macOS unable to open any non-Apple application

You should never, ever, install a MacOS update the moment it comes out. There is a high chance (> 30% from my experience) that something will be wrong with it. iOS too for that matter.

Wait for at least one week and check out other people's experiences first.

This applies to every Mac, with or without an update.

This.

To save yourself the headaches and frustrations, wait for the bug fix releases and updates to come first before installing this very first new release.

It makes no sense to immediately update the system and then risk your computer being rendered unusable with such bugs and problems whilst having a deadline hanging over your head.

I ran the beta over the summer and it was awful. I loved the changes but it was just unstable as hell. And people kept saying it was the most stable is yet, I don’t get it.

> Wait for at least one week and check out other people's experiences first.

Of course if everyone does this, there is no experience upon which to draw.

Furthermore, the title is straight up wrong: this is not related to Big Sur and is in fact also affecting other versions with Gatekeeper.

I’ve been running it as a daily driver since the first day of the developer betas and have found it to be vastly more stable than the previous version, with basically no issues before this.

I don’t know what to tell you, beyond the fact that all use cases are not the same, apparently.

Not only Macs. “There is a high chance that something will be wrong with it” applies to almost all software of the size of modern OSes.

The software quality of Apple is embarrassing. They have the money to hire the best of the best, and to do tons of manual QA yet their OS releases are always riddled with errors. Why is software the red-headed step-child of Apple?

This has nothing to do with a software update. I haven't updated anything and am still running into this. It's their online services that are the problem.

Unstable in what way?

To elaborate on what others are saying, macOS has been doing this phone home for a while, it just looks like the server it phones home to started being _really slow_. So if you were offline, the software behaves fine, but if you're online, it blocks on getting a response.

Great example of how you should never block UX on network requests.

This was a problem on previous releases too.

Having to restart every day. CPU was also pretty much pegged nonstop when in clamshell and connected to two monitors. Catalina doesn't do that.

It's same for any other OS. There's a reason Ubuntu won't try to update itself to the next LTS until it hits X.1.

Yes, Windows 10 forced updates have broken so many things for me.

Thats strange, I run 2 34" displays from mine and haven't seen that. Did you upgrade or clean install?

Must be an absolute nightmare trying to handle every possible configuration someones Mac could be in. I dont envy the devs.

This has nothing to do with the problem we're discussing.