Hi,
We have several Apps that use CEF internally for real-time offscreen HTML rendering. Specifically, we have a framework with an embedded XPC service that itself uses CEF to render HTML and sends the resulting IOSurface back to the host App via XPC for rendering in a Metal pipeline.
So far our Apps have only been available as a direct download, but recently we have been trying to submit one of them to the MAS and have run into several issues, CEF being one of them.
The core of the issue seems to be that submission to the MAS requires that all executables, including XPC services, be signed with the sandbox entitlement. After enabling the sandbox on the host App, my XPC service with CEF continued to function as before. However, after signing the XPC service with the sandbox entitlement, it stopped working. After some research, it seems that the issue here is that the XPC service once signed with the entitlement is running in its own sandbox, and because CEF uses global Mach ports for internal communication, this then fails. Further, I have read from other developers that even if these issues are overcome by e.g. modifying CEF, they have been rejected by the review team because CEF uses some private API calls.
So my question is, does anyone have concrete information on whether or not it will be possible to successfully submit an App using CEF in this way (App > Framework > XPC > CEF) for publication on the MAS?
Further, as an alternative I have been looking at WebKit, specifically WKWebView and calling "takeSnapshot", as this seems to be the only documented way to retrieve pixels. However, it seems that this method is not designed for real-time rendering. Assuming that CEF is a non-starter for the MAS, is there anything specific that Apple recommends for real-time offscreen HTML rendering?
Cheers, Dave Lincoln