Request access to the private Apple entitlement for Chromium PWAs: com.apple.developer.associated-domains.applinks.read-write

[mbacchi]

As of Chromium 80, there is a private Apple entitlement that is used for PWA support. It caused us trouble when signing Chromium 80 last week, and we added this patch as a workaround for the short term to remove the entitlement. The Chromium team pointed out that they announced this in the Chromium Embedders google group(which many of us are now members of.)

To properly add support for this, we need to contact Apple and request to be whitelisted for the com.apple.developer.associated-domains.applinks.read-write entitlement.

[mbacchi]

Requested access to this entitlement via an Apple Developer portal TSI (Technical Support request), waiting to hear back from them.

[mbacchi]

Have not heard anything from Apple support since the initial ticket acknowledgement.

[mbacchi]

Sent a follow up email to Apple Developer Technical Support to inquire about the status of this request after chatting with an Apple employee. Will comment here as soon as I hear something.

[mbacchi]

I have not heard anything officially from Apple Developer Technical Support, but my Apple contact has said that we should have access to the entitlement now if we update our provisioning profile. I will inquire from DTS to find out if this applies to all of our channel provisioning profiles.

[mbacchi]

Received this from Apple Developer Technical Support earlier in the week:

I confirm the entitlement has been granted.
...
You’ll need to add the entitlement to your profiles and re-generate them. Then you’ll need to rebuild your app with the newly generated profile.
...
Since this entitlement is for making universal links work with the Brave browser, you need several pieces to work together. Your app will need to check if it is launched by the user when clicking on a URL, if that URL is a universal link. This is done by using the SFUniversalLink API. If it is a universal link, the app should display UI to ask the user if they want the link opened in the linked app, or in the Brave browser.

After rebuilding your app with the profile that contains the new entitlement, here is the process I’d use to test:

1. Set the Brave browser (that you just built) to be the default in the System Preferences > General tab.
2. Install the Twitter for macOS app from the Mac App Store. Sign into your Twitter account, and make sure the app is working correctly.
3. In notes type “http://twitter.com” and press return.
4. Click the resulting link in Notes.
5. Brave should open with some UI that you implemented asking if the user wanted to open the link in the Twitter app.

This response includes a confirmation that our entitlement has been granted, answers to my questions about whether it was granted for all of our provisioning profiles, and instructions on how to test it is in fact working after building with the new profile(s).

I will leave this open for the moment but will shortly open an issue to require using these new entitlements.

CC: @bsclifton @bridiver