Notarizing Your App Before Distribution
Here&#x27;s how I&#x27;m understanding this:<p>Currently, you have three options to distribute software on macOS.<p>1) You register as an Apple Developer (which costs $100 a year) and distribute through the Mac App Store, where Apple will do their review&#x2F;automated scans&#x2F;whatever, resign the app with their certificate, and then distribute it.<p>2) You register as an Apple Developer but <i>don&#x27;t</i> distribute through the app store, and instead sign your software with the certificate you get through the developer program. It looks like, starting in macOS 10.14.5, you&#x27;ll have to upload your software to Apple to be &quot;notarized&quot; if you want to distribute this way. It sounds like it&#x27;s only for new software at first, but eventually old software will stop working unless it&#x27;s notarized.<p>3) You don&#x27;t register as an Apple Developer, and you just build and distribute software however you like. Currently, if a user tries to run your software it simply won&#x27;t run, and the user has to know to go into system settings and manually give it permission. What isn&#x27;t clear (at least to me) is weather this option will remain unchanged. This sentence:<p>&gt; In a future version of macOS, notarization will be required by default for all software.<p>kind of makes it sound like like <i>all</i> software will have to be notarized, which implies that you have to be an Apple Developer to distribute at all. But saying &quot;by default&quot; makes it seem like there&#x27;s some kind of option given to the user, so maybe it just means that software that&#x27;s distributed by a registered Apple Developer but isn&#x27;t notarized just moves down into the third tier of software that has to be explicitly allowed to run by the user.<p>It seems like Apple&#x27;s ideal model is that if a user wants to run software of any kind, it has to go through them (like iOS). I don&#x27;t <i>think</i> that&#x27;s what they&#x27;re announcing for macOS, but it&#x27;s a little hard to say for sure.