How do you ship a macOS app to the App Store?

The app is signed with App Sandbox + Hardened Runtime, submitted to Apple for notarization, then pushed through App Store Connect review. macOS is less restrictive than iOS, but if sandbox entitlements (file access, multi-display) aren't justified precisely, you get a review rejection.

Why is a live wallpaper app technically hard?

Continuous video playback burns GPU and battery; wallnetic uses hardware-accelerated playback plus battery-aware logic that pauses when unplugged. Keeping state synced across multiple monitors and assigning a separate wallpaper per Mission Control space are desktop-specific challenges too.

No, it's free on the App Store. No data collection, no tracking, no accounts.

Is there a ready-made API for live wallpapers on macOS?

No. Settling into the "wallpaper" layer on macOS isn't a ready-made API like on iOS; you have to get window levels and Mission Control space behavior right by hand. In wallnetic that was the invisible part of the job.

← Blog · June 13, 2026

Shipping a macOS app to the App Store solo: wallnetic

I’ve written iOS and React Native for work for years. But wallnetic was a different itch: there was no live wallpaper app that behaved the way I wanted on my own Mac, so I built one. One person, one app, live on the App Store — these are the technical notes from that road.

What it actually does

wallnetic brings cinematic-quality live wallpapers to the Mac: 4K/1440p/1080p video playback, hardware-accelerated. But it needed to be more than “a window playing video”:

Battery-aware playback — pauses when unplugged (continuous video roasts a laptop)
Multi-monitor + Dynamic Island with synchronized state
A separate wallpaper per Mission Control space
Time-based rotation (separate playlists for morning/day/evening/night)
Photo slideshow with Ken Burns effects
Brightness, contrast, saturation, blur, tint effects

The app is 2.1 MB; it collects no data and asks for no account. I made that a principle from day one.

The macOS-specific App Store traps

Coming from iOS, you assume the macOS App Store will be the “relaxed” one. Half true: fewer API restrictions, but the App Sandbox + Hardened Runtime + notarization trio builds its own maze. Do something system-level like a live wallpaper and you have to justify your sandbox entitlements (file access, multiple displays) exactly — too many and you’re rejected, too few and it doesn’t work. Apple’s own docs spell out each leg of that trio separately: App Sandbox, Hardened Runtime, and notarization.

Settling into the “wallpaper” layer on macOS isn’t a ready-made API like on iOS either; getting window levels and space behavior right was the invisible part of the job.

The reality of going solo

Solo means everything is yours: the architecture, the icon, the App Store description, the screenshots. The clearest lesson I learned is to keep scope ruthlessly small. wallnetic’s first release was a quarter of today’s feature list; the rest came after shipping, from real usage.

Second: on macOS, a “small but correct” app always beats a “big but half-done” one. A 2.1 MB app that respects your battery and asks for no account — those aren’t marketing bullets, they’re the things a Mac user quietly appreciates.

wallnetic is free on the App Store. The rest of my work lives at github.com/fatihkan.