Apple Pushes Developers Towards Mountain Lion Gatekeeper

Apple began stepping up its effort to get developers on board with Gatekeeper, the digital signature technology for Mountain Lion. The company sent out emails to registered developers with information about Gatekeeper and encouraging them to sign up for their own Gatekeeper Developer ID.

Gatekeeper Missive

Apple Email Message

Gatekeeper was announced as part of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion on February 16th, and with it, users can limit the software that can be installed on their Macs to software released through the Mac App Store, which will be the default setting in the new OS. Users can also choose to allow software from other sources (CD, DVD, external storage, downloaded from the Internet, etc.).

For developers to have access to all users, therefore, they must sell their software through the Mac App Store and sign up for a Gatekeeper certificate, which is then attached to their software through Apple’s Developer ID.

While Gatekeeper was announced with Mountain Lion and has been a part of the developer preview program for the new OS, Monday’s email marks a beginning of Apple’s public campaign to get developers on board with the technology.