Privileges 2.4.1 Public Beta

[mthielemann]

Here is a first preview of the upcoming version 2.4.1 of Privileges.

What's new?

• After careful consideration, we have decided to add an optional timer to the Privileges status menu. While we still recommend leaving it disabled for efficiency reasons, you can now enable it in the app's settings.
• As requested in issue 237, we changed the behavior of the Dock Tile and the status item. Rather than disabling the Request Privileges menu entry when the user is required to provide a reason for becoming an admin, we now launch the Privileges app, which improves the user experience.
• The new version better addresses the very rare case where Privileges is unable to identify the current console user. This only occurs with corrupt user accounts, and is now properly handled and logged.

Please play around with the new features and open an issue if you have any feedback. Thanks and happy testing!

Privileges_2.4.1b2067.pkg.zip

[mthielemann]

The new week starts with a fresh build of the upcoming version 2.4.1 of Privileges.

What's new?

• We added another two new preference keys ForceUpdatePrebootVolume and RevokePrivilegesAfterSystemTimeChange:

  • When ForceUpdatePrebootVolume is set to true, the PrivilegesDaemon runs the command /usr/sbin/diskutil apfs updatePreboot / whenever a user's privileges change. You should normally never have to enable this function because the preboot volume is updated automatically after a while. However, we implemented this feature because it seems to be needed in some environments.
  • RevokePrivilegesAfterSystemTimeChange makes sure the user's administrator privileges are revoked if the system time did change. This feature should prevent users from extending their admin time by adjusting the time on their Mac. If you enable this feature, please be aware that users with admin rights can extend or retain their admin rights in various other ways. Therefore, this feature offers no protection against users misusing their admin rights.

Here's a quick update about the new icons for macOS 26. The icons are ready, but unfortunately, some functionality is missing from Xcode 26, so the new icons were not included in this beta version. The missing functionality is as follows:

• It is not possible to provide one icon for macOS 26 and newer versions and a different icon for older versions. Instead, the new icon is used for older macOS versions, which looks bad. This only worked in Xcode 26 beta 3 and is not working anymore.
• It is also not possible to add multiple new icon files to a project. Consequently, we cannot provide alternate app icons, which are necessary for the Privileges Dock Tile plugin.

As soon as Apple provides the missing functionality, I will post a new version containing the new icons.

Please play around with the new features and open an issue if you have any feedback. Thanks and happy testing!

Privileges_2.4.1b2075.pkg.zip