MAUI WebView doesn't allow to web session to inspected in Safari developer tools (Mac Catalyst)

Description

WKWebView Safari developer tools (inspect option) are not available in a MAUI Mac app. If the same app is created using native tooling Xcode + Swift with no extra configuration/entitlements - it works (there is a visible session to inspect in Safari dev tools). If a new MAUI app is created with just a WebView in it (which created WKMauiWebView, which is essentially the same as WKWebView), Safari shows no debuggable sessions available.

Other scenarios tests - the same result with no option to debug the session:

• BlazorWebView
• Plain MacCatalyst WKWebView
• MAUI WebView with custom handler with developerExtrasEnabled set

The source for all foud projects is in the following repository: https://github.com/xamcat/maui-wkwebview-inspect

Steps to Reproduce

1. Create new MAUI App
2. Register WebView on the main page

 <WebView Source="https://www.apple.com"
             VerticalOptions="FillAndExpand"
             HorizontalOptions="FillAndExpand" />

1. Run on Mac with dotnet build -t:Run -f net6.0-maccatalyst
2. Open Safari and navigate to Develop-> <MacName>

Result: No inspectable application message Expected: Web session created by WebView (WKWebView) is visible in debug tools

Version with bug

6.0 (current)

Last version that worked well

Release Candidate 3 (current)

Affected platforms

macOS

Affected platform versions

maccatalyst 13.1

Did you find any workaround?

No workaround has been found.

Relevant log output

No response

[tstephansen]

@headintheclouds21 I think I got it figured out. I haven’t actually tested and JS in it yet (busy on another project) but it at least shows up in Safari so I suspect JS debugging will work.

So what I did was create a project with the default maui blazor template. I also made the changes outlined in the PR that fixed this issue. The trick to getting this to work (for me at least) is adding the following to the MainPage.xaml.cs file.

public MainPage()
{
    InitializeComponent();
    Loaded += MainPage_Loaded;
}

private void MainPage_Loaded(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    if (blazorWebView.Handler.PlatformView is WKWebView view)
    {
        view.SetValueForKey(NSObject.FromObject(true), new NSString("inspectable"));
    }
}

Once I did that the app shows up in Safari again.

[alexeystrakh]

I found some confirmations that the entitlement is needed (get-task-allow) to have the Safari inspect tools work, but also confirmed that Xcode doesn’t include any entitlements for a Cocoa app and it works for Xcode.

May be Xcode includes this entitlements for debug builds automatically without asking us? Found here

get-task-allow is typically added by Xcode automatically for development builds