Hi all! I’m trying to make an app that looks at my messages on my macbook. MacOS Mojave blocks access to the

~/Library/Messages

folder by default. I have 2 questions: 1. How can I request permission to access this folder in Kotlin? 2. Can I give IntelliJ and all child processes permission to access this folder? I gave IntelliJ full disk access, but that doesn’t seem to give permissions to my app when I click the

run

button. Right now I have to build the whole app and manually add that build to my security settings each time.

this is unrelated to kotlin hint:

$ ls -ltr ~/Library/Messages
ls: Messages: Operation not permitted
ls -ltr ~/Library |grep Messages
drwx------    8 nico  staff   256 Aug  6 16:28 Messages

If you’re suggesting using

chmod

to add permissions or to mess with groups, I don’t think that is the way to go. That would make sense on Linux, and even though Mac is BSD underneath, I think permissions under Mojave require a different approach. You’re right that it’s not Kotlin specific, I just thought there might be some weird interfacing with MacOS going on and some accepted way to do that. I think I can accomplish what I need by doing

File.canRead()

and popping up a dialog based on that. (I’ve seen other apps, JetBrains stuff included, popping up a dialog like that under Mojave)

Apple does not provide an open API for messages, so any solution would be considered as hack I think