Sign Mac Releases for Gatekeeper

[fjab]

This is something for later, but I just want to mention it here so everyone has heard of it.

MacOS has something called "Gatekeeper", where it only lets you open apps that are signed with a trusted developer ID. As long as we don't have that, new users are greeted with a warning like this:

Anyone who ever used more obscure third party software on Mac knows how to get around this and tell Gatekeeper that there's an exception for this particular app, but I could imagine that e.g. corporate machines don't even allow the user to bypass the check.

From what I see on the Gatekeeper site (above), we might need to be part of Apple Developer program, which costs around 100 bucks per year.

[fjab]

Note this technically violates our user story of "no unnecessary hurdles for installation", but given that the MacOS user base is still smaller, I'd ignore it for the moment. What do you think?

[edongashi]

Hah, of course you must pay an annual fee! How Apple of Apple.

[cristianberneanu]

Yes, code signing (for Mac and Windows) is something that we should address at some point, but I wanted to postpone this discussion for the next iteration, as it involves a lot of complexity and bureaucracy, and it will get very noisy.
Once we add it, it will require constant maintenance from our part (certificates will expire), which is not great in the long term.

[fjab]

Yes, agree it's not to be addressed at this point. Just adding it so we have it in front of us.