#developer id

How to Configure Developer ID Signing in Xcode Bot

Apple’s Notary Service only accepts binaries signed with the Developer ID certificate. Correspondingly this certificate has direct links to a legal entity or a natural person, forcing them to vouch for the signed binary. In a sense this linkage supplies some security to users as virtually nobody can distribute apps anonymously any longer. Accordingly Developer ID signed binaries carries the…

Introducing macOS Notarization Automation Book

“I’ve just notarize an app with Xcode organizer UI. As a next step I want to do it in [a] CI process. How to do it?” “Is there instruction on how to best integrate [notarization] into a CI build process?” “How can I get this [notarization tool output] from the command line so the build script can deal with the result?” Are those questions sound familiar to you? If yes, you’ve come to the right…

What’s New with Xcode 13 Notarization

WWDC 2021 has ended. Now it’s time to look at all those developer tools Apple delivered and see how it can improve our work as software engineers. One notable change for macOS developers is a new notarization tool called notarytool. For one, the new tool promises faster uploads thanks to S3 transport optimizations. To clarify, the it would upload the binary to one of Amazon Web Services’ many…

What can be Notarized for Developer ID Distribution?

“It’s not clear what can be notarized” When you’re new to distributing macOS apps outside the store, the topic of notarization may be foreign to you. Put simply, notarization is about registering your binary to Apple. Unlike uploading for App Store, the process is entirely automatic on Apple’s end – there is no human reviewer to approve or reject your application. Apple would then scan your…

How to Securely Provide Apple ID Password into Notarization Build Jobs

Notarization is now mandatory to distribute macOS applications, plug-ins, and drivers outside the Mac App Store. You would need to present your binary package to Apple for automated registration. If it turns out that the package contains malware, Apple can prevent all macOS computers to run it. In other words, it’s a kind of centralized malware scanning. The notarization process usually takes a…

Notarizing Disk Images for Developer ID Distribution

Distributing macOS apps within .zip files nowadays is no longer a good idea. One issue is app translocation. Another issue is the mandatory notarization starting from macOS 10.15 Catalina.

App translocation goes into effect when the user downloads a .zip file containing an application, extracts it, and runs it directly without moving it anywhere using the Finder. The operating system would run…