Discussion: How to Use keychain-access-groups with iOS Simulator

[Mike-E-angelo]

Apple platform

iOS

Framework version

net9.0-*

Affected platform version

Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2022 (64-bit) - Preview Version 17.14.4 Preview 1.0

Description

Hello there. 👋 To start, I feel you should create the Discussions tab here on your repository for questions such as this. Thank you for any consideration. 🙏

I recently opened a ticket on developercommunity which was closed and referred to this repository.

To summarize the issue, I can easily use protected storage on the Android emulator with minimal configuration and hassle. With the iOS simulator, however, this seems to be a completely different story. I have not been able to do this due to the mentioned issue and resulting error.

I have not been able to find any documentation on how to do this for the iOS simulator, and every remedy that I have tried has resulted in the reported error.

Can the keychain-access-groups be used with the iOS simulator to reach parity with the Android simulator? If so, how? Thank you for any assistance you can provide.

Steps to Reproduce

Attempt to use keychain-access-groups on iOS simulator, observe grief.

Did you find any workaround?

Not yet. :)

Relevant log output

On Visual Studio an error is thrown:

Could not find any available provisioning profiles for <application> on iOS.

[rolfbjarne]

I think the discussions for MAUI is a better place than discussions here, mostly because the MAUI discussions have a much bigger audience, and it's more likely you'll find help there. So, moving there.

[Mike-E-angelo]

Thank you for that @rolfbjarne, it is appreciated. 🙏 I hope you'll understand my surprise, however, that the repository dedicated to iOS development doesn't seem to know the answer to this question, which to me seems like a basic one. I guess I am quickly learning that the simulator is not used very much at all with typical development. In any case, I do appreciate you pointing me in the right direction. 👍

[rolfbjarne]

Looking a bit more at this, it's kind of related to using the free apple developer account, because creating provisioning profiles is not allowed there it seems.

As a workaround, try adding this to your csproj:

<Target Name="NoProvisioningProfiles" BeforeTargets="_DetectSigningIdentity">
  <PropertyGroup Condition="$(RuntimeIdentifier.Contains('simulator'))">
    <CodesignRequireProvisioningProfile>false</CodesignRequireProvisioningProfile>
  </PropertyGroup>
</Target>

The good news is that this will be fixed in .NET 10 (it was very recently fixed).

[Mike-E-angelo]

Hi @rolfbjarne thank you very much for the suggestion. That did seem to resolve that error that I had, but now I have a new one. 😁

Here's my Entitlements.plist

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
	<dict>
		<key>keychain-access-groups</key> 
		<array> 
			<string>$(AppIdentifierPrefix)<ApplicationId></string> 
		</array>
	</dict>
</plist>

Where <ApplicationId> is the <ApplicationId> in csproj.

A warning is generated:

Cannot expand $(AppIdentifierPrefix) in Entitlements.plist without a provisioning profile for key 'keychain-access-groups' with value '$(AppIdentifierPrefix)<ApplicationId>'.

And an error:

MessagingRemoteException: A problem occurred while deserializing an error message for topic build4216842168micha/error/xvs/build/18.5.9199/execute-task/Application.Mobile.Application.Maui/052dab4002fAOTCompile
JsonSerializationException: Error resolving type specified in JSON 'System.Collections.Generic.List`1[[Xamarin.Messaging.Exceptions.ExceptionSerializableProperty, Xamarin.MacDev.Tasks]], System.Private.CoreLib'. Path 'InnerExceptionInformation.SerializableProperties.$type'.
JsonSerializationException: Could not load assembly 'System.Private.CoreLib'.

Thank you for any further assistance you can provide. 🙏

[rolfbjarne]

The "$(AppIdentifierPrefix)" part comes from a provisioning profile, so if you don't have one, our build notifies you about it. One way to silence the warning would be to remove the "$(AppIdentifierPrefix)" part, so that the line is "". Or alternatively you can just ignore the warning if the app works as expected.

The error sounds like a bug, I would suggest filing an issue about it.

[Mike-E-angelo]

Woohoo @rolfbjarne I can confirm with the latest preview I was able to launch using the above configuration, and can further confirm that I have working keychain access. Thank you so very very much for helping me out. 🙏🙏🙏 It is greatly appreciated. Hopefully others who run into the same issue will see this as well to get them pointed in the right direction.

As a final note, this is my Entitlements.plist. I originally got it from Uno, thinking that CFBundleIdentifier was from that SDK, but apparently that is a Maui-recognized variable too. 👍

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
	<dict>
		<key>keychain-access-groups</key> 
		<array> 
			<string>$(AppIdentifierPrefix)$(CFBundleIdentifier)</string> 
		</array>
	</dict>
</plist>