Tkinter apps can't be distributed on the macOS App Store

[freakboy3742]

Bug report

Bug description:

If you use tkinter in your app, and package the app for distribution in the macOS App Store, the app will be rejected with a message to the effect that:

Guideline 2.5.1 - Performance - Software Requirements

Your app uses or references the following non-public or deprecated APIs:

Contents/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.12/lib/libtk8.6.dylib

Symbols:

• _NSWindowDidOrderOnScreenNotification

The use of non-public or deprecated APIs is not permitted on the App Store, as they can lead to a poor user experience should these APIs change and are otherwise not supported on Apple platforms.

(or similar).

This appears to be a known issue in Tk.

This ticket is mostly to log the issue as something that can affect macOS users; there's not much we can do to fix it until such time as Tk fixes the problem and releases the fix in a version that Python can incorporate into a release (or, I guess, Apple changes their App Store review policies).

CPython versions tested on:

3.14, 3.13, 3.12, 3.11, 3.10, 3.9, CPython main branch

Operating systems tested on:

macOS

[hoodmane]

Maybe you could patch tkinter.so to stub out the symbol to a trap?

[freakboy3742]

I'm not sure that would actually fix the problem - the issue is the existence of the symbol at all. Apple's already demonstrated that their app rejection processes rely heavily on fairly naïve pattern matches (see #120522); I wouldn't be at all surprised that if you wrote some code that just happened to use the name _NSWindowDidOrderOnScreenNotification as a symbol, it would be rejected, even if the code had nothing to do with Cocoa.

It's also an issue internal to the Tk dylib, not the tkinter.so Python module; so this sort of approach would require doing binary patching (or source patching) one of our upstream dependencies.... just so people can put Tk apps in the App Store. I'm not convinced that juice is worth the squeeze.