Native Apple Silicon Support (m1, arm, macOS, osx)

[fishcharlie]

Electrum should release a Universal or separate Apple Silicon build of the application. This would allow users to use the application with increased performance without having to rely on Rosetta 2.

[SomberNight]

1. This might be non-trivial to do with our current scripts for codesigning and being able to strip the codesign signatures to verify reproducible builds.
2. Not sure if pyinstaller supports this yet.
   • EDIT(2026-04): looks like it does since macOS: add support for macOS 11 and Apple M1 Silicon (arm64) pyinstaller/pyinstaller#5581
3. Looks like one needs xcode 12.2 to build universal2 binaries, which requires macos 10.15 for the build system, which based on past experience would mean bumping the min supported macos version for users to the ~same. (Currently we support 10.13+)
   • EDIT(2026-04): Since 86f6e3d, the release build system uses macOS 11.7.10 and xcode 13.2. We could bump this further a bit if that helped.
4. Note that we would want to build on amd64.
   • that is, ether building a universal2 binary, or two separate x86_64 and arm64 binaries would be fine, however if at all possible the build host machine should stay x86_64

Contributions are welcome.

[ballo]

pyinstaller can build native binaries BTW
pyinstaller/pyinstaller#5315

[Ishaanahuja7]

Any update on this? Qt 5.15.9 community version also supports building on apple silicon now natively. Official Qt download link here

[Ishaanahuja7]

@SomberNight

[SomberNight]

Feel free to try to adapt the build scripts and open a PR.

Again, the number one criteria is that the build should stay reproducible. Also, our current build machines are amd64-based - is it possible to build on those while targeting arm?

[Ishaanahuja7]

Yes, arm64 can be built from amd64 mac. But min mac os then needs to be updated to 10.15+ and which requires xcode 12.2. Builds will be reproducible as in the amd64 mac case so that shouldn't be an issue.

[Ishaanahuja7]

Any updates on this yet? @SomberNight

[SomberNight]

We will be moving the build system for the mac binary to a new VM (macOS 10.14.6, xcode 11.3.1 -> macOS 11.7.10, xcode 13.2). See #8738
This itself is unrelated to arm64.

However, as part of that change, we accidentally bumped into a reproducibility failure that was caused precisely due to compiling some .so files as universal (x86_64+arm64) instead of just x86_64. We had to specifically disable that, to make it reproducible.
See 77f8406

Any updates on this yet?

Please take a look at that commit and try to make hid.so build reproducibly as a universal binary.
Pull request welcome.

[Ishaanahuja7]

Thanks a lot for adding initial support for apple silicon macs @SomberNight. According to @ecdsa, hid.cpython-310-darwin.so is reproducible #8738 (comment). Can you enable universal builds now?

[ecdsa]

@Ishaanahuja7 No, I wrote that this file is reproducible because the native support has been disabled.