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IT Home reported on August 12 that Apple suffered a massive server outage shortly after releasing the macOS Big Sur system in 2020. The outage affected macOS installation, iMessage, Apple Pay, and especially the app notarization service. This meant that users encountered major problems when opening apps, exposing Apple's flaws in Mac app verification.

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According to IT Home, every time you launch an application, your Mac will perform several verification checks. One of them is to verify whether the application is malware, and another is to ensure that the developer certificate associated with the application is still valid. These checks are designed to protect user security and are often referred to as "application notarization."

Normally, if the user's Mac is offline, the check will fail but the application will still launch normally. However, in this case,macOS still attempts to connect to the server for checks instead of failing directly, resulting in unusually slow application launch times.

Following the incident, Apple announced a series of changes to address the issue.Includes the ability to allow users to completely opt out of online notarization checks. The changes were originally scheduled to begin rolling out in 2021.

Initially, Apple announced these improvements in response to concerns that the company was using the notarization process to collect data about how users use apps. The company reiterated that this was not the case and highlighted some of the upcoming changes in a support document:

To further protect privacy, we have stopped logging IP addresses associated with Developer ID certificate checks and will ensure that any collected IP addresses are removed from our logs. Additionally, over the next year, we will be introducing several changes to our security checks: New encryption protocols for Developer ID certificate revocation checks Strong protections against server failures New preferences for users to opt out of these security protections

To Apple’s credit, it did implement some of the changes it promised, such as stopping collecting IP addresses and creating a new encryption protocol for developer ID certificate checks.

However, there is still no news on an option to opt out of online notarization checks altogether.All references to the feature in support documentation were completely removed sometime in the past year.

It looks like Apple has scrapped its plans to allow users to open apps without any form of online security check before opening them. Apple may have made other underlying changes to macOS to ensure that server outages no longer prevent apps from launching properly, but Apple needs to clarify their plans.