Gatekeeper

Gatekeeper is a built-in macOS technology that checks that software downloaded from outside the App Store comes from an identified developer, is notarised by Apple and has not been altered, and asks the user before first opening it. macOS offers the Gatekeeper technology and runtime protection to help ensure that only trusted software runs on a user’s Mac. Gatekeeper also requests user approval before opening downloaded software for the first time to make sure the user hasn’t been tricked into running executable code they believed to simply be a data file. Alternatively, users can override Gatekeeper policies to open any software unless restricted by a device management service . It is recorded as supporting malware detection.

Current Version

27.0

Product Page

support.apple.com/…/sec5599b66df

Market

ConsumerEnterpriseSMB

Licence

Free

Price

Free

Record Created

2026-08-20

Last Updated

2026-10-10

Apple does not sell security software. The protections listed here are built into macOS and shipped with every Mac, which makes them the baseline any third-party product on that platform is competing against rather than products a buyer chooses. Three of them appear in this index. XProtect is the malware signature system Apple updates silently in the background; Gatekeeper checks that an application has been signed by an identified developer and notarised by Apple before it will run; and the built-in firewall controls incoming connections. Alongside them sit System Integrity Protection, the signed system volume and app sandboxing, which are architectural rather than detection features and are not listed separately. Apple publishes no detection rates and does not enter its protections into the public test laboratories, so the laboratory columns here will stay empty for them. That is not a gap in the product: it is a company that treats platform security as part of the operating system rather than as a product to be benchmarked. Vendor page →

Website

apple.com

Country

🇺🇸United States

Headquarters

🇺🇸Cupertino, United States

Year Established

1976

Customers

500K organisations

Users

2.5B devices protected

Revenue

$416.2B (2025)