[hkpack]

I have the opposite experience - on macOS you can guarantee what users will see when you distribute your notarized app, while on Windows you cannot for undefined time.

How often do you notarize your apps? Why does the speed matter at all? In my cases it takes 2 seconds for the notarization to complete.

[makeitdouble]

The article is about iOS, and getting your notorization in 2 seconds or weeks is IMHO a big difference.

There's obviously simple cases where the iOS notorization also flies in 2 secs, but there seems to be enough tougher cases:

https://www.reddit.com/r/iOSProgramming/comments/1l9m7jd/how...

[drysart]

The length of time notarization takes depends primarily upon how large and complicated your app is, and how different is from previous versions of the same application you've previously notarized. The system seems to recognize large blocks of code that it's already analyzed and cleared and doesn't need to re-analyze. How much your binary churns between builds can greatly influence how fast your subsequent notarizations are.

A brand new developer account submitting a brand new application for notarization for the first time can expect the process might take a few days; and it's widely believed that first time notarizations require human confirmation because they do definitely take longer if submitted on a weekend or on a holiday. This is true even for extremely small, trivial applications. (Though I can tell you from personal experience that whatever human confirmation they're doing isn't very deep, because I've had first time notarizations on brand new developer accounts get approved even when notarizing a broken binary that doesn't actually launch.)

And of course sometimes their servers just go to shit and notarizations across the board all take significantly longer than normal, and it's not your fault at all. Apple's developer tooling support is kinda garbage.

[Someone]

> I've had first time notarizations on brand new developer accounts get approved even when notarizing a broken binary that doesn't actually launch

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/notarizin... (emphasis added):

“Notarize your macOS software to give users more confidence that the Developer ID-signed software you distribute has been checked by Apple for malicious components. _Notarization_of_macOS_software_is_not_App_Review. The Apple notary service is an automated system that scans your software for malicious content, checks for code-signing issues, and returns the results to you quickly.”

⇒ It seems notarization is static analysis, so they don’t need to launch the process.

Also, in some sense a program that doesn’t launch should pass notarization because, even though it may contain malware, that’s harmless because it won’t run.

[robenkleene]

I went through the comment there, all of those look like the most likely explanation is just bugs in the notarization system.