Need To Ship Your Qt App For Mac

And one More Thing(tm): “Also you need to sign your app by your signature(certificate) as Mac developer. You have to get such certificate from developer.apple.com, pay $99 for year subscription if you haven’t done it yet.” Since one needs the 99$ subscription anyway as to be able to deploy into the Mac App Store my question is rather academic, but just curios: are you sure you need a certificate (signed) by Apple? From the public Apple developer docs: “However, if the only reason you need a certificate is for a signing identity to use with Mac OS X, you can create your own identity by using the Certificate Assistant, which is provided as part of the Keychain Access application. ” with the subsequent caveats: “A self-signed certificate created with the Certificate Assistant is not recognized by users’ operating systems as a valid certificate for any purpose other than validating the designated requirement of your signed code.” Chapter “Obtaining a Signing Identity” in: Sounds to me like you can create and sign your Certificate yourself, no?

Or are there Mac App Store specific requirements (which are non-public) which require you to have your Certificate signed by Apple, as you suggest? Thanks, Oliver.

If a prospective customer downloads your software onto Mac OS X 10.8 and it hasn’t been signed, they will see a scary warning: Not good. To run unsigned software they need to go into Mac OS X PreferencesSecurity & PrivacyGeneral and change Allow applications downloaded from Mac App store and identified developers to Anywhere: Or they need to right/Ctrl click and see another scary warning. Double plus not good. This is the new Mac Gatekeeper system in action. Apple being Apple, Gatekeeper defaults to only allowing users to run software they have downloaded off the Internet if it has been signed. This could have a big effect on your conversion rate on Mac.

Need To Ship Your Qt App For Macbook

So if you are shipping software for the Mac, you really need to sign it. Apple fanboys will tell this is a sensible way for Apple to control software quality. A valid certificate shows that your software hasn’t been tampered with and, if it turns out to be malware, Apple can revoke your certificate. The more cynical might see it as a way for Apple to exert even greater control over Mac developers than it already does, while simultaneously extorting $99 per year from each and every one of them.

Make your own mind up on that one. I have now managed to sign my software, ready for its next release. I should have done it months ago. But I expected the process to be so tedious that it has taken me this long to get around to it. And it was every bit as mind-numbingly tedious as I expected trying to find a few useful nuggets amongst the acres of Apple documentation. I found some useful stuff in blogs, but it was quite fragmented. So I have thrown together these notes in the hope that it saves someone else a few hours going round in circles.

Note that I am not currently submitting my software to the Mac App Store, so I don’t cover that here. Also my software is developed in C/Qt using Qt Creator, rather than Objective-C/Cocoa using XCode, and my approach reflects that. Sign up for ($99 per year). Doesn’t matter if you already paid through the nose for a Windows authenticode certificate.

Need To Ship Your Qt App For Mac Mac

AppNeed to ship your qt app for macbook

Gatekeeper only accepts Apple certificates, so you have no choice. On the plus side, you do get other benefits, including downloading new OS upgrades for free. You need Mac OS X 10.8 so you can test that your signing works. If you have an Apple Developer Connection subscription, you can download 10.8 for free (get a code from the ADC downloads area and using it in the Mac App Store). I found the upgrade from 10.6 to 10.8 was surprisingly painless (Microsoft eat your heart out).

Request your Apple certificates and install them into your Keychain. You can do this from Xcode (instructions ). You may need to upgrade Xcode to a recent version. Use the codesign command line tool to sign:. Every framework in your.app bundle. Every plugin in your.app bundle.

Need To Ship Your Qt App For Mac

Your.app file I believe you can do this as part of your Xcode build. But I prefer a shell script.