Example threads. These questions and answers were written by the SDODS team to document real problems and how to fix them. The people named are illustrative, not real users. Questions asked on this site are marked new.
Downloaded the desktop app, dragged it to Applications, double-clicked, and:
SDODS is damaged and can't be opened. You should move it to the Trash.Downloaded it twice in case something was truncated. Same message. Is the download actually broken or is this the usual macOS thing?
Accepted answer
The usual macOS thing. The download is fine — the app is not signed yet, and Gatekeeper phrases "I do not recognise who made this" as "damaged", which is a genuinely terrible message for the situation.
The safest way past it is the one macOS offers itself: find SDODS in Applications, right-click, choose Open, and confirm in the dialog. macOS remembers the decision, so you only do it once and every later launch is a normal double-click.
There is also the direct form:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/SDODS.appIt works, and I mention it second on purpose: it is worse advice to hand a stranger, because it is a command you can be talked into running against something that really is malicious. Right-click and Open is the same decision with a dialog attached.
The CLI is unaffected by any of this — nothing installed by the script is quarantined.
To answer the implied question: signing is not free and not automatic. It needs an Apple Developer Program membership, a Developer ID Application certificate and a notarization step per build. Until that exists every download says this.
If you want to verify the download rather than trust the dialog, every release ships a SHA256SUMS.txt and you can check the file you got against it.
Do not skip the right-click. I tried Open from the Finder menu bar with the app already selected and got the same refusal; the context-menu Open is the one carrying the override.
For a managed fleet, none of the above scales — ask whoever runs your MDM to allow the app rather than telling twenty people to right-click. That is also the honest answer to give a security team, who will not love a xattr instruction in a runbook.
Wrap commands and output in triple backticks and they will render as a code block.
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