How to Distribute macOS Apps (free ebook)

ctietze

With the advent of macOS 10.14 Mojave, Apple have introduced a new verification process called "App Notarization". (When you ship your apps through the Mac App Store, your apps get reviewed; if you ship outside the App Store, they could contain malware and whatnot. App notarization involved checking for viruses, among other things I don't know about, and then sign the app as "not a threat".) This makes the process of shipping actual .zip files to people a bit more complicated. Not that it was straight-forward in the past! So I figured, why not collect the information in a short guide.

So this is the process of me assembling a short guide.

ctietze

I started assembling information about the notarization process (201811221820) and noticed I don't have a "what does it take to make your code into an app that runs on other people's devices?" guide anywhere. So I assembled this one.

# 201811221821 macOS App Distribution Guide
##outline #mac #appdev #indie

- Leave Sandboxing Enabled
- Prepare project for app notarization [[201811221820]]
- Ways to distribute macOS app bundles [[201704301502]]

Then I collected info on how to run the commands from the Terminal (201811221920). I was shipping an update to my app TableFlip yesterday, and had to re-create a Retina Display image. I couldn't remember how to do that, so I wrote a note about that as well (201811221921; you see from the timestamps that I filed the notes shortly after another, but I didn't write them in the course of a minute).

I also prepared a repository for the guide and set it up as a LeanPub book, both to have a PDF/ePub/Mobi generator that works really well, and to have another publication on their platform to bundle up with the others.

# 201811221821 macOS App Distribution Guide
##outline #mac #appdev #indie

Repository: <https://github.com/CleanCocoa/distribute-mac-apps-guide>

- Leave Sandboxing Enabled
- Use Sparkle for updates
- Prepare project for app notarization [[201811221820]]
- Apple App Notarization from the command line [[201811221920]]

## Download

- Ways to distribute macOS app bundles [[201704301502]]
    - Favor DMG or PKG to circumvent app translocation
- Prepare DMG that looks rad
    - Combine images into multi-resolution DMG [[201811221921]]