Ive had a few error reports from people saying my macos app won’t run because it’s not available in their country.
I dont sell through the app store, and the USA (where they are from) is my biggest sales area. Loads of USA people are using this without issue.
What on earth can trigger this on macos?
Very foggily I recall this string was found in relation to Rosetta2 not being available.
Yeah. That’s what I thought might be the cause, but it’s definitely a ub app.
Did you get the exact error message from them, like a screenshot?
Just to verify it is indeed your app and what the message says exactly.
No. They asked for an immediate refund.
Maybe they are trying to run it under “Rosetta” anyway?
I’m no expert in building Desktop apps but what will happen if you have a plugin that is intel only and you build an ub app? Do you get a warning that some code is not arm?
There was forum thread 1 or 2 days ago where the crash log even hinted that the Xojo IDE was maybe running on Rosetta.
Tested here on a nice new install of Sonoma 14.4.1 and all is fine.
Doesnt even show a ‘run under Rosetta’ option in Get Info.
Ive sent them an ARM only build, lets see what happens
If its UB and does not show run under Rosetta, then thats reason to worry I think. Hinting that it will then automatically run under Rosetta.
Unless something changed in Sonoma regarding that. (I would need to test that).
The way it always was in the past…
Arm only app → Does not show option to run Rosetta.
UB App → Shows option to run under Rosetta.
x86 App → Does not show option to run Rosetta.
But only if run on an ARM Mac. There is no Rosetta running on an Intel Mac, with or without Sonoma 
FWIW, no resolution came of this.
Customer says ‘Apple was unable to help in any way’
Considering
a/ Part of their advice appears to have been ‘download on a phone and use Airdrop to move to the Mac’
and
b/ when asked by another customer to explain an error of ‘no application available to open this file’, they were unable to see that the customer was trying to use a Windows EXE on a Mac
then their inability to provide an explanation or solution wasn’t surprising.
When supplied with an ARM only build, customer reports that the error message changed to ‘unable to contact App Store’
Do these error reports cover only the last two or three days? Apple had some problems with their systems - so maybe their gatekeeper service was not always available to check the notarisation of your app?
Its the only such complaint I had. (Since 2022, when I reported it in another post, I see…)
The problem with some reports (like this one), is that I ask the customer 5 pertinent questions, like ‘is your Mac an M1/M2 machine’, and ‘can you show me a screenshot of the error message’ but their email reply ignores all my questions and instead says things like
‘and it didnt work even when I downloaded it via my iPhone’
…impossible to help when that’s what you get back, don’t you find?
isn’t that the type of customers that only want a refund ?
Sounds their bug report is not actionable since they don’t cooperate.
I would recommend you change the app to make it run in a trial for a few days without license.
(if it’s not an app you only need once or one day)
This way you can have them install it before at least and make sure they don’t ask for refunds.
For most sellers, refunds cost fees and cause trouble and thus should be avoided.
I always get very suspicious of these kinds of customers.
Already have a working demo , free for that purpose.
It probably shields me from some of these, but definitely not all.
I get those, too. I don’t know why anyone would buy software without testing the software.