Dilemma with the new Mac OS 10.15 Catalina

There are soo many dilemma with the the technical support lately. Sometime I wonder why the new OS update will cause more stir rather than bringing more sales >< Anyway, I’ll tell you a story about the issue with MAC update this time.

CATALINA HORROR

One day, Steam sent me email, notifying that I need to make sure my apps support 64 bit and notarization to make it works with the new OS, Catalina. I usually don’t pay much attention to OS update, because well, I have my apps in too many platform, and it’s a big hassle to confirm if it works in every new OS for every platform, unless there are a big notification that it will need urgent update like this or it won’t work anymore.

I thought it would be easy, like only turn the app to 64 bit and upload it to somewhere to get notarized. I WAS WRONG.

It’s very easy to turn the app to 64 bit, and all my apps on Steam started from HTTOYM (2015) are all 64 bit.
But then, the first notarization try ended failed. At first I thought I simply used a wrong SDK version, but that’s not that easy. The app needs to get the correct code sign first before notarized.

To do this code sign, we need to generate a certificate within the apple developer console (which cost 99 usd a year) but it’s ok as I already have it for iOS anyway. But that’s not all……..

After build the new app using the new SDK, I need to eliminate some files generated by the SDK that might bother the notarization progress, then code sign everything using the correct developer id certification (I got issue before cause idk why but there’s weird extra space that needs to be added on my developer id) then after finish everything, the next is…. proceed with the notarization.

NOTARIZATION HORROR

Tbh I already failed 3 times with this.

Basically it’s simple, I only need to upload the file to apple server. But it’s slow! I tried to use my ET Akio data to try because it’s the smallest, but it takes 30 minutes ish for the notarization. And then… ok let’s try the luck and see if it works or not this time 😕😕😥😥

After the notarization finished, I still need to staple the notarization result to the app itself before upload the new build to Steam.

Finish?

FINISH?

NO!

THE TRUE HORROR

Basically it will only finish for 1 build, while in my case, the games have each build for each language version.

This means, for Akio I need to reupload 4 build for the 4 languages it supports. Same for Takashi, then I also still have Kuon, Kurenai, and all my Eroolia and CAFE 0 Series. Imagine with the HTTOYM which now supports 7 languages (insert Death flag here) — in other words I need 14 hours ish only for HTTOYM game.

…is it really worth to do all of this?

…or maybe I should ask, is it really worth to ask developer to do all of this, Apple? 😭😭😭😭😭😭

For the meanwhile, I decide to learn first about how to notarize first while proceed with my other porting project T_T I can’t promise if I will make Catalina works with my games for now, as I haven’t succeeded yet as far with the notarization.

If it takes longer and messier than what I thought, I might drop all support for Catalina and later. My suggestion for now is simply, don’t update to Catalina yet T_T

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