I assume this refers to having an Apple Developer account, which is USD99 a year. Some of the points may be valid - support costs versus expected revenue, etc, but mostly these points seem really weak.

The headlines feels like it should be “Sorry macOS users, it doesn’t make sense for me to support macOS”. The rest seems like a bit of clickbaity hyperbole and throwing in a bunch of semi-related arguments.

You have to pay for the signing. You also have to wait several minutes for the notarization process to finish, and submit every program to Apple.

All malware checkers must read the app binary to be effective. Apple forces the app to be scanned once, not one million times on one million desktops.

Apple also forces every single app for macOS to be submitted to them. Seeing as how Apple has historically been willing to compete with the applications on their platform, that seems to at least have the potential to be a problem.

If they want to use your compiled binary to compete with you somehow, buying one copy per app they want to put out of business seems like a better option instead of setting up a whole notirization scheme to trick you into uploading it to them.

I paid hundreds of dollars for a Windows codesigning certificate. The Apple developer program is a relative bargain. If $99/year is stopping the developer this developer I’m not really sure what to say.

Notarization is free and in my experience it can take as little as 60 seconds for it to complete.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/notarizin...

I assumed you need to be in "Apple Developer Program" to notarize apps.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/notarizin...

https://developer.apple.com/support/developer-id/

https://developer.apple.com/support/compare-memberships/

https://developer.apple.com/support/roles/

You have to pay the $99/yr to be in the developer program, to access to the notarization service.

Also I heard that you need fairly new Mac hardware to actually use the notarization service.

Now try to integrate it with your CI, because the feedback that the notarization is complete is sent via email.

(FWIW: I don’t have first-hand experience, though I still have an Apple developer license. Probably won’t renew.)

I've scripted this for work, but it does have to run on a mac (for me a late 2013 Macbook pro), which would make it difficult to do in the cloud.

There is a utility (written in Java) that you run through "xcrun" that can upload, check status, fetch and "staple" the result. It usually turns around within 15 minutes for me, but I haven't measured the exact time. (I'm just polling every five minutes.) Check the "log" file, because it can successfully notarize and then report in the log that your signatures are all screwed up.

Details here if anyone needs to do this: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/notarizing_y...

Actually, that feels like a bigger issue: Does all of this have to run on a mac? That basically precludes build farms, since Apple doesn't make the xserve line anymore and doesn't play nice with virtualization. I guess you could build a farm of desktops...

I’ve long given up on supporting macOS.

You’re not kidding about the email. It’s email or manual polling, no webhooks. Strange. Well, I can suddenly imagine a lot of CI servers will be running SMTP. ;-)

> After uploading your app, the notarization process typically takes less than an hour. When the process completes, you receive an email indicating the outcome. Additionally, you can use altool with the notarization-history flag to inspect the status of all of your notarization requests

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/notarizing_y...

Electron-notarize polls: https://github.com/electron/electron-notarize/blob/b3156157f...

I am not a Mac developer, but this doc https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/notarizin... claims you need 10.13 or above, which seems to run on 2009-2010 hardware. I know the latest version of Xcode 10 requires 10.14, but even that is about ~2012 hardware and newer. I think the upcoming 10.15 also has the same hardware requirements as 10.14.

Anyway, even if we say 10.14, I wouldn't call 2012 models fairly new.

If it's anything like iOS dev, you need Apple hardware to access the tools to sign your builds. You can't just run osx in a VM.

You could potentially outsource the signing to a CI service that has the requisite Apple hardware though.

Well, you can... using hacked VMware and Hackintosh tools, it's just illegal :)