| Kudos to these developers. I wish them success. If I can do a small derail: I and some contributors had this mostly working a few iOS versions ago with isign (https://github.com/isignpy/isign). This is befor notarization. Announced several times to HN but didn’t seem to be interesting to many people. This was a spin-off from our work at a testing company. I’m not an iOS developer. (That may be why I could never see what to do with this.) I tried to make it into something, but I could never figure out who actually wanted this. What potential uses are foreseen for rcodedesign? - Weird custom signing. We did a project for a large financial company to make it compatible with hardware security module signing, but they never implemented it due to the pandemic changing priorities, and then someone discovered there was a little-known MacOS API to do something similar anyway, so our project was shelved. (We got paid though). - “Alternative” app distribution. From time to time I am contacted by people who run alternative app stores, either distributing hacked versions of paid apps, or who run app store in countries under embargo from Western countries. (They have banks, their customers have iPhones, they want a way to distribute iOS apps). The ethical issues and legal risks seemed significant so I never pursued that. If someone wants to go do that, I guess that’s a use case. - Build pipeline. Maybe, but you can’t fully build a iOS app on Linux so it didn’t seem like a win. - Mass app production. I am aware of some app white-labeling concepts that used isign back in the day. There was a guy who had a generic app for local news outlets, and essentially uploaded it to the App Store dozens of times under different names, for new versions. isign was more scriptable (and I wrote a multi-resign option for this use case) but I didn’t see a way to turn this into a business. - Testing on real devices. Even the original use case (re-signing apps to run on local device labs) has been mostly obviated. Hosting and scripting on MacOS has gotten better. - ??? something else? I even reached out to saurik about this at a conference. Cydia worked on jailbroken devices, so it didn’t need signing. To my surprise saurik was angry with me. He said that many, many companies had figured this out internally so he was skeptical we would ever release it. (We did!) So… again kudos, but what can we do with this? I’m not dissing it, I’m genuinely baffled. I also thought this would be important and useful but couldn’t figure it out. |
This is my use case (I implemented notarization API support in rcodesign).
I build MacOS apps entirely from Linux using my own bespoke toolchain, based on osxcross. It can potentially be used to build iOS apps too (I tested it in jest some time ago, but I don't use it for anything serious). This is all done without any of the apple binaries. The toolchain uses nix to pull everything together, clang and other llvm utilities as a compiler, lld as a linker, rcodesign for signing and notarization, and the macOS/iOS SDK for headers and tbd files used for linking. And a bit of custom glue code in bash to hold it all together.
The reason I do this is simple: My CI is entirely Linux-based. I already cross-build windows binary from Linux. This makes CI so much easier, as everything can be containerized, and thus run on most standard CI offerings. I only need to bring Windows and macOS VMs to run test suites. Because VM bringup is slow and somewhat fragile, pushing everything to run in Linux containers is a huge win.
It also gives me a lot more control when things inevitably break. Being open source, rcodesign can be trivially changed, be it to add more logging, or add new features. For instance, rcodesign has a remote signing mechanism! This isn't something that exists in the normal codesign implementation.