Atom will not start on Catalina -- Needs notarization

[directionless]

Hi! I was taking a quick look at Atom, and I noticed that the current macOS download is not notarized. Notarization is apple's current malware scanning service. There's some information up at https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/notarizing_your_app_before_distribution

While there are some ways for end users to skip this check, it would be best practice to notarized directly.

I've gone and notarized the 1.41.0 download (md5:622281426390b6649dee88807b5a1434), it passes with the current apple rules. These are set to get a bit stricter in January 2020.

I'm not sure what your build and release process. Perhaps electron or xcode have simple workflows. My usual workflow is something like:

xcrun altool --username $APPLEID --password @env:N_PASS --asc-provider $TEAMID --notarize-app --file ~/Downloads/atom-mac.zip  --primary-bundle-id com.github.atom
xcrun altool --username $APPLEID --password @env:N_PASS --asc-provider $TEAMID  --notarization-info $REQUEST_GUUID
staple Atom.app

[geoffrey4444]

I also have this issue. I really like atom, but as a new user, I almost threw it away after it triggered Catalina’s “cannot be checked for malware” alert. Any chance the macOS build can be notarized?

[lkashef]

Hello @directionless thanks for the report!

Atom has been recently notarized, you can access it right away by downloading the nightly version and it will take it's cycle to go from nightly to beta and beta to stable.

[jusjosgra]

I tried installing Atom Nightly today on Catalina 10.15.2 and still got an error telling me that Atom couldn't be checked for malicious content.

[lkashef]

Hey @jusjosgra, one of Atom's indirect dependencies notarization was breaking, so it broke Atom's notarization. The dugite team is working on it and should have a fix soon, so we can turn re-enable notarization on Atom.

Reference: #20390