SD Notary fails with SDK older than 10.9 SDK

I have an AppleScript application, which embeds a native application. It’s an open source application without active development.

When I try to submit my application to Apple for notarization with SD Notary, it fails with this message:

"The binary uses an SDK older than the 10.9 SDK."

The good thing is, it only fails on macOS Catalina. When I do the same on macOS Mojave, notarization works just fine. That’s nice, because that buys me some time to migrate to something else.

However, when I open the source of this native application, XCode says the Deployment Target is 10.9.

It would be really helpful if I could use SD Notary on Catalina for now. Does anyone have a clue?

Sharing helps, I think. It appears the application uses some deprecated methods. It says “first deprecated in macOS 10.7” and “10.6”. So that’s probably why notarization fails.

My Objective-C is a bit rusty (haven’t done much with it), but I will give it a try.

Does my assessment make sense?

Notarizing is supposed to require that all code is compiled with an SDK of 10.9. It’s not the methods, it’s the version of the SDK it was compiled under.

You are right. Apparently the distributed binary was an older version of the source code I have. Thanks for the input.