I am building and distributing my MacOS app through XCode the same way I have for years. However I noticed recently when I upload the app to Apple for notarization it comes back successfully and says "Ready to distribute" in the Archives window, but with a warning flag stating "altool has been deprecated...you should start using notarytool to notarize your software".
After doing some reading I understand what the message is saying. The part I don't understand is that, to my knowledge, I am not using altool anywhere in my project. I don't have any run scripts in the build process or anything, and did full searches for any reference to altool in the project with nothing found. The only notarizing I'm doing is the automated upload to Apple for notarization process, which I would hope is not using deprecated methods.
I AM using the Sparkle framework loaded via Cocoapods, so my suspicion is that maybe something to do with that is perhaps pre-notarized with altool or something else I don't fully understand, but I haven't been able to find any mention anywhere of anyone else seeing this message who wasn't using a script where they were directly running altool during the build process.
I'm okay for the moment since the notarization went through fine except for the warning, but I'd like to get this resolved now so that I'm not scrambling in a panic when it does become truly unsupported.
Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions on how I can track down exactly what part of my project is causing this warning to be displayed during the notarization process?
The built-in notarisation procedure of the current version (13.4.1) of Xcode uses altool.
Hopefully a future version of Xcode will have full GUI support for notarytool, because forcing developers to use the command line options of this tool is just a cheap attempt of Apple to discourage distribution of apps outside the Mac App Store.