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I'm building my app for all platforms (Win, Lin, Mac) on a Linux machine, so I don't (can't) sign or notarize. It's been going OK so far, but it seems like scr

I'm building my app for all platforms (Win, Lin, Mac) on a Linux machine, so I don't (can't) sign or notarize. It's been going OK so far, but it seems like screws are tightening and when this workflow doesn't work anymore, I will simply stop supporting Mac (this applies to M1 too).

steeleduncan 6y ago
How are you building a macOS app from linux? Is there some equivalent of mingw?
- patrickg 6y ago
  There is osxcross: https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross
- The_Colonel 6y ago
  My app is based on electron and electron-builder can do Mac x86 builds on linux.
  - elliottkember 6y ago
    GitHub Actions has OSX runners. I’m building an Electron app too and my builds run in Actions. Electron even has arm64 builds now. It works great
    - The_Colonel 6y ago
      Interesting, I need to look into it. ARM64 is nice too, but for me not applicable. I won't dare to produce builds which I can't test ...
      - elliottkember 6y ago
        I can understand that. Intel builds run just fine. But once you try the ARM64 build, it really flies and you can’t go back.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jermaustin1 6y ago
Why wouldn't you find a person with a Mac to sign the package? An apple developer account is only $100/year. I feel that is certainly worth it for a software developer that does any meaningful business on the platform. Maybe you don't get much Mac users, but if you did, I'd definitely look into it.
- filleduchaos 6y ago
  Not everybody writing software for a platform is doing business on it. Many apps are free. Then again I've never really understood the point of free (as in beer) software that's not also open source (or at least source available), so personally I think dropping platform support for a [free, cross-platform] application rather than simply distributing a tarball for users to do as they wish with is a bit dramatic. Personally though I think it's weird that so many people are okay with distributing on platforms they don't even own. It's particularly rampant in cross-platform dev - I don't understand how anyone can feel comfortable just publishing an app on Android and/or iOS when they've never tested it on a real device, to talk of actually collecting money for it.
  - The_Colonel 6y ago
    To clarify, my app is free and open source. There's nothing really preventing users from building the app themselves, and some of them do that. But building yourself is not something most users can do. So when talking about "dropping support", I mean specifically stopping doing Mac builds myself. (Or rather not creating new builds for M1 Mac and similar, I'm okay with doing builds for old x86) > Personally though I think it's weird that so many people are okay with distributing on platforms they don't even own. It's not very comfortable, and I had a lot of inner discussions about this. I originally supported only Linux and Windows (platform I use and test on regularly), but inevitably Mac users came and wanted to use the app too. It's quite difficult to reject such users when in theory a simple cross-build does not seem so difficult. As mentioned before I'm using Electron and fortunately it does shield you from majority of platform specific bugs, so not testing each and every release on Mac turned out mostly OK. There are other issues though - Mac is very opinionated and many things / conventions are very different from Linux/Windows. As a result a simple cross build of my app is quite "foreign element" and users ask for mac specific features. My eventual solution was a compromise of "I provide builds but don't implement any mac specialties".
telesilla 6y ago
I can't remember where but there is a group of devs who offers to sign mac apps for open source developers.

steeleduncan 6y ago

How are you building a macOS app from linux? Is there some equivalent of mingw?

patrickg 6y ago
There is osxcross: https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross
The_Colonel 6y ago
My app is based on electron and electron-builder can do Mac x86 builds on linux.
- elliottkember 6y ago
  GitHub Actions has OSX runners. I’m building an Electron app too and my builds run in Actions. Electron even has arm64 builds now. It works great
  - The_Colonel 6y ago
    Interesting, I need to look into it. ARM64 is nice too, but for me not applicable. I won't dare to produce builds which I can't test ...
    - elliottkember 6y ago
      I can understand that. Intel builds run just fine. But once you try the ARM64 build, it really flies and you can’t go back.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jermaustin1 6y ago

Why wouldn't you find a person with a Mac to sign the package? An apple developer account is only $100/year. I feel that is certainly worth it for a software developer that does any meaningful business on the platform. Maybe you don't get much Mac users, but if you did, I'd definitely look into it.

filleduchaos 6y ago
Not everybody writing software for a platform is doing business on it. Many apps are free. Then again I've never really understood the point of free (as in beer) software that's not also open source (or at least source available), so personally I think dropping platform support for a [free, cross-platform] application rather than simply distributing a tarball for users to do as they wish with is a bit dramatic. Personally though I think it's weird that so many people are okay with distributing on platforms they don't even own. It's particularly rampant in cross-platform dev - I don't understand how anyone can feel comfortable just publishing an app on Android and/or iOS when they've never tested it on a real device, to talk of actually collecting money for it.
- The_Colonel 6y ago
  To clarify, my app is free and open source. There's nothing really preventing users from building the app themselves, and some of them do that. But building yourself is not something most users can do. So when talking about "dropping support", I mean specifically stopping doing Mac builds myself. (Or rather not creating new builds for M1 Mac and similar, I'm okay with doing builds for old x86) > Personally though I think it's weird that so many people are okay with distributing on platforms they don't even own. It's not very comfortable, and I had a lot of inner discussions about this. I originally supported only Linux and Windows (platform I use and test on regularly), but inevitably Mac users came and wanted to use the app too. It's quite difficult to reject such users when in theory a simple cross-build does not seem so difficult. As mentioned before I'm using Electron and fortunately it does shield you from majority of platform specific bugs, so not testing each and every release on Mac turned out mostly OK. There are other issues though - Mac is very opinionated and many things / conventions are very different from Linux/Windows. As a result a simple cross build of my app is quite "foreign element" and users ask for mac specific features. My eventual solution was a compromise of "I provide builds but don't implement any mac specialties".

telesilla 6y ago

I can't remember where but there is a group of devs who offers to sign mac apps for open source developers.