Apple begins blocking M1 Mac users from loading iPhone and iPad applications [U]

Update January 19, 2021: Apple has changed this sidebar, and it’s again possible to load unsupported iPhone and iPad apps on an M1 Mac. We do not expect it to take long, so if you want any iPhone or iPad apps on your Mac, download them sooner rather than later with iMazing.

Earlier this week, 9to5Mac reports that Apple will soon start blocking downloading iPhone and iPad applications on their M1 Macs. Now Apple has officially flipped the switch on the server side to implement this change.

This means that it is no longer possible to use an app like iMazing to download unsupported applications from your iPhone or iPad to your M1 Mac.

As a refresh, Apple Silicon allows Mac users to run iOS and iPad applications on their Mac, but developers can not install their applications on the Mac. This is the path many developers have taken, and made the necessary change in App Store Connect to remove their app from the Mac App Store.

But with that said, to this day, you can manually install iOS apps like Netflix, Instagram, and Facebook on an M1 Mac using their respective IPA files downloaded under a valid Apple ID. Many people use tools like iMazing to complete this process.

9to5Mac has now confirmed that this is no longer possible as of today, unless the application is available in the Mac App Store. Apple has the necessary switch to run the iPhone and iPad applications installed on Apple Silicon Macs.

The change applies to M1 Macs using MacOS Big Sur 11.1, as well as the developer or public beta of MacOS Big Sur 11.2. The only difference is that users using the MacOS Big Sur 11.2 beta will see a more specific error message.

This is the error you will see if you want to install an unsupported iPhone or iPad app on your M1 Mac with MacOS 11.2 beta:

If you try to load an iPhone or iPad app on an M1 Mac with MacOS 11.1 Big Sur, you will see an error saying that the installation of the app was not successful and to try again later ‘.

If you have already downloaded an application from your iPhone or iPad to your M1 Mac, it will still work properly. This change only affects new application installations. Additionally, if you downloaded a .IPA file, you can still install it.

The change itself was made to the App Store system that delivers the actual .IPA file, and it’s all part of Apple’s APIs that manage the DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection of the operating system. As a result, a solution is unlikely to emerge in the future.

Check out 9to5Mac on YouTube for more Apple news: