[chedabob]

Apple issue the certificate but you never supply them with the private key. There's nothing stopping them from issuing a certificate with their own key though. It's not like Android where the signing key has to match otherwise apps can't be updated (amongst other things).

They must be doing some re-signing on their side because the binary you upload is huge and it goes through optimisation on Apple's side so the user has a much smaller download.

[lrem]

Do I understand correctly that Apple is already doing what Google wants to start doing here?

[chedabob]

They do something but it's not really comparable to Google's signing system. In the case of Google, developers voluntarily give Google the keys (or have them generated), and it's explicitly clear that Google will take your uploaded APK file and sign it themselves.

With Apple it's a big more of an unknown. In terms of Bitcode, I can't see how Apple could take your binary, "recompile" the Bitcode into a device specific format, whilst still preserving the signature.

From a 2 minute test of an iOS app I work on, I can see that what's downloaded on an M1 Mac has changed quite a bit from what I uploaded. The most obvious thing is the code signature on the binary itself has been replaced with one issued by Apple and isn't the one my build server added.

[ianlevesque]

> I can see that what's downloaded on an M1 Mac has changed quite a bit from what I uploaded. The most obvious thing is the code signature on the binary itself has been replaced with one issued by Apple and isn't the one my build server added.

So yes, Apple is already doing what Google wants to.