App Wrapper 4.5 introduces Architecture Independent Archives
By Sam Rowlands • Aug. 30, 2022
Some of you are like me, we care about the details of our macOS applications.
95% of my apps contents are macOS executables. With Universal Binaries, this means that half of the disk space taken up by my apps is wasted space on a customers computer, half of the archive file doesn't need to be downloaded, saving bandwidth and energy.
Enter "Architecture independent archives". App Wrapper 4.5 takes a single universal binary, and can create a specific archive for each architecture i.e. x86_64 and arm64, these archives are code signed and then notarized.
Giving your customers the choice to either download a specific architecture, or enabling a modified update system to only download the appropriate architecture for their Mac. This not only saves server bandwidth, customers bandwidth, but also space on the customers storage.
We've been testing this for several months with Sleep Aid. The download from the web page is a universal binary, but our update system will only download the current architecture for our customers Macs.
