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You can still distribute macOS apps on your own, just have to get users to trust you.

Why do you want to publish on the Mac App Store? If you think there's an advantage, then the costs are justified.



Sadly, this does not work for everything, as users can't always override the notarization requirement that was introduced in Catalina. I had the issue with Aerial, it's a screensaver which, technically, is a plugin and not an application. As such, the user will never get prompted for anything (and I'm putting aside the compounding effect/slight madness that screensavers are now a plugin to an appex to two different applications with different permissions set ! Oh Catalina...).

The only solution was to sign/notarize it, and I have to admit it took me more than a few days to figure it out, as finding exactly what works for distributing a plugin was not documented. And this is just to distribute a usable plugin on GitHub !




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