My team is distributing a cross-platform app outside the Mac App Store via ZIP file. The app works perfectly on Windows, but on macOS, while the ZIP downloads and extracts without issue, the app refuses to open. Users see either the app appear in the dock then immediately disappear or a Gatekeeper prompt saying the developer cannot be verified. We suspect the root cause is related to code signing and/or notarization, but we're not entirely sure where the breakdown is occurring. We have a few questions as we work through this. For ZIP-based distribution outside the Mac App Store, is both a Developer ID certificate and Apple notarization required on current macOS versions? We've also seen references to using ditto instead of Finder's built-in Compress option when packaging the ZIP. Is that necessary to properly preserve the app bundle structure and extended attributes? Any guidance on where this process might be going wrong would be hugely appreciated. Thanks!

I have an app for iOS already on the AppStore and I'm trying to add a macOS version of it. The AppID prefix for this app is different than my Team ID. This mismatch was always fine for submitting my iOS app. However for some reason, the macOS version gets rejected when I upload it. It tells me the AppID prefix must match my Team ID. I do not control my TeamID and I do not control my AppID prefix, they are both given to me by Apple. Yet the error message tells me they must match. How do I get past this? Here is the error message: Validation failed Invalid code signing entitlements. Your application bundle's signature contains code signing entitlements that aren't supported on macOS. Specifically, the "APPID_PREFIX.MY_BUNDLE_ID" value for the com.apple.application-identifier key in "MY_PACKAGE" isn't supported. This value should be a string that starts with your Team ID, followed by a dot ('"), followed by the bundle ID. (ID: 930b77ae-099f-4798-a14a-2803f2a9be9e) Thanks in advance for any pointer.

Sharing a solution for a problem that took me a while to figure out. Problem: During development of a macOS 26 app that uses ScreenCaptureKit, the screen capture permissions were being reset after every build. Each time I compiled and ran the app from Xcode, I had to re-authorize screen capture in System Settings. CGPreflightScreenCaptureAccess() would return false even though I'd just granted permission minutes ago. Root cause: I was using ad-hoc code signing during development. macOS ties screen capture permissions to the app's code signing identity. With ad-hoc signing, the identity changes on every build, so the system treats each build as a "new" app. Solution: Switch to an Apple Development certificate for debug builds. In Xcode: Build Settings → Code Signing Identity → Debug → set to "Apple Development" Make sure your development team is selected After this change, the signing identity remains stable across builds, and screen capture permissions persist. This might be related to the broader issue discussed in this forum about ScreenCapture permissions disappearing — if other developers are seeing permissions vanish, it's worth checking whether the code signing identity is changing between sessions.

We've noticed, that size of our ipa started to vary from time to time. We've found that all the difference was in the LC_CODE_SIGNATURE command under the _LINKEDIT segment of binary. The main reason of that change was the different number of hash slots due to different value of page size: 4096 on macOS SEQUOIA and 16384 on macOS TAHOE. So the size of the final binary was dependent on the machine, it was produced on. I didn't find out any information on why the default page size changed on TAHOE. Apple’s codesign supports a --pagesize argument. For regular builds that setting can be passed via OTHER_CODE_SIGN_FLAGS=--pagesize 16384. But it seems that xcodebuild export ...` completely ignores it: i've tried to pass invalid size (not the power of two), and the export still succeded. I've also managed to get xcodebuild logs via log stream --style compact --predicate 'process == "xcodebuild" OR process == "codesign"' --level trace They have no occurrences of --pagesize: 2026-03-24 13:43:27.236 Df xcodebuild[93993:a08c53] [IDEDistributionPipeline:verbose] invoking codesign: <NSConcreteTask: 0x8a1b21bd0; launchPath='/usr/bin/codesign', arguments='( "-f", "-s", 8C38C4A2CB0388A3DB6BAEFE438F20E044EE6CB2, "--entitlements", "/var/folders/w_/5t00sclx2vlcm4_fvly7wvh00000gn/T/XcodeDistPipeline.~~~T3Dcdf/entitlements~~~c2srXx", "--preserve-metadata=identifier,flags,runtime,launch-constraints,library-constraints", "--generate-entitlement-der", "--strip-disallowed-xattrs", "-vvv", "/var/folders/w_/5t00sclx2vlcm4_fvly7wvh00000gn/T/XcodeDistPipeline.~~~T3Dcdf/Root/Payload/App.app/Frameworks/FLEXWrapper.framework" )'> So here I have some questions: How is the default page size selected? Why the default page size may change between SEQUOIA and TAHOE? How to provide page size to xcodebuild's export or it's a bug that it doesn't look at the value of OTHER_CODE_SIGN_FLAGS?

Your development team has reached the maximum number of registered iPhone devices. I am use the free provisioning file. So how can I delete old device and use my new iPhone to develop my app. only way is use a paid account? or register a new Apple ID?