App being detected as virus/malware.

[MeguminBOT]

Why Antivirus Software May Flag This App (.exe)

It's somewhat expected for antivirus software to flag .exe files created from pure Python, due to how these executables are generated. The official builds of this app use Nuitka, a tool that compiles Python code into C before producing an executable. While this approach improves performance and simplicity for the users of the tool, it also makes the file more likely to be flagged by antivirus programs—especially since it’s unsigned software.

If you trust the source of this tool (myself and the contributors), you can add an exception for the .exe in your antivirus software to allow it to run.

Alternatively you can download the source code, install Python yourself and run the .bat script from the source code to install the required dependencies. This script simply runs commands like pip install until all dependencies are installed.
Once that's done you simply double click the "Main.py" in the downloaded source code to run the app.

Source Code Transparency vs Executable Trust

While you can inspect the source code to verify what the tool does, it's not always easy to confirm that the compiled .exe file exactly matches the source—unless you know what to look for. Tools like VirusTotal can help by analyzing the file across multiple antivirus engines for execution behaviors and such.

As seen in that VirusTotal scan, the .exe is labeled as "nuitka/python", which some antivirus programs flag due to how easy it is to distribute malicious content using Python. This doesn't necessarily mean the file is dangerous—just that it could be, and antivirus software is designed to detect potentially risky behavior like running scripts that extract files to temporary folders (which is exactly how this app functions).

Starting with version v1.9.4 (upcoming), all official releases will be submitted to Microsoft for cloud-based whitelisting before public release. Microsoft performs both AI-based and human reviews to check the executable and its underlying source code. I won’t be doing this for other antivirus vendors due to time constraints, but Microsoft Defender is the most widely used antivirus today and tends to respond quickly.

[MeguminBOT]

So I was hoping to be able to sign the exe, but this has a high cost.
I can however sign with a developer key, that should somewhat alleviate some issues but not enough. I will still send the app to get excluded in Microsoft's false positive list.

Additionally I've decided I'm going to ship 3 variants of the app. Instead of two

1. built executable release (exe)
2. Source code with .bat script installing dependencies.
3. New pseudo-executable that starts the Main.py file with a local embedded python package.

The pseudo executable is going to be the recommended version to use, as it won't suffer from antivirus false positives or the need to wait for Nuitka to update their pip package between python versions.