1. Mac Software Cannot Be Opened How To
2. Mac Application Cannot Be Opened Catalina
3. Mac App Cannot Be Opened Unidentified Developer

• Gatekeeper was first introduced in 2012 with the release of Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. It’s a security feature that stops an app from running if it hasn’t been signed with a certified Apple developer certificate. On modern versions of macOS, unsigned software simply won’t run unless you go out of your way to approve it.
• First of all, open up a Terminal window by going to Finder Go Utilities. Mac Finder; From there, locate and open up a Terminal. Once the terminal window is up, use the following command to run the application: sudo xattr -cr /path/to/application.app Running App from Terminal.

For macOS 10.14, 10.15 or later macOS versions, the users may encounter this issue when they are going to open a installed software from Launchpad, the issue is “xxxx can’t be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software.”.

Fix “X can’t be opened because Apple cannot check for malicious software” and “Developer or app can’t be verified” using the command line.

Mac OS X Catalina has introduced a new host of permission issues. There are workarounds for applications that you’re installing to your “Applications” folder, namely right-click and use the “Open” -> “Open Anyway” trick.

For developers among you, you will want to use the command line to fix this situation rather than clicking around the UI.

For the non-developers among you, some applications will fail to open even if you give them the correct system & security settings.

Mac Software Cannot Be Opened How To

This post details how to do that using the command line (Terminal) and xattr -d com.apple.quarantine <path-to-program>.

The manual permissions workaround

Mac Application Cannot Be Opened Catalina

In order to open an application that “can’t be opened because Apple cannot check for malicious software” or “Developer or app can’t be verified”, we open Finder and go to Applications.

Find the relevant application and right-click it.

When the right-click menu opens, select & click “Open” and when the dialog opens, click “Open”.

Use the command line to fix “Apple cannot check for malicious software” and “Developer or app can’t be verified”

Mac App Cannot Be Opened Unidentified Developer

Your terminal application (I use iTerm but Mac OS comes with Terminal). Find the path of your application.

For applications in your “Applications” folder, that will be something like: /Applications/<app-name>.app.

Use xattr to delete the com.apple.quarantine attribute:

You can then check that it’s been deleted using xattr's default behaviour.

That’s how you can open applications for which “Apple cannot check for malicious software” or “Developer or app can’t be verified”.

Get The Jest Handbook (100 pages)

Take your JavaScript testing to the next level by learning the ins and outs of Jest, the top JavaScript testing library.

Join 1000s of developers learning about Enterprise-grade Node.js & JavaScript