MacOS – How to whitelist applications for users

catalinamacosparental-controls

We had few MacBooks where users without admin rights had Parental Control turned on and could open only whitelisted apps. It was working very well and it was everything we needed really.

With macOS 10.15, Catalina, update Parental Control is gone and all we have now is Time Screen which doesn't do anything like Parental Control. All I can do is time limit to (not every) application and I can't whitelist any applications, or set time limit to 0:00.

Is there any other solution to restrict user to use only whitelisted apps?

Best Answer

Under Screen Time there's a setting called "Downtime", it's for specifically for white-listing apps and you could schedule it by day. Any new apps introduced will be blacklisted by default, at least that's the way it works on iOS.

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MacOS – Steam under Parental Controls

Steam has an automatic updating system. Games, and even the steam client will update automatically, if you are connected to the internet.

What seems to be happening to you, is that one of the games (or the actual client) has registered its intent to update, but it cannot, due to offline mode being enabled.

Try enabling online mode, and updating everything. This should negate the need for an update, and fix the problem.

However, if I have read your question wrong, this method will probably not work.

macOS – Fix Parental Controls ‘Always Allow’ Not Working

This gave me enough info to fix the Minecraft launcher. The prior answer works, but has an ugly menu name, which my son would pester me about. So instead, I fixed the Minecraft.app setup.

In a nutshell, in terminal:

cd /Applications/Minecraft/Contents/MacOS
mv JavaApplicationStub Minecraft
cat > JavaApplicationStub << EOF
#!/bin/sh

exec `dirname $0`/Minecraft "$@"
EOF
chmod +x ./JavaApplicationStub

Basically, it would appear that ParentalControls expects the application being run to match the name of the executable (which is not the case with the distributed app: It's Minecraft.app, and JavaApplicationStub), so by moving the executable to match the app name, it works. I had to create a shell script to actually exec the executable because I got "Path not found" otherwise.

This seemed to work.

I only put this here because it worked for me. If you do not understand the code block again, please keep in mind you might have to re-download the app (or make a copy first).

Best Answer

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MacOS – Steam under Parental Controls

macOS – Fix Parental Controls ‘Always Allow’ Not Working

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