OS X Mountain Lion's Gatekeeper is ideally meant to warn users about potentially malicious apps sitting around the web. That's a good thing! But Gatekeeper could also be interpreted as Apple heavily discouraging less savvy users from installing non-Mac App Store apps entirely. It's one step away from turning the current app freedom on the Mac into the app dictatorship of iOS.
Of course, it's no where near a real problem yet but it's at the very least, a curious move. Apple has made it known that developers can activate Gatekeeper on Mac OS X 10.7.3 to see how their apps would behave under Gatekeeper's security level. If the app doesn't pass Gatekeeper's rules, the warning message above would pop up to users.
Um. Yeah.
That doesn't do much to calm our fears of an Apple apphoarding future. I mean, OS X is explicitly telling you to move the app to the Trash. Even worse, the app receiving the throngs of Gatekeeper's wrath is Adium. Adium. The instant messaging client that everyone has installed on their Macs. If Gatekeeper is treating Adium like this, no app will be able to escape its harsh shadow (as an aside, Adium is an app Apple is trying to kill with Mountain Lion). How many people will blindly follow these instructions? [MacRumors via @adampash]