(But also, yes, Apple massively over-promised and the imminent lawsuits are probably justified.)

The reason Google and Amazon will apparently beat Apple to the on-device integration race isn’t because of some dysfunction that Apple has that they don’t, it’s because Apple cares about privacy WAY more than they do.

Apple (if you’re listening): IMO this policy is onerous & burdensome but if for some reason it must remain please a) add warnings to the Add Capability UI in Xcode so devs know what they’re getting into, b) update the ASC docs, c) update the ASC transfer alert text. (Yes, radars have been filed.)

So I guess the takeaway is: Mac developers, think twice before adding the App Groups capability to your app. If you’re using a library that requires it, contact the owners and get this requirement relaxed. (I’ve read that Electron used to require it, but this doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.)

BTW, iOS developers are apparently safe – if you turned on the App Groups entitlement at any time, apparently all you need to do is turn it off (and possibly release the new version? I haven’t tested this…).

If you’re curious too, here’s the shell script.

Out of curiosity I wrote a simple shell script that lists all apps on my Mac with the entitlement, and even though I don’t have that many, it found 25 3rd party apps that have it. Do the developers of all these apps realize the predicament they might find themselves in? 🤔

I still find myself bemused by this policy. The capability is trivial to enable, there’s no warning, the docs are wrong, the App Store Connect alert is wrong, but sorry, we’re going to jeopardize your ability to ever sell your app anyway.

There, the venerable Quinn “The Eskimo” wrote:

“The language in ASC Help is not sufficiently clear here… once your Mac app has shipped with the entitlement, you can’t transfer the app, even if you’ve removed the entitlement in your latest build… I don’t see any wiggle room on this policy.”

Since the error we were getting said “You can only transfer sandboxed apps that are not *sharing* a group container” as opposed to “…have never shared…”, I thought there must be some mistake, and escalated to DTS. About a week later I got en email pointing me to this Developer Forums thread.

According to Apple’s docs, if this entitlement is *currently* active, you cannot transfer your app to another owner. But this is wrong for Mac apps. In reality, if this entitlement has EVER been active in a released version of your app then you can’t EVER transfer your app to another owner.

(Taska in fact didn’t share files with another app; it’s just that the logging library we used defaults to storing logs in that location.)

Here’s the deal. There's an app entitlement called “App Groups” (com.apple.security.application-groups) which allows your apps to share files. Turning it on is a simple matter of choosing it from a list in Xcode, and there’s no warning whatsoever of potential repercussions.

It sounds crazy but if you’re a Mac app developer, you might not ever be able to transfer your app to a new owner. Since most buyers will want your customer base, subscriptions, reviews/ratings, and all that ASO juice you’ve worked so hard at building, this could be a deal-breaker.

I’ll take a larger Burgeroni™ and a Dutch Apple Treat