I’m attempting to notarize my first macOS application for direct distribution outside the Mac App Store. I now have several submissions stuck indefinitely in In Progress, with no logs and no way to cancel them.
The application is an Electron app containing:
- Standard Electron and Chromium components
- Native components written in Rust
- A Swift helper application used for voice dictation
Submission chronology
1. First GitHub Actions submission — Invalid
My first submission was produced and uploaded by my GitHub Actions CI pipeline.
Apple processed it quickly and returned Invalid:
489bd350-8be3-407e-ad0e-799c6d8aa3ec — Invalid
I investigated and discovered that some nested native components had not been signed correctly. That rejection was completely reasonable.
2. Second GitHub Actions submission — stuck In Progress
I temporarily removed the affected optional Python-based local feature and ran the GitHub Actions pipeline again.
This second GitHub submission was the first one to become stuck:
f8fe6edd-c150-4427-9a26-77ac0ab27b8d — In Progress
Created: 2026-08-05T04:21:23Z
The GitHub job produced no output for approximately 20 minutes, so I believed it had stalled and cancelled the runner to avoid continuing macOS runner costs.
The Apple submission remained In Progress after the GitHub job was cancelled.
Because this CI invocation used JSON output, multipart-upload progress was suppressed. Apple created a submission record, but I cannot retrospectively prove whether every upload chunk completed. It is possible this became an orphaned submission following an incomplete upload.
3. Troubleshooting moved to my local Mac
After the second GitHub run became stuck, I stopped using GitHub Actions for troubleshooting. I moved the complete signing, packaging and notarization process to my local Mac so I could inspect every stage without consuming CI time.
During this local work, I discovered additional mistakes in my custom signing process for nested components. I therefore expect some of my early local submissions to be invalid.
However, they have never become Invalid or produced diagnostic logs. They remain In Progress:
d3b3b11e-156d-4c71-a1e5-4f1ca6fa4de4 — In Progress
fbf5de13-46c6-4a51-b75b-e9e4a02ecef3 — In Progress
4. Corrected and locally verified submission
I corrected the signing process and added strict pre-submission verification covering:
- Main application signature
- All nested executables, frameworks and helper applications
- Developer ID certificate fingerprints
- Team ID
- Hardened Runtime
- Secure timestamps
- Distribution entitlements
- DMG integrity and checksum
- Final DMG signature
- Packaged-application launch testing
The corrected 0.7.2 submission passed those checks but also remains stuck:
16101ad1-89a5-411f-94ff-326e10c3e966 — In Progress
5. Version 0.7.3 with definitively completed upload
I have now built version 0.7.3 from current main and submitted it manually using verbose notarytool output:
Submission ID: 60acb64e-7f3f-4ebe-8882-a189bcdb1bef
File: Velvet-Avocado-0.7.3-macos-arm64.dmg
Size: 161 MB
Created: 2026-08-06T06:35:27Z
Status: In Progress
Unlike the earlier CI submission, I captured definitive proof that this multipart upload completed:
Completed [33/33] chunks of a multipart upload.
Upload progress: 100.00% (161 MB of 161 MB)
Received new upload status: Succeeded
Multipart upload process has completed successfully.
Successfully uploaded file.
The submitted DMG’s SHA-256 was:
46b3730a122d557c957a7709e1c9f7e6b8a2a66b83a34f85c473686bdb4af1dc
For every submission still In Progress, notarytool log reports that the submission log is not yet available.
I have opened an Apple Developer Support request asking for the older submissions to be cancelled or investigated. There appears to be no self-service cancellation mechanism.
I understand that the incorrectly signed builds should fail. My concern is that they never reach a terminal status, never produce diagnostic logs, and may be interfering with subsequent corrected submissions.
Apple’s documentation says most notarizations complete within five minutes and 98% complete within fifteen minutes. Some of these submissions have remained In Progress for more than a day.
I do not want to create further duplicate submissions, but I cannot complete my macOS release until Apple returns a terminal result and makes the notarization ticket available.
How should I proceed?