How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

I installed Zoom on macOS yesterday and I thought that the install was crashing because this is not the expected behavior. I would double click the download, try to install, and then the installation program would "crash", so I'd try it again. Did that a few times before I realized it was installed. Until now I thought it had somehow gotten far enough in the installation process before crashing that I could at least use the application. I'd been hearing everyone raving about how Zoom was such better software than anything else, and my first experience was their installer doesn't even work.

This was a horrible user experience for me, and I wasn't thinking about security implications at all.

I would highly recommend checking all installers on macOS through Suspicious Package. It will give you a complete picture of all the installer scripts that will be run and all the files that will be written. I did just that for zoom and decided against installing it.

https://mothersruin.com/software/SuspiciousPackage/ for those curious