A progress update on cDock and other plugins on M1 (and beyond) macs
After finally getting our hand on a new M1 MacBook on 1/19 it was finally time to get some real debugging done and answer the question 'Can we get this stuff working on an M1 mac?'
Thankfully the answer to the above question was a quick yes. Without too much troubleshooting we were able to get plugins loading into Apple processes. Below is simple screen grab of cDock running on macOS 11.1 on my new Air.
When can updates be expected?
This is a question I'm not ready to answer yet. Most likely it will still take some time to get things working smoothly and push out updates for many of our apps as well as MacForge plugins.
Currently I am loading plugins via the project Frida.re, which is great, but ideally we'll be writing up our own code loader so we don't have to rely on Frida for loading plugins which will also keep the setup and installation process clean and simple for the user.
What about iOS Applications?
Currently it's still unclear if there will be a workaround for running iOS apps with reduced system security. It's come to our attention that the process are stopped form running because of a part of the Kernel called FairPlay. It's definitely possible there could be a bypass made at some point but right now there are no plans to fiddle with the Kernel.
Recovery Mode
M1 machines have brought about a new way of entering recovery mode. There is no longer such a thing as internet recovery, just a much more secure local recovery process.
With that in mind there are plans to clean up the initial setup process of cDock/MacForge such that the user will not have to manually enter recovery mode and any additional terminal command that a user needs to run will also be automated.
Users will still have to type in the command csrutil disable in recovery mode but that is the only thing the user will have to manually have to do. There are also plans to remove the mention of partially disabling System Integrity Protection. Partial setup seems to have begun to be phased out with the introduction of Big Sur and simplifying things to one singular command should make overall setup easier.