Including a prefpane in App bundle?

Somewhere in the back of my head, I seem to remember that we can include prefPanes in our app store distributed apps these days (much like we can now include driverkit extensions). I can't for the life of me find this in the documentation again though.

Can we do this? Or do I need to copy it from my app bundle to ~/Library/PreferencePanes?

Thanks!

Answered by DTS Engineer in 791745022

AFAIK there’s been no change in this space.

Share and Enjoy

Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

Accepted Answer

AFAIK there’s been no change in this space.

Share and Enjoy

Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

Thanks Quinn! I guess it is just my head playing tricks on me. Damn... and the sandbox means that there is no way to do this from an App Store app?

and the sandbox means that there is no way to do this from an App Store app?

You might be able to make that work. I see four potential issues:

  • You won’t be able to install for all users because that requires privilege escalation.

  • You’ll have to bring up a save sheet to ask the user where to save it. You should be able to default that to the right directory.

  • The sandbox quarantines any executable created by your app. However, in this case the preferences pane is a plug-in, not an executable, so the quarantine might not be a problem. You should try it out and see how things pan out.

  • Finally, there’s App Review. I don’t work for them, so I can’t say for sure what they’ll make of this. You’ll definitely want to review the App Review Guidelines.

Share and Enjoy

Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

Including a prefpane in App bundle?
 
 
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