What exactly do I get?
The Hawser app. Paste the licence key from your receipt and it unpacks your kit: an Xcode project (the menu bar skeleton), ship.sh and appcast.sh, and five guides. Then it walks you through the certificate and notary setup. Full readable source, no obfuscation. The key is checked once, when you unlock; your copy is stamped with your name and the app never phones home again.
I already have an app. Do I have to rebuild it in your skeleton?
No, and this is the question we get asked least and lose most people on. The pipeline is not tied to the skeleton: point ship.sh at any Xcode project and it ships that one instead.
PROJECT="$HOME/path/to/YourApp.xcodeproj" SCHEME="YourScheme" APP_NAME="Your App" ./scripts/ship.sh
That is how Hawser itself is shipped, so it is the path we exercise on every release rather than one we merely support. The app's How it works tab builds that exact line for you: pick your project, press copy, paste into Terminal. Nothing in your own project is modified. The skeleton is there for people starting from nothing, and you can delete it.
How long does the first day actually take?
Longer than the 61 seconds on the pricing page, and we would rather you heard that from us. 61s is the command, warm, once everything exists. Your first day is a different measurement, and here is ours: getting a Developer ID certificate and a notary key took about ten minutes of clicking, and the first notarisation Apple ever does for an account took 31 minutes while every one after it took about 40 seconds. That first wait is an account-verification tax, not a slow pipeline, and panicking at it is the normal reaction. End to end, from a Mac with no certificate to a notarised DMG, was about an hour. What we cannot put a number on is Apple approving your Developer Program membership, which is between you and them and can take a day or more. Nothing ships before that, kit or no kit.
What else do I need?
An Apple Developer Program membership ($99/year, paid to Apple, required for Developer ID signing no matter what tooling you use), Xcode 15 or later, and a payment provider account only if you want licence keys.
Which platforms and versions?
Swift + SwiftUI. Your app targets macOS 13 Ventura or later and builds universal (Apple Silicon + Intel) out of the box. Updates use Sparkle 2.
Can I use it in client work? In several apps?
Yes. Unlimited apps, commercial or free, including apps you build for clients. The only thing you cannot do is resell or redistribute the kit itself.
Do I get updates to the kit?
Yes. Fixes and improvements to v1 are free and delivered through your original download link. We ship our own apps through these scripts, so when Apple moves the pipeline it breaks our releases before it reaches yours. What has shipped so far is on the
changelog.
What doesn't it do?
No sandboxed / Mac App Store variant; this is the outside-the-store pipeline. No CI templates:
ship.sh runs on your machine, not in GitHub Actions. Swift and SwiftUI only, macOS 13+, no Objective-C skeleton and no iOS. And the licence check runs on the client, so it makes casual copying inconvenient rather than impossible. We say the same thing
in the write-up.
Am I locked into Polar?
No, and this is worth being precise about because it is the question people decide on without asking. The kit ships a working Polar client, so licensing works the day you buy. But the provider is confined to LicenseClient.swift: 72 lines of code whose entire job is one HTTP call returning "valid" or "not valid". Everything that is actually hard to get right sits above it and never learns who answered: the 14-day offline grace, keychain storage, refund and revocation handling, and the licensed / grace / unlicensed state machine that must never confuse "the server said no" with "I could not reach the server". Moving to Stripe, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy or your own endpoint means rewriting one function against that same contract.
Can I try it before buying?
There is no time-limited trial, and that is deliberate: the kit is source code, so a trial would mean handing over the product and asking for it back. Instead the proof is up front and permanent. The
sample app is the kit’s actual output, free and verifiable on your own machine, and
the ten traps are the expensive half of what we learned, published in full.
Can I get a refund?
No. You receive the complete source the moment you buy, and source code cannot be returned. That is the honest reason, and it is exactly why everything is laid out before you pay: the full box contents, measured numbers instead of promises, and this page. If you are unsure, do not buy yet; the page is not going anywhere.
Who is behind this?
Onur Yavuz, who builds and ships Mac and iOS software.
The about page says what else ships from here and why that matters when you are buying a build pipeline.