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Comment by jermaustin1 | Hacker News Reader

Why wouldn't you find a person with a Mac to sign the package? An apple developer account is only $100/year.

I feel that is certainly worth it for a software developer that does any meaningful business on the platform. Maybe you don't get much Mac users, but if you did, I'd definitely look into it.

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Not everybody writing software for a platform is doing business on it. Many apps are free.

Then again I've never really understood the point of free (as in beer) software that's not also open source (or at least source available), so personally I think dropping platform support for a [free, cross-platform] application rather than simply distributing a tarball for users to do as they wish with is a bit dramatic.

Personally though I think it's weird that so many people are okay with distributing on platforms they don't even own. It's particularly rampant in cross-platform dev - I don't understand how anyone can feel comfortable just publishing an app on Android and/or iOS when they've never tested it on a real device, to talk of actually collecting money for it.

To clarify, my app is free and open source. There's nothing really preventing users from building the app themselves, and some of them do that. But building yourself is not something most users can do. So when talking about "dropping support", I mean specifically stopping doing Mac builds myself. (Or rather not creating new builds for M1 Mac and similar, I'm okay with doing builds for old x86)

> Personally though I think it's weird that so many people are okay with distributing on platforms they don't even own.

It's not very comfortable, and I had a lot of inner discussions about this. I originally supported only Linux and Windows (platform I use and test on regularly), but inevitably Mac users came and wanted to use the app too. It's quite difficult to reject such users when in theory a simple cross-build does not seem so difficult.

As mentioned before I'm using Electron and fortunately it does shield you from majority of platform specific bugs, so not testing each and every release on Mac turned out mostly OK. There are other issues though - Mac is very opinionated and many things / conventions are very different from Linux/Windows. As a result a simple cross build of my app is quite "foreign element" and users ask for mac specific features. My eventual solution was a compromise of "I provide builds but don't implement any mac specialties".

Surely a contributor has a Mac, and could take over code signing, and pushing that into your dist or bin directory?

I would think it would definitely be worth putting up an issue, asking if any have a Mac for that reason, especially since you have users actually asking for Mac builds.

GitHub says my project has 34 contributors, but in reality it's a one-man show, just like the majority of open source software. I would of course welcome if somebody would do the signing, but nobody stepped up to do it.

>An apple developer account is only $100/year.

When the other operating systems have options that are entirely free of cost, that's not as good of a deal as you think.

How do you sign for free for Windows? When I last looked at certs they were as expensive if not more, and they still wouldn’t solve the SmartScreen “not frequently downloaded” warning problem

> only $100/year

That is an absolute robbery for something which should be free.

Code signing isn't free. It never has been free, and most code signing certificates are 300-500/yr.

Apple is the one who wants the code signed so they should pay.

$100 is very expensive compared to the other platforms. These licensing fees destroy the majority of open-source projects geared around said platforms, sadly.

I'm pretty sure only Android is cheaper.

Last I checked Microsoft's signing prices were much higher than Apple's

$100 is lot of money in many parts of the world, specially if your app is free.

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