Give app access to Documents on Catalina

Since many of my customers have upgraded to Catalina they have struck problems.
The program remembers the last folder that the user stored files and attempts to create a list of the files on open.

Worked fine previously but now Catalina prompts them with
“myapp would like to access files in your Documents folder.”
ALLOW / DON’T ALLOW.

Trouble is many users panic and click immediately select DON’T ALLOW without thinking.
The program then displays “No files found” and the user thinks their previous work has been deleted.

After they contact me for help I’ve had to tell them how to grant the program permission to access the Documents folder by going to System Preferences > Privacy.

It would be great if I could distribute the app with permission to Documents already granted.

That’s not possible because it would circumvent the silly security.

Give them a picture of what they have to do like many apps do for the full disk access. My users occasionally confuse Automation with Full Disk Access. But the picture helps a bit.

You can also add a NSDocumentsFolderUsageDescription key to your info.plist to let them know why they’re being asked.

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