No but if you want to distribute your app and hope to get any users at all then you need to sign/notarize your app then release it on the macos app store.
Those apps still have to go through the notarization process and occasionally release updates that do nothing except change the notarization.
And sometimes apple will just mess up your developer account so you can't do the notarization meaning the apps stop working for users until apple fixes their mistake.
Sorry but this isn't true in my experience, I've worked on 3 different native macOS apps at different companies in the last few years and all were signed, notarized and then distributed with Sparkle. At least one of those has pretty sizable DAU/MAU figures so you can definitely get users.
- Spend a few weeks troubleshooting with your users because Apple's notarization works on some machines and not others
- Now cycle through all apps adding only notarization/packaging changes instead of spending that time releasing real features / bug-fixes
- Repeat this each year because they keep changing their own requirements
- Randomly have apple shut down your development account so you can't release any updates. Go through 2 months of jumping through hoops over the phone including getting elevated to the top developer account support team and getting them to admit that their own rules have created impossible catch-22 scenarios that they can't change.
- End up having to create a brand new developer account
- Re-release all apps under new account's notarization
- Somehow convince users to download the new app just so they can get their updates because the old apps can't be auto-updated anymore
- Apple's changed their notarization process again so time to re-release all the apps again
- Continue to deal with customers who complain about issues that have been fixed years ago in the new updates that they aren't getting because they aren't using the right app.
- Spend time, resources and sanity to provide IT support to reassure users that no, they are infact still using the old app and they need to remove the old app and download the new app
- Apple's changed their notarization process again
All that, and the iOS app store is worse.
Dealing with Apple has cost us and our users our sanity.
No. Just no.
As for the other platforms, Android requires only about 2-3 weeks per year to keep apps releasable, And Windows requires only a few hours a year.
Everything we have is being reimplemented on the web now. Our first migrated app is being released in 4 months with another 2 new apps released shortly after (thanks to shared code). After some project post-mortem analysis early next year, and some v1.1s based on user feedback, we plan to start porting over all the others.
Yeah frustrating process for sure, I wasn't necessarily challenging those aspects, just that I hadn't seen many companies distributing mac apps through the mac app store (for many of the reasons above).
