That’s all great in theory, but what if Apple accidentally approves a malicious app.
If an app isn’t notarized, you’re prevented from running it on macOS. It’s different from a regular “app review” of the software, and since February 2020 it has become a requirement for even Mac software distributed outside the Mac App Store to be notarized by Apple to allow it to run on macOS Catalina, the latest shipping version of the Mac operating system. A really cool feature of Apple macOS, from the security point of view at least, is that all software distributed via the Mac App Store has to be checked by Apple for malicious content – a process known as “notarizing.”
