Fix Your Damaged Mac App Store App by Parsing the App Store Receipt Dates Correctly
If your customers get this message when downloading your app from the Mac App Store:
XYZ is damaged, remove it and download again from App Store.
… it might be because you’re parsing the App Store receipt dates wrong!
Apparently, Apple began to change Mac App Store receipt date formats recently:
- Old format:
2020-10-03T07:12:34Z - New format:
2020-10-03T07:12:34.567Z
When you parse receipt dates, account for both variants. To make things easier for you, strongly consider to use ISO8601DateFormatter (NSISO8601DateFormatter in Objective-C) which should (!) handle multiple variants of ISO-8601 dates for you.
Huge thanks to Frank Illenberger of ProjectWizards, makers of project management software Merlin Project, for figuring this out!
See also:
- Frank’s Twitter thread with the description
ISO8601DateFormatterdocumentation- Merlin Project for Mac (I have zero experience with them, but Frank’s a swell guy, and it’s an indie app, so check it out!)