Mac App Store review policy for Apple Event temporary exception entitlements

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I’m looking for some advice regarding the usage of temporary exception entitlements in Mac App Store apps. Specifically the Apple Event Temporary Exception to communicate with other third party applications (not first-party macOS system apps):

The Best Practices for Submitting Scriptable and AppleScript Apps to the Mac App Store section is a bit vague (how to 'request' a temporary entitlement?) and I couldn't find it mentioned in the Review Guidelines.

Before designing, implementing and testing functionality based on the Apple Event Temporary Exception I’d like to know if these entitlements would:

A. Always be rejected on the Mac App Store
B. Only accepted in highly specific use cases
C. Accepted if there is a clear use case and sufficient argumentation

For this particular use case I’d like to send Apple Events to Adobe Illustrator and QuarkXPress. The application helps the user with some design tasks in their documents. The app requests the currently open documents and accesses document content to process used design elements. This is optional functionality that the user must explicitly enable in the app.

I’m aware that the com.apple.security.scripting-targets entitlement is preferred. (Side question: are these always allowed or can they also be rejected for third party app scripting?) However, many third party applications don’t offer any scripting access groups in their definition, including Adobe Illustrator and QuarkXPress in this case.

So before spending a lot of time implementing this feature I’d like to have some indication whether it is unlikely that sending Apple Events to third party apps will be allowed on the Mac App Store.

Thanks for any insights!

Answered by DTS Engineer in 885244022

Your specific questions are about App Review policy. I don’t work for App Review, and thus can’t offer definitive answers on their behalf. If you want to talk to them about their policy, you can contact them via the various channels described in Developer > Distribution > App Review [1].

However, my experience, based on conversations I’ve had with developers, is that App Review rarely approves folks to use temporary exception entitlements [2].

Depending on your app’s intended user experience, you might be able to approach this differently, as explained in Implementing Script Attachment in a Sandboxed App.

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—
Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

[1] You could also start a thread here on the forums, in the App Store Distribution & Marketing > App Review subtopic, but my experience is that threads that ask questions like this tend to get redirected into one of the above-mentioned channels.

[2] Which isn’t to say that temporary exception entitlements are fundamentally wrong. I talk more about that in various posts linked to from App Sandbox Resources.

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Answer 1

DTS Engineer OP

Apple

2h

Recommended

Your specific questions are about App Review policy. I don’t work for App Review, and thus can’t offer definitive answers on their behalf. If you want to talk to them about their policy, you can contact them via the various channels described in Developer > Distribution > App Review [1].

However, my experience, based on conversations I’ve had with developers, is that App Review rarely approves folks to use temporary exception entitlements [2].

Depending on your app’s intended user experience, you might be able to approach this differently, as explained in Implementing Script Attachment in a Sandboxed App.

Share and Enjoy
—
Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

[1] You could also start a thread here on the forums, in the App Store Distribution & Marketing > App Review subtopic, but my experience is that threads that ask questions like this tend to get redirected into one of the above-mentioned channels.

[2] Which isn’t to say that temporary exception entitlements are fundamentally wrong. I talk more about that in various posts linked to from App Sandbox Resources.

1

Answer 2

floorish OP

1h

Thank you Quinn for the information and resources! Contacting App Review seems to be available after a submission is rejected — given your experience that temporary exception entitlements are rarely accepted I don’t think it’s worth it to spend time working on this and risking a rejection to be able to contact them afterwards. Unfortunate, but it is what it is :)

Just one related question: the com.apple.security.scripting-targets entitlement is not a temporary exception. In your experience, are these entitlements also rarely accepted? Not looking for a definitive answer, just interested if investing time in this approach would be worthwhile.

Thanks!

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