Widening our Distribution Channels: Microsoft Store and Homebrew

I had considered submitting Konjugate to different package managers about a month ago, but I didn't/couldn't go through with them because I perceived a lot of conditions as entry barriers. I vaguely remember reading Homebrew requiring the 75 stars or 30 forks to accept the pull request to get into their system. Well, I may have misunderstood what it actually meant at the time.

About a week ago, I received an email notification from a GitHub-Actions bot that was not initiated by me. It was from AppImage and they wanted to add Konjugate into their catalogue to showcase apps using AppImage format. And the best part is, I didn't have to initiate it.

For those of you who don't know, AppImage is a portable Linux application format that let's you run apps on all major Linux distributions simply by double clicking on the app; no need to "install" it. Although AppImage catalogue is not a package manager, it prompted me to think about revising the idea.

After reading about it, it seemed that it would be easy to get into WinGet and Chocolatey, which are the only two package managers for Windows that I know of. It was not too hard to configure GitHub workflow to automatically submit to these, and Konjugate has been submitted there. At the time of writing this article, Konjugate has passed all automated checks and is waiting for manual approval on both.

After that was done, it occured to me, why don't we just attempt to publish it to Microsoft Store? I read about it, turns out there is no paywall to submit and the reviews are faster there. I spent some time logging into Microsoft Partner portal, filling their form and submitting it there. I got a review asking to submit screenshots taken from a Windows machine instead of one taken from other platforms. I resubmitted it, and within 24 hours, Konjugate got into Microsoft Store!

This also takes care of our problem related to the blue popup warning, titled "Windows protected your PC". The only drawback is that we have to wait for Microsoft's approval everytime we create a release.

Now, the popup warning on Windows is easy for ordinary users to get around. Microsoft has not made it extremely difficult to install packages that are downloaded from external sources and not signed. But on macOS, it is a very different beast.

On Apple Silicon macs, if you try to open an unsigned DMG-file downloaded from an external source, you don't get a warning. You get a message stating that the package "is damaged". And that is a huge problem; when people see such a message, it is not intuitive for people to navigate to System Settings → Privacy & Security and click on Open Anyway. With a message like that, they wouldn't know what the real issue is!

I think it is still a bit too early to pay for Apple's developer program just to get it signed. Instead, I started re-reading about how Homebrew works. Turns out, you don't really need to have 75 stars or 30 forks to get brew install to configure Konjugate; we just have to create our own tap. It took me a short while, but I managed to get GitHub workflow to build/update it automatically. Now, people can just run the following command to install Konjugate on their system.

brew install --cask zenineasa/konjugate/konjugate

When you install it with brew, the right warning shows up on the terminal during installation. Post installation, Konjugate ends up in the Applications folder, and it works just like any other app, signed or unsigned!

The update workflow within Konjugate application, and installation instructions on the website have been updated in accordance with these new distribution channels. I hope it will be easier for folks