Standalone App "is damaged and can't be opened. You should move it to the trash"
'Your app' is damaged and can't be opened. You should move it to the trash.
This error keeps surfacing whenever people download and try to open the standalone Mac OS X app I've exported from Max. It seems that altering their security & privacy system settings to 'allow apps downloaded from: anywhere" resolves the issue - but this isn't an entirely satisfactory solution. Is there an alternative fix?
Thank you for any help.
I STRONGLY discourage you to tell customers to reduce gatekeeper protection like that. It's one thing for a deep power user to do this but you're increasing the risk of the average non-techie user to get bitten by malware.
See for example
I'm familiar with the workaround by disabling Mac Gatekeeper, but obviously this isn't ideal. Is there no way to get it to say something other than 'is damaged and can't be opened?' Some apps downloaded online simply say 'this isn't a familiar developer, are you sure you'd like to open the app?' Something like this might be more acceptable. Any ideas? App signing using Apple's dev. kit seems like a major pain...
On the other hand, using Mac with Gate Keeper enabled, and OSX configured the way apple wants it, samewise windows
with built in protection, firewall, virus defender and so on, is not suitable for any serious audio/video
live performance or development work.
So there You go - choose what is best for You.
I realize this was posted some time ago, but I wanted to point out that you can bypass this error by code signing your apps. But to do so, you must become an Apple Developer, which costs $100 a year. After becoming a developer, just download the required certificates and run the following code in terminal:
codesign -f -s "Developer ID Application: YourName (YourDeveloperID)" -v --deep "/PathToYourApp/YourApp.app"
Best,
Tim
That is pretty hardcore, to ask $100,- per year for just being able to
share your applications.
What if you don't want to make a profit on it..?
But what I don't understand is: I'm used to the message about "unidentified developer",
which you can open in security settings with "open anyway".
Why the first message instead of the latter?
Theoretically "open anyway" should resolve this problem, but it sometimes works, sometimes not. But it is a wider problem - concerns not to Max only (for example, applications made in Processing are also shattered).
Apple's $100 fee for developer's permissions can be considered a lot or little - depends on context. On the other hand, from the user's point of view, it makes sense, because it sifts away the amount of suspicious software.
Of course, in the case of Max it is still possible to publish patches or collections instead of the application... then the user will need to install Max runtime.
Hi everyone,
I'm trying to distribute an OSX standalone I created to some students I teach. If I upload it somewhere as a .zip for them to download, they all get this damaged app message. Now there is no 'run apps from anywhere' option in OSX.
Is there any way round this other than for them to open the app as root in terminal (too complex) or me to distribute it manually (not possible). Or for them to install Max. It seems the zipping and downloading causes the problem, is this true?
I'm not a developer, I just want to share something with students. This just seems totally ridiculous!
The fact that You are a teacher puts You in a good position to also
teach the students to be creative with computers, learn how to
disable SIP and gatekeeper, how to use curl to download
Your Standalone and extract it to apps folder without
getting translocated and set quarantine xattr.
Perhaps... but you are not really considering my use case. There is not time to do this on the curriculum, and the students do not have the base skills to do this - they are sound designers and composers who have no interest in app development. I appreciate what you are actually getting at, but Max allows artists to create apps easily. My question - is there currently a way to share these easily between artists on OSX? Fine if the answer is no...
The answer is no, as far as I see it.
And definitely not in the future with that apple policy.
Of course it is possible to buy Apple certificate,
and go trough all that codesigning and notarizing procedure,
but if we are talking about artists without programming skills,
not interested in app development and paying that fee, that seems impossible.
So only option remains to install max and share patches.
But than artists without programming interest have to cope with Max.
Also the freeware - shareware model of development is going to dissapear on
mac platform - who would pay 99 $ just to give stuff for free ?
--------
If Your only problem were download and unzip ,
than You could solve it by letting students download
app usind curl script from terminal.
Compress the file uzing tar or targz
download example :
sudo curl -SL www.some-domain/files/MyApp.app.tar.gz | tar -x -m - -C /Applications
That works only with tar / targz compression.
App gets extracted directly into apps, without
getting brandmarked.
That can work till 10.14.5
Later MacOS needs notarization...
Thanks for explaining further.
Also the freeware - shareware model of development is going to disappear on mac platform - who would pay 99 $ just to give stuff for free ?
- That all seems like a great shame. I wonder if this is about security or profit.. Perhaps more reason to ditch Mac.
I'll either try your targz solution, otherwise will try to find a workaround.
Cheers
@Mark Durham
This isn't an ideal solution but thought I'd suggest it anyway as I'm having the same problem since updating to Max 8.
All previous standalones worked fine. I've always had the 'unidentified developer' error after having built the standalone through Max 7 but now when building through Max 8 and attempting to open the app after downloading it, I'm getting the 'app damaged' error.
The only way around this I've found (other than messing with GateKeeper or going back and exporting the standalone as 32bit in Max 7) is to upload the file to some webspace then download it via an FTP client rather than through a browser. Either that or download it through Windows and copy it over to the Mac.
Any updates on this? I'm having the same problem. My standalone app works fine on my computer, and also works fine when sent via airdrop to another mac which doesn't have Max. But as soon as I upload to dropbox/google drive, etc. and download on another computer it says "The application can't be opened".
This seems pretty crazy - what's the point in being able to make an application if you can't share it with anyone? Surely there's a solution.