Why We Built a Native macOS App (And Stayed Independent)

There's a moment every indie Mac developer faces: you've built something you're proud of, and then someone emails you saying, "your app says it's from an unidentified developer — is it safe?"

That moment tells you a lot. It means people care enough to ask. And it means you owe them a real answer.

This post is that answer. It's about why webPit is a native macOS app, why we chose to stay outside the Mac App Store, and — if you're staring down a Gatekeeper warning right now — exactly what to do about it.

The Technical Case for Going Native

The Menubar Agent Needed to Be Native

One of webPit's most-used features is the menubar agent — a small persistent icon that lets you drop images for quick conversion without opening the main window. This sounds simple. It isn't, unless you're native.

A native menubar app is a first-class macOS citizen: it can register for system events, respond instantly to drag-and-drop, and sit quietly in your menubar using effectively zero resources when idle. Achieving the same in Electron requires keeping a hidden browser window alive, which means the "lightweight background tool" you wanted is actually running a full web process at all times.

For watch folders — where webPit monitors directories and automatically converts new images — native access to the macOS file system notification API (FSEvents) is orders of magnitude more efficient than polling-based approaches that non-native apps typically fall back on.

SwiftUI and AppKit Integration

webPit uses native macOS UI frameworks — the dialogs, the file pickers, the drag targets, the keyboard shortcuts all behave exactlyWhen we started building webPit, we had the same options every developer has. We could wrap a web app in Electron, ship a cross-platform framework, or go native. Here's why the choice was obvious.

Memory and CPU: The Gap Is Real

Electron apps carry an entire Chromium browser as their runtime. That's not an exaggeration — open Activity Monitor on your Mac and look at any Electron-based app. You'll routinely see 300–600 MB of RAM consumed before the app has done a single thing for you. Some top 1 GB during active use.

webPit, as a native macOS app, sits at under 30 MB at idle. During a batch conversion of 200 images, it peaks in the 60–80 MB range and then comes back down. For an image processing utility that might run in the background all day — especially with watch folders active — that difference is the gap between a tool that quietly does its job and one that competes with your browser for resources.

CPU behavior follows the same pattern. Native apps compile to machine code that runs directly on Apple Silicon or Intel. The OS scheduler treats them as first-class citizens. Electron apps run JavaScript interpreted through V8, with an extra abstraction layer that introduces latency and burns battery. On a MacBook, this is not hypothetical — you feel it in fan noise and hours of battery life.

the way macOS users expect them to. System appearance modes (light/dark), accessibility settings, and trackpad gestures all work because the app speaks the same language as the operating system.

This is harder to build. It took longer. But it means webPit feels like a Mac app, not a web app wearing a Mac costume.

The $99 Question: Why We're Not on the Mac App Store

Here is the honest version of this story.

What the $99 Developer Program Buys You

Apple's Developer Program costs $99/year. For that fee, you get:

• The ability to notarize your app (Apple's automated malware scan)
• The ability to code-sign your app so Gatekeeper passes it without warnings
• Access to the Mac App Store distribution channel
• TestFlight for beta distribution

For many apps, especially ones with in-app subscriptions or broad consumer reach, this is a straightforward business decision. The distribution and trust signal is worth it.

Why We Chose Not to Pay It — Yet

We made a deliberate choice to start without the Apple Developer Program, and we want to be direct about why.

First, the economics of early-stage indie development. webPit is a $8.99 one-time purchase. The developer fee is $99/year. That means we need to sell 12 copies just to recover the annual fee before we've covered any of our actual development costs. For a product that was just finding its footing, front-loading that cost felt like optimizing for appearances over fundamentals.

Second, the App Store is not a neutral distribution channel. Apple takes 30% of every sale (or 15% under the Small Business Program). On an $8.99 app, that's a meaningful cut. More importantly, the App Store has strict sandboxing requirements that would limit some of webPit's core functionality — specifically, the watch folders and the persistent menubar agent. Apps in the App Store cannot freely monitor arbitrary directories the user hasn't explicitly granted access to in each session. Our watch folder feature would require significant architectural compromise or would simply not be possible in its current form.

Third, we wanted to prove the product first. We believe in webPit. But we thought it was better to ship something real, get feedback from actual users, and grow into the developer program once we knew we had something worth the full infrastructure investment.

What this means for you: The app you download from webpit.site is not on the Mac App Store and is not code-signed by Apple. That triggers a Gatekeeper warning. We'll explain exactly how to handle that below.

What we want you to know: The app is safe. The source of the Gatekeeper warning is a business decision about distribution, not a quality or security issue. You can inspect the binary, run it through VirusTotal, or simply read on and follow the bypass instructions.

