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We have an app that is distributed in our .pkg installer (using pkgbuild and productbuild). Now we need to perform various system checks, eg. minimum macOS version and then continue or abort the installation, based on conditions.
When we do that in the pre-install script, it works but the user experience is not what we need. The installation aborts with a generic message. What we want is to show the progress, eg. which checks have failed and why, a link to open the installation log, and to gracefully exit the installation.
Is it possible to achieve all this without resorting to writing a custom installation mac app ?
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I know it's uncommon for Mac apps to have uninstallers. But in our use-case, we need to have a separate uninstaller app for various purposes, including:
to prompt the user for some information before deleting the app
to stop the app (which is kept running via launch agent with KeepAlive = TRUE), so technically this is to unload or bootout the launch agent (and delete it's plist from ~/Library/LaunchAgents/)
to remove the main app from the /Applications folder (and ofcourse removing its extensions, but I assume that is automatic)
to remove the artifacts that the app has created outside it's container
Please note that the main app is sandboxed, signed by developer id, and contains system extensions.
I've took a look at a couple of other third party apps (eg. AWS VPN Client), which also have a separate uninstaller app. When run, it asks for system admin credentials before proceeding, and then clean up things as expected.
The question is:
What is the 'right' way (best practices, APIs, pitfalls etc) to build such an uninstaller app that can do all of the above ?
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We have a developer signed mac app that users install using an installer.
Our use case is to keep the app running all the time, even when user terminates it forcefully. To achieve this, we copy a launch agent plist file to /Library/LaunchAgents with RunAtLoad=true, and KeepAlive=true, during the installation. We load/bootstrap this agent at the end of the installation using launchctl script.
This serves our purpose very well. ie. 1) app is launched whenever any user logs in to the machine 2) app is relaunched automatically, even if user terminates it.
By default, when the app is already running and users launches it again, there is only one instance of it which is totally fine and is expected.
But there are some situations, when after a machine restart or user login, we have observed two instances of the same app running at the same time. Yes, two app icons in the dock and two app windows.
But we discovered that if the user has selected 'Open at Login' by right clicking on it's icon in the Dock, and then restarts the machine or re-login, two instances are launched.
We suspect that one instance is autolaunched by our keepalive/runatload launch agent. And the other one perhaps by the 'Open at Login' action. But the user experience is very bad in this situation.
We tried to add LSMultipleInstancesProhibited key to the app plist, but it didn't work.
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We have a vpn app for MacOS (developer signed), which adds a vpn profile to System Settings. How do we configure our app so that end users are not able to remove the configuration (see screenshot)
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We want to keep our Mac UI app running all the time, when a user is logged into to a mac machine (app resides in /Applications). To achieve this, we can use launchctl from within post-isntall script to load a plist file which resides in /Library/LaunchAgent.
How to prevent a user (without admin password) to unload the agent using launchctl from terminal?
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We're using ASWebAuthenticationSession to kickstart the auth flow in our Mac app.
Most of the time when we start the auth session, Chrome is launched and authentication flow proceeds as expected (because Chrome is the default browser).
On the same machine with same configuration, some times Safari is launched.
What might be wrong ?
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We have a UI app for Mac which we want to keep running all the time, for all the non-admin users on the system. It looks like this can be achieved by adding a 'KeepAlive' launch agent in /Library/LaunchAgents.
But since this solution adds an entry into System Preferences -> Login Items -> Allow in Background, any user can toggle the ON/OFF switch to stop the app from 'keeping alive'.
Is there a way to restrict user from toggling the switch (unless the user enters admin credentials)?
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Our app has a network extension, that adds a VPN configuration to the system. We don't want end-users to remove that VPN configuration using System Settings->Network->VPN & Filters->XYZ-Config->Remove Configuration. How to achieve this ?
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We want our system extension to generate some files, and the container app to read those files.
We tried using app group like this:
Configuring an app group (group.com.awesomecompany.app) in both the app and system extension
FileManager.containerURL(forSecurityApplicationGroupIdentifier: "group.com.awesomecompany.app")
For the system extension, this method returns path like this:
/private/var/root/Library/Group Containers/group.com.awesomecompany.app
For the container app, this method returns a path like this:
/Users/username/Library/Group Containers/group.com.awesomecompany.app
So even if system extension writes a file in that path, the container app cannot access it, because app cannot read files inside /private/var/root
We tried asking the extension to write files in user's home directory.
Although the app extension runs as 'root', but it does not seem to have the permission to write files inside ~/SomeFolder or ~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.awesomecompany.app
What would be the correct way for the container app to read files generated by the system extension?
appledeveloper12.