Opening Yagi for the first time

Yagi is not signed with an Apple certificate, so the first time you open it macOS will ask you to confirm. It's one click, once. After that it never asks again.

The four steps

  1. Drag Yagi into your Applications folder.
  2. Open it from Applications. macOS will say it can't check it for malicious software. Click Done — not “Move to Trash”.
  3. Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down to Security and click Open Anyway next to the message about Yagi.
  4. Open Yagi again and confirm. That's it.

Can't see the “Open Anyway” button?

That's the usual case, and you haven't done anything wrong: that button only appears for a while — about an hour — after you've tried to open the app.

If you went straight to System Settings without doing step 2 first, there's nothing there to see. Do step 2 and go back to Settings right away.

What you must never do

You'll find advice online telling you to run sudo spctl --master-disable.

Don't. That turns off macOS security checks across your whole system and for every application, not just Yagi, and leaves the machine open to anything you download afterwards.

We will never ask you to do that. If anyone suggests it to install Yagi, be suspicious: it isn't needed, and it isn't what an honest application does.

Why isn't it signed?

Because Apple's developer programme costs €99 a year and Yagi has no income: it's free, with no ads, no paid version and nothing behind a donation.

The choice wasn't “signed or unsigned”. It was publish it or don't publish it.

Unsigned doesn't mean updates arrive unchecked: every update is signed with its own key, and Yagi rejects any update that doesn't match.