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!