Oh dear. Thanks for that. But the thing is, Dropbox can clearly still add itself to Favourites without user intervention... Are they doing something naughty behind the scenes? (klsSharedFileListFavoriteItems isn't working at the moment for me, but that may be because another part of my utility is broken!)

Update: the Bus Error is also occurring when I try to run ibtool, in the Storyboard phase.

Found the fix! The ibtool crash logs pointed to the problem being in Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/lib/libMainThreadChecker.dylib . Turned out it was this known issue: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64817964/xcode-10-3-does-not-work-on-macos-big-sur-11-0-1-non-beta . The solution was to install a newer XCode (12.5), and copy its libMainThreadChecker.dylib into the XCode 10 package. Saved me having to start all over again with a Mojave VM!

Further info: this may relate to this issue: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/118773 The main app was built a few years ago in an earlier version of Xcode, and it may have a unique app identifier rather than using my Team ID. In the above example, the Team ID is CD......7C, but I have an app group which has been working all this time to allow communication with another extension, and its prefix is 3R......RQ. Do I need to swap everything to use the Team ID, and if so how would I do that?

Update on my update: it doesn't look likely that there's a mismatch. Both the main app and the extension have identical embedded.provisionprofile files, with the same CD......7C value for ApplicationIdentifierPrefix, com.apple.developer.team-identifier, com.apple.application-identifier (with a .), and keychain-access-groups (also with a .). There's no mention of the 3R......RQ app group anywhere in either. (Should there be? It's still being used to share the Group Containers subfolder with the other app extension...)

Further update: this is odd. I noticed the Dropbox tokens were originally being written with a minimal set of attributes and no access control: acct = 1.....9 labl = com.orexresearch.EMPSecure.dropbox.authv2 class = genp svce = com.orexresearch.EMPSecure.dropbox.authv2 mdat = 2022-01-10 11:10:03 +0000 cdat = 2022-01-10 10:46:08 +0000 So I'm calling SecItemUpdate with the following entries in the query:             (kSecAttrAccount as String): key as AnyObject         (kSecClass as String): kSecClassGenericPassword         (kSecAttrService as String) : "(bundleId).dropbox.authv2" as AnyObject?         (kSecAttrAccessible as String) : kSecAttrAccessibleAfterFirstUnlockThisDeviceOnly ...and the following attributes to be updated:         attributesToUpdate[kSecAttrAccessGroup as String] = "CD......7C.com.orexresearch.EMPSecure.Shared" as AnyObject?         attributesToUpdate[kSecUseDataProtectionKeychain as String] = true as AnyObject? This returns a value of 0, so it appears to succeed... but when I query the entry again, the extra attributes haven't been added. Do I need to delete and re-add the whole entry for this to work?

Final answer was the comment posted to Matt's response: the app group container was correct, but the bundle identifier was different between the main app and extension, and Dropbox's retrieval code was using the bundle identifier as part of its search string! I also had to patch the Dropbox Swift toolkit so that it stored the token with the kSecAttrAccessGroup attribute set to the Keychain Access Group value, and the kSecUseDataProtectionKeychain attribute set to TRUE -- the documentation at https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/keychain_services/keychain_items/sharing_access_to_keychain_items_among_a_collection_of_apps glosses over the fact that you need to set either kSecUseDataProtectionKeychain or kSecAttrSynchronizable for kSecAttrAccessGroup to work.