Flipper cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified in macOS Catalina

Question

Flipper is a platform for debugging iOS, Android and React Native apps. I have downloaded the Flipper app from https://fbflipper.com/, but I can't run it.

macOS version: Catalina 10.15.3

Answer 1

Just Right Click > Open. Or alternatively, open System Preferences, Security & Privacy, General tab, and Click 'Open Anyway'. Guide on support.apple.com

This is a general problem (security feature called Gatekeeper) with apps on macOS where the developer is not registered with Apple (Paying $99/year) and so has not notarized their application. Specifically, Gatekeeper saves a quarantine flag on a downloaded file. So alternatively, you can remove this flag for your specific file, or disable Gatekeeper entirely so you never have this issue again.

---

A nice explanation by the Terraform team who faced the same issue:

Indeed the new version of MacOS is stricter about running software you've downloaded that isn't signed with an Apple developer key. Terraform distributions are signed with a HashiCorp key with signatures distributed out of band on releases.hashicorp.com, but MacOS Catalina is requiring participation in Apple's developer program specifically, and Terraform is currently not built to support that. source

---

From a app developer stand point:

Applications on macOS need a Developer ID certificate to verify that we are trusted developers. This also provides access to macOS capabilities: e.g. CloudKit, Apple Push Notifications. If you're making an app, you can need to go into developer.apple.com to create an Apple Developer ID certificate, or create on in XCode (in some cases).

Answer 2

You can run following command to remove the warning and allow un-authorized app to run on macOS Catalina:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Flipper.app

Answer 3

Go to System preference, Security and Privacy and choose Opneanyway:

Answer 4

An alternative is to either run or build from source.
Helpful if you're on a work computer with tighter application security settings.

Prerequisites:

• NodeJS (https://nodejs.org/en/)
• Yarn (https://yarnpkg.com)

Running from source

git clone https://github.com/facebook/flipper.git
cd flipper/desktop
yarn
yarn start

Building from source

yarn build --mac --version $buildNumber

For Building from source, you should do it in the following steps:

git clone https://github.com/facebook/flipper.git
cd flipper/desktop
yarn
yarn build --mac --version $buildNumber

Note: I've noticed building from source as of Aug 2020 0.53.0 has some issues for me, so would recommend running from source if you need to use this.