permission-flow

permission-flow provides a Rust-friendly API for presenting the macOS permission guidance flow backed by the Swift/AppKit implementation in this workspace.

What it does

• Creates a PermissionFlowController on the macOS main thread
• Starts guided flows for supported privacy panes
• Infers a likely host app bundle with AppPath::suggested_host_app()
• Exposes host-app permission status checks through Permission::authorization_state()

Supported permissions:

• Accessibility
• Input Monitoring
• Screen Recording
• App Management
• Bluetooth
• Developer Tools
• Full Disk Access
• Media & Apple Music

Quick start

use permission_flow::{AppPath, Permission, PermissionFlowController, StartFlowOptions};

let controller = PermissionFlowController::new()?;
let app_path = AppPath::suggested_host_app()
    .expect("expected a host app bundle in this launch context");

controller.start_flow(StartFlowOptions::new(Permission::ACCESSIBILITY, app_path))?;
# Ok::<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>>(())

Platform behavior

This crate is designed for macOS, but it now compiles on other operating systems too.

Outside macOS:

• PermissionFlowController::new() succeeds with a no-op controller
• start_flow() and stop_current_flow() become no-ops
• Permission::authorization_state() returns PermissionAuthorizationState::Unknown
• AppPath::suggested_host_app() returns None

That keeps cross-platform Rust workspaces buildable without pretending the actual macOS permission UI exists on those platforms.

Important status warning

Permission::authorization_state() reports what the current host process or host app can determine about its own permission state.

It does not authoritatively answer whether an arbitrary target .app bundle already has the requested permission.

This means:

• if the target app is the current host app, the status is meaningful
• if the target app is some other app bundle, treat the status as host-app information only

Runtime note

Because the final macOS executable links Swift runtime libraries, downstream binary crates currently need this in their build.rs:

fn main() {
    if std::env::var("CARGO_CFG_TARGET_OS").as_deref() == Ok("macos") {
        println!("cargo:rustc-link-arg=-Wl,-rpath,/usr/lib/swift");
    }
}

Acknowledgements

The Swift side of this crate builds on top of the excellent PermissionFlow project and uses swift-rs for the bridge into Rust.