Guide to distribute Electron apps made simple
Moved to electron-osx-sign-guide
It is worth noting that most of the steps here taken have made unnecessary with packaging tools and signing tools. The documents here attached are targeted as specifications of stepwise procedures that eventually lead to distribution of products in a conceptual flow. Also, the way of categorizing target platforms here is slightly different from the current Electron documents; this is so that we may structure the steps slightly more logically. The packaging of Electron app is out of the scope of this document.
In the current phase of working/drafting, only Electron platforms darwin and mas are to be covered; however, your contributions are very welcome to our project. Additional thanks go to @jasonhinkle and @zcbenz for making a leap start. The guides here generally follows what described in the Electron documents.
To distribute apps inside the Mac App Store, Electron platform mas must be used. Please avoid platform darwin here as protected calls in Electron forbid the app from being accepted.
The workflow here is branched into two parts:
Development-signed Application is chosen when testing a product on registered devices; Mac App Store Deployment, when submitting a product for review by the iTunes Connect. Please navigate into each to know more about the manual distribution process.
NB: There is a difference between the two and only one could be taken at a time. Though the actual app being the same, making for development and for distribution are different. It is more easily appreciated that during iOS app development only registered devices could run test apps installed; this mechanism now acts very much the same on the development for the Mac App Store.
For Electron version < 1.1.1
As solution made in electron#5601 has not yet been announced in earlier versions, some of what mentioned above could be discarded. Please follow the guide below to distribute your app:
To distribute apps outside the Mac App Store, Electron platform darwin should be used. However, platform mas should not emit warnings if used to be distributed outside the Mac App Store; only less feature than in the full-fledged platform darwin is available.
NB: The changes introduced in Electron version 1.1.1 does not affect distribution outside the Mac App Store. Please feel free to follow the guide above.