I mainly develop and deploy applications for Windows using Inno Setup, but have now received a few requests to release those same applications for macOS.
For Windows I use Inno Setup, and I was wondering if anyone could point me in the right direction to create installers for macOS? Is there a similar tool such as Inno Setup for Mac, or what would be the best strategy in the Mac environment to distribute apps?
Looking for a strategy that will be the best possible user experience for my users.
If you’ve only the application bundle to worry about a dmg is normal. It’s a disk image with a copy of the app users simply drag it to applications to install.
If it’s more complicated then apples own Pkg system is the way to go. It works in a similar way to Inno, in as much as it has a text based instruction file.
I’m not sure what it means that it needs an internal version number to run on Tahoe… is that a showstopper to use Packages (or just extra effort required during the build process)?
It sounds like the current public release version of Packages is incompatible with Tahoe. To me, that sounds like a showstopper. However, the existence of an internal version seems like a good thing.
There is also a commercial solution but I haven’t used it myself.
This is one of the nice things under MacOS: each application brings it’s own stuff with it. That means no mess with Dylibs, the corresponding component to Windows’ DLL if I am right. An app will not break other apps by overwriting a DLL with an older version. Many years ago OS/2 had a similar approach, but that was not an image, just a buch of regular files kept together.