We're running into an issue with our pkg bundle where the main .app file disappears after installation and wanted to see if anyone has an idea about what would cause it.
We have a pkg bundle with three separate apps, one primary app and two supporting apps. We distribute this pkg bundle directly to our users, who will manually install it on their devices (rather than through the app store).
The installation itself will usually complete without any issues, and we aren't seeing anything in the install or system logs indicating that it was removed afterward (our postinstall script checks that all of the files exist and are in the correct locations), but after the installation the main app disappears while the rest of the files (including the supporting apps) we lay down are still present. Sometimes it will fail with an error similar to this:
2024-10-02 09:43:07-04 MBA-L-8114 installer[9894]: Error getting application status info for file:///Applications/.hiddenfolder/app1.app: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=260 "The file "app1.app" couldn't be opened because there is no such file." UserInfo={NSURL=file:///Applications/.hiddenfolder/app1.app, NSFilePath=/Applications/.hiddenfolder/app1.app, NSUnderlyingError=0x6000026a0d50 {Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=2 "No such file or directory"}}
This only happens on certain computers, but on those computers it will happen consistently. We have noticed that it seems to happen more often with computers that are MDM configured.
So far we’ve investigated permissions issues with the build process, installation script issues, and signing/notarizing, but have not found anything that might cause this issue. We did verify that we’re setting BundleIsRelocatable NO in the plist file for our package, so in theory it shouldn’t be trying to move the app after installation (we don't see the main app anywhere on the device so macOS doesn't seem to be moving it).
We have another post going into more technical detail here: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/769443