Comment by _mlbt
1 year ago
I think Homebrew is the best solution for shipping open source Mac apps if you don't want to pay the developer fee or jump through any hurdles, assuming your users are technical enough to use it.
The alternative is not signing your binaries and explaining to users that they can run them by right clicking and selecting "Open" from the menu.
Unfortunately, getting users to install Homebrew is a hurdle that's hard to pass for what I'm dealing with. It's a non-starter if users have to open a terminal to install anything, even though Homebrew has a .pkg installer now. The users typically don't know what a terminal even is.
> The alternative is not signing your binaries and explaining to users that they can run them by right clicking and selecting "Open" from the menu.
That's what I'm doing now, and it's still an issue, unfortunately. Non-power users are not going to remember the right-click -> Open ritual when they just double-click on everything else.
And the warnings Gatekeeper shows also caused users to think their apps, and even computers, were broken or hacked.
Why aren't you just ... paying the 100$ a year to sign your app?
> I stopped updating my open-source Mac apps because I can't justify the cost of jumping over artificial hurdles Apple puts in place that ensure users can't run the apps they want to use. I have other hobbies where spending money actually gives me tangible goods and benefits versus paying an arbitrary yearly tax for the privilege to build stuff that ultimately benefits Apple.