Question

I have a Qt app I submitted to Apple Mac App Store. It’s been rejected for writing to ˜/Library/Preferences/com.mycompany.myapp

here’s the message I received:

2.30

The application accesses the following location(s):

'~/Library/Preferences/com.nourayn.AlMosaly.plist'

The application may be 

* creating files
* writing files
* opening files for Read/Write access (instead of Read-Only access)

in the above location(s).

How to fix this?

Answer 1

I presume you’re saving your application settings using QSettings. Your code probably looks like this:

QApplication app;
app.setOrganizationDomain("nourayn.com");
app.setApplicationName("AlMosaly");
QSettings settings; // this creates a .plist file under ~/Library/Preferences
                    // which is non-MacAppStore-friendly

Instead, you can create your QSettings with an explicitly specified filename:

app.setOrganizationDomain("nourayn.com");
app.setApplicationName("AlMosaly");
QSettings settings(yourAppDataFolder+"/settings.plist", QSettings::NativeFormat);
                    // this writes to the file you specified

If you use QSettings at multiple places in your app, doing this might ease things a little:

// in main.cpp
app.setProperty("SettingsFileName", yourAppDataFolder+"/settings.plist");

// in someotherfile.cpp
QString settingsFileName = qApp->property("SettingsFileName").toString();
QSettings settings(settingsFileName, QSettings::NativeFormat);

Moreover, if you have a com.trolltech.plist file in ~/Library/ (which stores Qt global settings), you may need to move to Qt 4.8.1. More info here:
http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/qsettings.html#changing-the-location-of-global-qt-settings-on-mac-os-x