DesktopDeploy: Simple Code-Signing and Update Pipeline for Indie Desktop Apps

How do I distribute?

I ship a paid desktop app on Windows and macOS, so this part I can answer from scars rather than theory. Hosting the installer is the easy half. Your own site plus a payment flow is fine, and the download link behind a receipt is what most small tools do. The hard half is that an unsigned installer barely gets installed at all. On Windows an unsigned binary meets SmartScreen and most non technical buyers stop there. On macOS an unsigned app is simply refused, and the accepted path is an Apple Developer ID signature plus notarisation, with the ticket stapled into the artifact so it also works offline. A budget warning on the Windows side. We spent four months paying a monthly fee for a cloud signing service whose identity verification rejected our company three times, and produced exactly zero signatures. Whatever route you pick, confirm your legal entity can pass the identity check before you plan around it. Then there is updating, which is where the real bugs live. Ours crashed on Mac because the update replaced the application bundle while the running process still needed to read from it, and the runtime loads parts of its archive lazily rather than all at startup. Swap on quit, never mid run, and make the updater prove which version is actually on disk afterwards rather than assuming the copy worked. On protecting the code, the honest answer is that anything running on someone else's hardware can be read. Bundled Python and Electron unpack in minutes, and native code yields to anyone sufficiently motivated. Licence keys stop honest people, not determined ones. What actually protects the business is keeping the expensive half where you control it: the data, the service call, the thing that costs you money to operate. If your entire value is in the binary, you are relying on nobody caring enough.