MacOS Catalina 'Verifying Files'

Sorry to add a "me too" here but... me too, can't run Xcode without it reverifying after a build, before running the sim - Catalina is completely broken.

Suggestion for Apple - don't break MacOS nor iOS each and every summer, don't expect beta users to identify every major bug. Really poor QA from Apple.

We should have been offered the opportunity to be guinea pigs. Instead, that role was shoved down our throats (a benign way to express the sentiment) with a long series of "it's coming soon; be sure your apps are ready for 64 bits..." Etc. I dutifully checked ALL apps to ensure that their designers had kept up and that I had installed updates to keep pace. Then when the new system came out I followed the rest of the lemmings (sorry for mammal metaphors) over the cliff. This should be getting a lot wider play online than seems to be the case. I see nothing particularly condemnatory about commentaries to date. This has been a disaster, way more than Apple has admitted.

I'm still waiting for news on my pending Apple "case," having been told that data downloaded from my computer by Apple was being analyzed and that Apple and Microsoft were supposedly working together on the Office apps. Adobe Acrobat quit altogether, and I've switched to another program - PDF Studio, a lot cheaper, and nimble enough for now.

I completely agree. Catalina has for the first time made me consider switching to Windows as my main OS. While Windows has it's own perks and problems, I haven't encountered anything near as egregious as Catalina's broken security system.

On my work computer, apps will spontaneously lose access to my Desktop and Documents folders and require a system restart every time to fix it before it breaks again. I highly suspect that problem is related to the new privacy permissions added in Catalina.

While I understand the reasoning behind these new security features, there is also a case of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," or at the very least when adding these ambitious changes to an already mature OS, making sure it's thoroughly tested before it's released to the public.

The end user are not your beta testers. While we can put up with the occasional odd bugs, I'm increasingly getting the perception that Apple just releases software in an unfinished state now because they don't have to resources to fix major issues before release.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/11/21/apple-shifts-ios-14-development-strategy-to-cut-buggy-releases

Apparently Apple is changing its development procedure to cut buggy iOS and MacOS releases in future

Thanks for sharing that article. However, all I can see in that article is the iOS development team is refining its procedures. No reference is made to the MacOS team, which i a completely different group. One can only hope though that they get enough feedback of this widespread disaster, and figure out what they did wrong and not make that mistake again!

I also submitted an issue to apple, using "feedbackassistant.apple.com". I shared my own experiences as well as directing them to this thread, and explicitly copying and pasting the notes that hirokzu detailed above. Hopefully that helps the effort.

Curiously, following the procedure to disable sip made no difference for me... however, when I was already starting down the path of reverting to Mojave and I had booted back up in recovery mode, I checked and it seemed like sip was not disabled. So perhaps disabling didn’t take for some reason for me... or that it somehow got re-enabled after the process.

System Integrity Protection is macOS's primary security mechanism for preventing integral system files being modified by malware. I would highly advise against disabling it through csrutil; the post marked as a solution in this thread is akin to leaving your garage door open permanently because it always gets stuck when you want to open it.

The recommended use of csrutil is to disable SIP so you can do some intended system modifcation (provided you know what you're doing), and then immediately re-enabling it again, not to disable it permanently.

And no, people having this issue aren't limited to laptop users.

Absolutely right. Right now I am speaking to a senior apple support person concerning this problem, trying to determine if Apple has this on their official bug list. They are looking at this discussion thread and have just verified that this bug is being worked on by Apple.

Totally understand your frustration. Somebody on Reddit just ended up doing a clean install. But I have so much stuff I've set up the way I need it that it'll be a really daunting effort to do that. :/

That’s basically what I ended up having to do anyway though in reverting to Mojave, because restoring from time machine backup was dialing initially, and I ended up doing a clean install of Mojave and then finally figuring out how to recover the data from time machine, and then reinstall and reconfigure apps, etc.

il curious if I had done a clean install of Catalina and recovered data and reinstalled apps the same way if I’d be in a stable state now. But I won’t try again until I get a new Mac mini next year, then I’ll start building that up with a clean catalina.

Sorry this is straying a bit off-topic, but what are you using to run macOS VMs? I tried Parallels before as I was already using that to run Windows relatively well in a VM environment, but was disappointed at how slow and sluggish it was at running macOS.

After going without SIP and reading the cautionary tales, I enabled the service. Other than the increased startup time, my biggest complaint is that it "breaks" Parallels Access, which I use for remote access from my iPad. The workaround for me is to run the install dmg, which keeps the app running til the next time I need to reboot.

Reminds me of the good old days of Windows. Lucky us.

Morey

Not sure - for my 2016 Macbook pro it's a problem after updating from Mojave, for my iMac Pro I'm not seeing the same "verification" issues, but it does seem to keep repeating authorization requests to receive messages from apps. The Macbook I had to disable SIP because it became unusable and right now, I can't afford to upgrade my MacBook.

Unless you have a good reason to upgrade your iMac from Mojave, don't do it until they resolve the many issues in Catalina.

Just noticed that this morning myself. I am still disturbed though that Apple never acknowledged the problem and didn't even announce the fix with this latest update. Yeah, the symptom went away but what was the underlying issue? What else don't they tell us or warn us about that they are doing "under the hood" that affects us in unknown ways? Did they really fix it or did this latest update accidentally make it disappear as it accidentally appeared in the first place?

Paranoid? no. Well founded caution from years dealing with technology and privacy issues on an architectural level. Trust is hard won and easily lost.