Gatekeeper on Mountain Lion

On Jul 25th, 2012, Apple finally released the Mountain Lion. You could pay $19.99 dollars from Mac App Store to get the OS X 10.8. Only one year past, this new OS X added up over 200 new features, and one of the major highlight is the Gatekeeper, which act as its name described, to be the first line of defense to help protecting your apps and system security.

Before Mountain Lion released out, people worried about those apps which are not brought from App Store may not be allowed running in OS X. Although it keeps the system more security, that would make Apple become the monopoly in this market. But now, people could be satisfied that Mountain Lion used another way to keep the app security – Gatekeeper.

Different from Reminders and Notes, which could be displayed in Dock, Gatekeeper appears in the security & privacy item from System Preferences. It displayed as 3 options:

Allow applications downloaded from:

Mac App Store

Mac App Store and identified developers

Anywhere

We could clearly catch the point that users could freely decide whether to use the protection or not. To both keep the app security and get more varies apps, the second options are recommended to tick. After ticking the second options, those apps are not identified by Apple would not be allowed to be installed.

Then this “identified developer” becomes very important on security protection. It could help most developers who do not belong to Apple to continue developing their app; and for Apple, it could make the whole market to be more opener and more competitive. Still for all OS X users, it improves the safety of computer operation.

Although it is a huge step for security protection, it is not all for safety. If a user really hopes to use some app without identification, he always has the methods. So the release of Gatekeeper do not mean the lastday of Antivirus app.

This article only describes the Gatekeeper feature, to help you catch more new added features, we have wrote major updates of OS X Mountain Lion before, you could go there to check for more.