Thanks Quinn, this helped me get it working.
Just to note two additional things that I found confusing in the process.
The defaults command line tool doesn't really help here, as far as I can work out it can't be used with App groups. When using defaults read group.UUU myKey I get The domain/default pair of (group.UUU, myKey) does not exist Is that expected?
The Mac Native side logs a scary message when trying to access values, but does in-fact seem to find the value still. Not sure how concerned I should be able this.
[User Defaults] Couldn't read values in CFPrefsPlistSource<0x600003978680> (Domain: group.UUU, User: kCFPreferencesAnyUser, ByHost: Yes, Container: (null), Contents Need Refresh: Yes): Using kCFPreferencesAnyUser with a container is only allowed for System Containers, detaching from cfprefsd