Opening an Unsigned Mac App: Step-by-Step Gatekeeper Bypass

macOS Gatekeeper is a security feature that checks whether apps are code-signed by a registered Apple Developer. When you download webPit, macOS will block it by default. Here's how to open it safely.

A note before we start: Apple designed these steps intentionally. They require deliberate action from you — they're not something that happens by accident. That's a good thing. The steps below are the legitimate, Apple-sanctioned way to open apps you trust that didn't come from the App Store.

Method 1: Right-Click to Open (Recommended for First Launch)

This is the cleanest method and the one we recommend.

Step 1. Download webPit.dmg from webpit.site and open it. Drag webPit to your Applications folder in the usual way.

Step 2. Navigate to your Applications folder. Find webPit. Do not double-click it yet.

Step 3. Right-click (or Control-click) on the webPit icon. A context menu will appear.

Step 4. Click "Open" from the top of that context menu. This is a different action than double-clicking — it carries a trust signal that tells macOS you intentionally want to open this specific app.

Step 5. A dialog will appear asking if you're sure you want to open an app from an unidentified developer. Click "Open" in that dialog.

Step 6. webPit launches normally. You will not see this warning again for webPit — macOS remembers your choice.

Method 2: System Settings (If You Already Got an Error)

If you already tried to double-click webPit and got a hard block — a dialog that only offers "Move to Trash" — you'll need to clear that through System Settings.

Step 1. Click the Apple menu → System Settings (macOS Ventura or later) or System Preferences (Monterey or earlier).

Step 2. Go to Privacy & Security.

Step 3. Scroll down to the Security section. You should see a message like: "webPit was blocked from use because it is not from an identified developer." Right below it, there will be an "Open Anyway" button.

Step 4. Click "Open Anyway". Enter your Mac password if prompted.

Step 5. A confirmation dialog will appear. Click "Open".

webPit will now launch and macOS will remember your decision. You won't need to do this again.

Method 3: Terminal (For Power Users)

If you're comfortable with the Terminal, you can remove the quarantine flag that macOS places on downloaded files:

1xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/webPit.app

After running this command, webPit will open normally with a double-click, no dialogs.

Why Does This Warning Exist? (The Honest Explanation)

macOS Gatekeeper was introduced to protect users from running software that Apple hasn't vetted. When an app is code-signed, Apple's servers verify that the developer's certificate is valid and that the app hasn't been tampered with since it was signed.

When an app is unsigned, macOS has no cryptographic proof of origin. It doesn't mean the app is malicious — it means Apple hasn't vouched for the identity of the developer who built it.

Many legitimate, well-loved indie Mac apps have been distributed unsigned for years. The steps above are how macOS lets you make the decision yourself. If Apple thought it was impossible for unsigned apps to be trustworthy, they wouldn't have built this override mechanism.

We're telling you exactly what the warning means, exactly why it exists, and exactly how to get past it — because you deserve to understand what you're clicking through.

What Being Independent Actually Means

There's a version of "indie" that's just a marketing word. And then there's the version where one person (or a tiny team) builds something, self-distributes it, handles support emails personally, and ships updates based on actual user feedback rather than a product roadmap approved by committee.

webPit is the second kind.

When you buy webPit at $8.99, you're not funding a subscription billing cycle or a venture runway. You're buying the tool. You own it. It runs offline. There's no account, no telemetry, no license server checking in.

When you email us with a bug or a feature request, a human who worked on the code reads it. That's not a promise we'd make if we were on a roadmap that required 10,000 MAU to justify any single line of work.

Staying independent means we can make calls like: "let's add watch folders because power users asked for them," without those features needing to survive a quarterly planning process.

The Roadmap for Trust Infrastructure

We're being transparent about where we are, so here's where we're going.

We intend to join the Apple Developer Program once the business justifies it. That means notarization, code-signing, and no more Gatekeeper warnings. We'll post an update here when that happens.

Until then, the bypass instructions above are accurate, complete, and safe. And if you ever have any questions about what's in the app or how it works, our inbox is open.

Summary

webPit is a native macOS app because native apps are genuinely better for image processing workloads: less memory, better battery life, first-class OS integration. It's not on the Mac App Store because the App Store fee, the 30% cut, and the sandboxing restrictions are real costs that don't make sense for where we are right now. It shows a Gatekeeper warning because it's not code-signed — and the steps above will let you open it in under a minute.

We built this tool because we needed it, we made it native because the alternatives were worse, and we stayed independent because we wanted to be honest with you about all of it.

Download webPit — $8.99, one-time →

Questions? Reach us at [email protected]. We read everything.