How to Submit an Electron 7 App to the Apple App Store
Friitig,01 Novämber, 2019

Following my last post I wasn’t much successful with my first electron app, elektro. But I wasn’t totally wrong: you do need the entitlements to reflect the permission to open selected files. However, my impossibility to test the MAS/.pkg locally left me in a loop with the apple store. First the wanted the dock too (tray only app was not something they liked, especially that you have to right click to quit) and I did change that but – in my last exchange – we are back to the tester not being able to open files with it so I am at a loss.

The good side is that 1) elektro has at least a working, signed and notarized dmg 2) I learned a lot about the process and electron packager.

This leads to my next adventure: I have now submitted trommel (no is not an alien name, it means drums in German :) )a really minimalist MP3 player to the Apple store. The first error I got was just about the website (easy to fix) but a more worrying one is:

Your app app links against the following non-public framework(s):  
CAContext  
CALayerHost  
NSAccessibilityRemoteUIElement  
NSNextStepFrame  
NSThemeFrame  
NSURLFileTypeMappings

Other people seems to have the same issue umh. I have now updated the app to Electron 7 and re-submitted. Fingers crossed again but somehow I feel more optimist this time :) at least there was no issue in running the app. That is really very annoying because not being able to replicate the issues can be very frustrating. I have also decided to change the nav of this site to include a link to the list of all the apps that I completed. The iOS and Google Play ones were definitely easier to submit because. could test on Xcode.

Electron has been a bit more challenging but let’s not forget that a notarized dmg is perfectly fine for apps distribution. On mobile apps you don’t have this option at all.