Submitting to Mac App Store possible?

[jjsonick]

Hi all, I see there's some old threads about the possibility of submitting Mac Renpy apps the Apple's Mac App Store, but I can't find any reports of success or failure with trying this (please point me to them if they do exist).

Is it the case that it's technically possible, by following the similar steps of preparing a Unity Mac app for the Store, but that the license Renpy is released under is a sticking point for being accepted?

Has anyone tried and been accepted/rejected?

Thanks,
JJ

[jack_norton]

I'm getting a new mac soon to test another engine, but I plan to try submitting some games. BTW I think there's a new code signing tool that doesn't require those steps anymore.

[jjsonick]

I'm getting a new mac soon to test another engine, but I plan to try submitting some games. BTW I think there's a new code signing tool that doesn't require those steps anymore.

Oh, cool, I'll look into that, and would be glad to hear how your experience goes.

[jack_norton]

Well so far my experience has been a nightmare, though I'm not a uber-clever-geek of course, so maybe is just me. However after wasting 1h with certificates/keychains/provisioning files and commandline codesign, I got nothing done. Will keep trying but if is such a pain I guess will probably give up... I have better things to do with my time

[PyTom]

Mac code signing is something I want to add to the launcher, but it hasn't risen to be a high priority yet. (One reason is because my mac mini is now obsolete, and I need to get a new one to do this. And giving money to Apple... ugh.)

[jack_norton]

I know, I just bought a new one too though I have to say, it was much better than my "ancient" one from 2007... I was tempted to install Win7 on it with dualboot
What I don't get is why on Earth they assume anyone has time to waste reading 150983210 page docs. Can't they just make a simple step-by-step tutorial?
1. create your certificate bla bla
2. validate it bla bla
3. download and add to keychain etc

right now, either I read all those pages or I give up. So far, I've given up
The main reason I'm doing it is that once Mountain Lion is out (next month so very soon) in theory all Ren'Py games won't run anymore on it thanks to the great Gatekeeper new feature...

[FatUnicornGames]

@Jack - Maybe I am confused, but are you saying Ren'Py games won't run on Macs anymore in the next generation? I have a Mac and that could really screw up my plans.

[PyTom]

They will, of course. For a while, there may be a warning people have to dismiss when running a game - just like they'll get when running any other pre-Mountain Lion app.

Depending on what other people are doing, I might do something like running a kickstarter or indiegogo campaign to fund updates to Mac and iOS support.

The big annoying problem is that the codesigning stuff is mac-specific - so you'll need a mac to build a signed mac app. That irks me a little.

[Camille]

Re: Gatekeeper... It's not really that bad:



The problem is that the default is the second option, "Mac App Store and identified developers". So the average user downloading a Ren'Py game might be like "Why won't it run? " because they never bothered changing the setting.

Mac support is really important to me (and other Mac users, I'm sure) so if you did run a Kickstarter or start a fundraising campaign for Mac and iOS support, I'd be 100% behind you.

[jack_norton]

Yes but I heard rumors that the next one (Sea Lion? ROFL they're running out of animals...) will completely disable running unsigned apps unless you hack with the command line, something that "the average joe user" will never do. Is a rumor but knowing Apple I'm not surprised anymore of anything.

A mac/iOS campaign would be a guaranteed success (well unless you ask $100k ). Beside donating a good amount I can also offer my games as prize for other users and I'm sure Hanako and C.Love who are more press-friendly than me would be able to spread the word quite a bit.

[PyTom]

The bigger problem - to me - is that the the message it gives for unsigned apps is pretty nasty.



That's kind of nasty - and while I think enthusiasts won't have a problem disabling gatekeeper, a lot of people will take that advice. I kind of want to play it by ear, here - wait some time after ML comes out, and see if this has a big impact, or if people just disable it and move on.

(Plus, I'm fairly busy for the next few months.)

[papillon]

The problem is, it's quite hard to measure how much impact stuff like that has, since most people who encoutner this nonsense never bother telling us about it, they just delete the files and run away in fear. (since similar problems happen on windows with some 'protection' software)

[PyTom]

I'm kind of hoping that there will be some sort of sense formed when ML is actually out - is the first thing people do to disable gatekeeper, or are there a large number of people that run with it turned on?

[jack_norton]

When Windows did something similar with their UAC, people quickly realized it was a BS and 99% people turned it off. But that was popping up for ANY action that required administration privilege. Now in this case only happens with unsigned apps, so I'm willing to bet that maybe for an "established indie" like me, Hanako, etc they might even trust us, but it would prevent many unknown people to have their games played and I think is really bad...

[jack_norton]

So today managed to codesign rather easily, I didn't understand that I needed to use my certificate NAME, and not the full path+.cer file!
Probably you (pytom) already know this, but some stuff in Info.plist probably needs to be changed to be submitted to appstore (and probably also to verify the codesign, not sure). The Bundle identifier is org.renpy.launcher and probably should be possible to set that from the Build command into something more custom (like com.winterwolves.planetstronghold) also the Copyright field is empty (again enough to have a text field in the new launcher).