Max Standalone in the App Store (2019)

I got my metronome app approved and on sale in the App Store in November of 2019. In addition to the excellent article provided here, there are a few adjustments that need to be made (or at least updates) in order to get a standalone into the app store. Here are my thoughts / experiences

1) Downgrade to Max 8.0.8 to build the app. This is because later 8 updates provide Implicit frameworks which are not able to be successfully submitted at this point. More on this later, if relevant

2) Max 7 will not work at all as at least Catalina can't open the .mxo's

3) Notarization for the app store is not necessary, however codesigning with entitlements is

4) It is only necessary to codesign once using the --deep and --force flags. Max has its own signatures so --force will overwrite them. Signing with --deep on your entire app will also sign all the nested frameworks and .mxo's You do not need to sign each individually

5) You can ( though I do not recommend this - I did it after a while to prevent going insane) make adjustments to the underscore in ad_coreaudio in your Max 8.0.8 and it will flow through to your app build. You can even add the Identifier lines to the .mxos but I would not advise tampering more with Max than necessary, although you will presumably only be using it to build your apps. I also kept a spare .dmg with the complete and untampered 8.0.8 on my desktop and had to use it several times.

6) xattr is necessary to fix the resource fork error caused by many custom .icns files but you only need to use it once with xattr -lr -cr

7) IMPORTANT - hardened codesigning is not necessary unless you need your app notarized, which is not necessary for the app store as appstoreconnect and the manual review provide all the checks that notarization would. Hardened codesigning will likely brick your app.

8) Apps made with Max 8 load much slower than those built with 6 and my menubar kept crashing after codesigning. I realized that this might have been specific to my machine so I submitted the app anyway. Time will tell if this continues to be a problem. I'm working on this at the moment so more to come later.

9) As another commenter pointed out, building and codesigning is not advisable on iCloud folders. To be safe, build to your app to your local directory.

10) It's a good idea to add "Copyright (human-readable)" key to your main app's plist. I'm not sure this is necessary yet. Also you need to increase or change bundle versions every time you upload a package to appstoreconnect. The frameworks' plists should have a bundle name too but apparently that's not necessary as I did not want to go through the loops involving adding that row as it messed up the symlinks for some reason.