No local area network prompt or entry for app in macOS 15.2

Question

Created Jan ’25

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We’ve been dealing with local network permission issues on macOS 15. Although 15.1 brought some improvement, users are now reporting similar problems again on 15.2.

Our setup:

A “launcher” app (installed from a web package, not sandboxed) uses NSTask to launch our main macOS app.
This macOS app connects to an iOS app via the local network.
We expect a local network permission prompt to appear when the new app launches, but for many users, it never does.
In cases where it worked on an earlier macOS version, there’s no entry in System Settings > Privacy & Security > Local Network, so they can’t toggle anything.
Oddly, if we run the macOS app directly in 15.2, local network access works, yet the privacy entry is still sometimes missing.

We haven’t found a clear way to troubleshoot this within the current API. Has anyone experienced a similar issue, or have suggestions on how to debug and resolve this? Thanks in advance!

Answered by DTS Engineer in 822120022

Have you read TN3179 Understanding local network privacy yet? If not, do that now and then get back to us with your follow-up questions.

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

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Answer 1

DTS Engineer OP

Apple

Jan ’25

Recommended

Have you read TN3179 Understanding local network privacy yet? If not, do that now and then get back to us with your follow-up questions.

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

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Answer 2

jdm_z OP

Jan ’25

Thanks @DTS Engineer , we had read the document and I spent some time in it again with my engineers. There's nothing that seems to stand out, and we've gone through the considerations for macOS and iOS based on our use cases.

There are 2 workarounds that make me think it's not an issue on the app, but we are continuing to troubleshoot on our end now that we can repro on first install on a newly installed macOS 15.

The workarounds we've found are:

Deleting application files, and re-installing the app.
Duplicating the app in "Applications" folder, and simply deleting the duplicate app. This is enough for the next run to trigger the prompt after running the app.

Both of these seem to indicate that we're either doing something weird and undefined, or that the OS has a weird edge case where it doesn't prompt for network under certain conditions when the app was already installed previosuly.

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