RZelaya

Once the Apple Silicon Macs came out, I converted my whole family from PC to Mac because the price to performance finally made sense.

I'm the resident tech support for my family and some friends, so having them all playing in the Mac ecosystem made it way easier.

My mom's fiance had a $3,000 Windows laptop for doing video editing. And I convinced him to get a $600 base M1 Mac Mini when they were new and he has never gone back. He just upgraded to an M4 Mac Mini last year

I'm sure these new MacBook Neo's are converting a whole other wave of users that have that price point as their cap but need something mobile.

Good catch. Easy edge case to miss if you only test on QWERTY. I'll double-check the implementation, thanks for the heads up.

update: You're right, this is a real bug. The Direct version's auto-paste hardcodes the QWERTY keycode for V instead of translating for the active layout, so Dvorak / Colemak / AZERTY users would all hit it. The MAS version is unaffected (clipboard-only; the user presses their own Cmd+V, which is layout-correct). Fix is going into the next release. Thanks for the careful read.

Thanks for sharing this. The "phase out the broadly-scoped Accessibility API and replace with narrower permissions" point is exactly the right structural fix. Right now developers have to declare a permission far broader than they actually need, and from the outside the criteria for what counts as legitimate use isn't clearly defined. Interesting that your iOS app got through but macOS didn't. WhisperPad is Mac-only and I haven't gone through the iOS path, so your experience there is useful data. The "demonstrable accessibility" criterion seems to be where everything bottlenecks.

From what I understand Wispr Flow distributes directly from their website and doesn't ship through the Mac App Store, so they don't go through Apple's App Store review at all. They use the Accessibility API the same way the direct version of WhisperPad does. The 2.4.5 limitation really only kicks in if you want App Store presence.

Apple's built-in dictation works for casual use, but in my own daily use the typo rate was high enough that I was constantly going back to fix things, which defeated the point (with a hand injury, those corrections cost me). WhisperPad uses Whisper models instead, doesn't cut off after 30-60 seconds like Apple's does, supports 99 languages offline, and pastes into any active field via hotkey. There's a 120-minute monthly free tier so you can see if it fits your use case. If Apple's built-in dictation handles what you need, that's a fair answer.

Same approach: CGEventPost with Accessibility permission. The wrinkle was that my App Store reviewer wasn't comfortable with how I was using AX permission for auto-paste, even though the mechanism is the same as other apps already in the store. The clipboard-only version of WhisperPad needs no AX permission and that's what got through. Interesting that your sandboxed app with similar mechanics is approved.

The direct version uses CGEventPost to synthesize the paste, which requires Accessibility permission. The App Store version writes to the clipboard only, so no AX permission needed and the user presses Cmd+V manually. The 2.4.5 rejection was specifically about the Accessibility permission use case. Your read sounds right that this path has been gimped for a long time.