The Anatomy of a macOS App

I've joined the Apple Developer program to be able to sign/notarize my Tauri app. And it's been three weeks that I'm failing to get the app notarized. I don't own a Mac so I'm using GitHub actions. Apparently the fact that notarization takes ages is very common the first time(s) an app is sent. I've spent nearly $100 on GitHub and my app still isn't notarized.

I contacted support and they don't want to help because I'm not using a Mac and using a third party framework (Tauri), even though it's just using xcrun, Apple's tool...

Also I've been unable to even use the notarization API to retrieve the submission logs and Apple didn't help for that either so far (they just disregarded my ticket).

I feel powerless and abused. This is the worst DX/CX I've had in years.

As a side note, authenticating against the notarization API is a nightmare. You get a PKCS8 that you have to use to create/sign a JWT and you're basically on your own... I had to build a little node program just to craft the JWT...

Dude, go buy a used Mac mini for $150, sign your stuff with it, and move on.

We can talk all day about how this _shouldn’t_ be necessary, but you are tilting at windmills trying to get Apple signing to work without Apple hardware. You’ve definitely spent more of your time trying to make this work than if you’d just buy a cheap Mac mini.

Man, there are plenty of repos out there that sign and notarize on GitHub Actions. It’s not a unique nor unsolved problem.