Officially this is being done in the name of security... is it really or is this a cash grab to coerce everyone making apps for macOS to pay the $99/year fee which is required for the signing/notarizing being mentioned?
While you are right, it is adding an extra hurdle that is obviously trying to stride dev toward the store.
"Hey, you can have your software notirized (which we might not accept), people will be warned before opening the app and some other bs or you can pay us 99$ and stop worrying!"
I am criticising what they are doing now. Which is making everything harder if you don't go through the App Store, and they have been doing it for a while now. It's the same they are doing with their hardware and everything (you can't repair it yourself because "quality") so I can't really see them doing anything different.
I think that is actually a smaller part of what's at play. The money is in Apple getting everything to be on the store, getting fees on the money spent on the store and the control over it. They will have the final say over everything.
If that’s actually Apple’s goal, it’s taken them over a decade to get there. The Mac software market is so small and insignificant for Apple’s revenue that it wouldn’t be worth the trouble.
By introducing themselves as gatekeepers, they can analyse software and reject it. For example, if they decide to deprecate an API, they can decline to notarise any software that uses it.
The thin end of the wedge is, of course, free notarisation with few limitations. Then once that is in place, they can increase their power to the level they enjoy in the iPhone app store.
The "security" part is of course complete bullshit. They slowly want to turn macOS into a walled garden for more control and profit like they did in the mobile space.
Except of course it isn't complete bullshit. It's saved me a few times where naive family members (one greater than the age of 80, the other under 12) has inadvertently downloaded mal/annoyanceware and tried to install it.
Crapware is a substantial cause of 'my machine's not working properly' among the less technically savvy
I don't know about everyone else but the only reason I even have macOS computers is because I'm making apps for iOS. If it were possible to develop for iOS on Windows 10 or Linux I would do that in a heartbeat.
I don't know much about it but I thought you could develop for iOS using C# using Visual Studio 2017/2019 and it remotely deploy to Mac?
I read a bit about it because I wanted to do it myself but I haven't upgraded from Sierra yet due to no support/broken for my audio hardware in newer versions.