MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

> a degraded user experience, as the first time a user runs a new executable, Apple delays execution while waiting for a reply from their server.

The way to avoid this behavior is to staple the notarization ticket to your bundle (or dmg/pkg), i.e. "/usr/bin/stapler staple <path>." Otherwise, Gatekeeper will fetch the ticket and staple it for the user on the first run.

(I'm the author of xcnotary [1], a tool to make notarization way less painful, including uploading to Apple/polling for completion/stapling/troubleshooting various code signing issues.)

[1] https://github.com/akeru-inc/xcnotary

> The way to avoid this behavior is to staple the notarization ticket to your bundle (or dmg/pkg)

Maybe in some cases, but the article says "even if you write a one line shell script and run it in a terminal, you will get a delay!"

Shell scripts don't come in bundles. I don't think this kind of stapling is possible for them? I don't think it'd be reasonable to expect users to do this anyway.

The Gatekeeper behavior is specific to running things from Finder (not Terminal), and only if you downloaded it via a browser that sets the com.apple.quarantine xattr.

Two posts from Apple dev support (Cmd+F "eskimo") describe this in more detail.

https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/127709

https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/127694

> The Gatekeeper behavior is specific to running things from Finder (not Terminal), and only if you downloaded it via a browser that sets the com.apple.quarantine xattr.

The article says the described problem isn't limited in this way:

> This is not just for files downloaded from the internet, nor is it only when you launch them via Finder, this is everything. So even if you write a one line shell script and run it in a terminal, you will get a delay!