To whom it may concern and help:
Summary: If you have macOS Apps and use App Groups and want to distribute to the App Store, do yourself a favour and upgrade your macOS to Sequoia and Xcode to at least 16.3.
Detail: I had no issues with app groups for macOS apps until after mid Feb 25. I used Xcode 15.2 on a Ventura iMac. Then, as per posts above, it all failed upon distribution. I also saw two AppGroup capabilities in Signing&Capability. I tried everything I read here and more. Registered the app group (although it is not necessary for a macOS app), included in Build Settings the 'Register App Group' trick from Eskimo (but it is for iOS App Groups), tried to monitor what is going on with my provisioning profile (but dump on exported app does not work as macOS apps do not embed a provisioning profile I think), deleted all provisioning profiles, created my own manually etc etc. Nothing worked. Upgrading to Sequoia and Xcode 16.3 does it without any pain: no registration of the App Group necessary, only 1 App Group in Signing and Capabilities, no configuration of AppGroups in AppID identifier necessary (as this would be for iOS App Groups) - only ticking the box for the AppGroup Capability.
Topic:
Code Signing
SubTopic:
Entitlements
Tags: