Every year I battle with a few permission related bugs in my app. Somehow macOS will randomly block some file accesses on some machines in some circumstances.

Take security scoped bookmarks. The only way that sandboxed apps can persistently access files outside their sandbox. It's an important feature. It's broken on some Macs. I know from logs that about 0.5% of my users run into this bug. It's been broken for years, and every time I report the problem to Apple they ask me for steps to reproduce or and Xcode sample project. I have no idea what to do, it's a bug in ScopedBookmarkAgent or in SecKeychain somewhere.

With Sequoia, they managed to break the feature for about 10% of users. That was apparently enough to get Apple to pay attention, so they fixed it in macOS 15.1. I think it's back to 0.5% now.

Somehow Apples own apps aren't affected by these bugs. Bugs that mostly affect 3rd party apps seem to slip through a lot more easily.

The security tech in macOS is unreliable garbage. And people praise it, they just think 3rd party apps are buggy. But for a lot of my bugs, the bug is in the macOS frameworks, but users come to me and complain.

It's no wonder that many developers don't sandbox their apps. It's just perpetually broken.

I wish they would make their tech reliable.