Apple says that next year it will introduce several changes to MacOS that will prevent the gatekeeper bug from happening again. The list includes introducing a new encrypted protocol for Developer ID certificate revocation checks, putting in place strong protections against server failure and introducing a new preference for users to opt-out of these security protections.

In addition to this, Apple also answered users' concerns about these new security features giving it insights into the competitor apps. The company said that it doesn’t use data from these checks to learn about individual devices.

“Gatekeeper performs online checks to verify if an app contains known malware and whether the developer’s signing certificate is revoked. We have never combined data from these checks with information about Apple users or their devices. We do not use data from these checks to learn what individual users are launching or running on their devices,” Apple explained.