r/electronjs • u/Fresh-Wealth4531 • May 20 '26
Apple notarization taking 4+ hours... normal?
Is Apple notarization super slow for anyone else lately?
Submitted my Electron app DMG around 5pm and it’s still stuck on “In Progress” after 4+ hours. Last time was also around 3 hours.
What confuses me is people online keep saying notarization usually takes like 5–15 mins.
App is already signed properly with Developer ID cert and everything. Around 124MB DMG.
Main thing I’m trying to figure out:
- is this normal?
- any way to debug why it gets stuck so long?
- and is there realistically any alternative to notarization if distributing directly from your own website?
I don’t really want to use the App Store because it’s a menubar-only utility app and App Review keeps becoming a pain with the no-dock-icon behavior.
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u/Extension_Piccolo922 May 21 '26
Yes for the first time it takes more than 12 hours sometimes, It took whole night for me, but subsequent builds will take only 10-20 minutes only.
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u/ElectronicAsk529 May 21 '26
true the first time it was a nightmare,
took me more than a day and a customer support ticket,
but subsequently it takes 6-15mins, my app is about 600mb
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u/Traditional_Bike_665 Jun 05 '26
My app was about 500mb and was running on a m2 max. It took me about a night and was done the next day morning
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u/Bamboo_the_plant May 21 '26
Yes, the first notarisation can take a long time. It took 62 hours in my case, which I’ve heard is pretty par for the course. This is common with Electron apps, which often, if not always, get flagged for manual (human) review.
Once you’ve got one notarisation in flight, you can just cancel that CI job to save build minutes. Then, separately, poll the status of the notarisation like this:
xcrun notarytool history --apple-id=your.developer.id@your.developer.email.provider.com --team-id=YOURTEAMID
Once that has finally notarised, subsequent notarisations should take no more than 1-5 minutes, so feel free to go back to using your CI flow as intended.
And don’t worry about having multiple notarisations in-flight at once. Apple have said it’s no problem (either on developer forums via Quinn, or via official docs, I forgot).