One of the major highlights of M1 MacBooks is that they can also run iPhone and iPad apps. The problem was that most developers disabled their iPhone apps from being available for M1 Macs on the Mac App Store. As a workaround, users were able to sideload such apps on their Macs. Apple, however, has now blocked the ability to sideload and run iPhone and iPad apps on M1 Macs.

M1 Mac users can download the IPA of iOS apps using third-party tools and their Apple ID. They were then able to install these apps on their MacBook Pro, Air, or Mac mini by simply double-clicking on the IPA. Now that Apple has flipped a server-side switch, it is no longer possible to sideload iPhone and iPad apps that are not available on the Mac App Store.

If an app is available for download from the Mac App Store, it can also be sideloaded on M1 Macs but most users ended up sideloading those apps that were not available for download on the store.

Trying to sideload an iOS app on macOS Big Sur 11.1 on M1 Macs will throw an error saying “try again later.” On macOS Big Sur 11.2 though, a more specific error message is shown saying “This application cannot be installed because the developer did not intend for it to run on this platform.”

If you have already sideloaded iPhone or iPad apps on your M1 Mac, they will still continue to run like normal. Users will only not be able to sideload new apps on their Macs now. Since this is a server-side change from Apple, it is unlikely that a workaround to bypass this problem would be available anytime soon.