Dear Apple Developer Support Team,
I am reaching out for assistance with two pending DriverKit entitlement requests. This is my first experience developing an application within Apple's ecosystem, and I recognize that my use case is somewhat unconventional. I may not have reached the appropriate support channel, so I would appreciate your guidance or assistance in directing this request to the correct team.
We are currently evaluating the feasibility of adopting iPads for an internal enterprise application that communicates with our proprietary USB devices.
These devices use the standard USB Communications Device Class (CDC), exposing a virtual serial port (UART). They work reliably on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
To my surprise, I discovered that iPadOS does not provide general-purpose access to standard USB CDC serial devices. Based on my research, the recommended approach appears to be implementing a custom driver using DriverKit.
We also use macOS as our primary development and debugging environment, so we would like to maintain a consistent DriverKit-based implementation across both platforms in macOS only for development.
On September 30, 2026, I submitted the following entitlement requests:
1. Request GW966578ZB — DriverKit UserClient Access
- Requested entitlement:
com.apple.developer.driverkit.userclient-access
2. Request 3HN2GMDFN5 — DriverKit / USB Transport Distribution Authorization
- Requested entitlements:
com.apple.developer.driverkitcom.apple.developer.driverkit.transport.usb
Unfortunately, I have not received any response or status update on either request in the three weeks since submission.
At this stage, our work is strictly a proof of concept (POC). We are not requesting public distribution or App Store publication. Our immediate objective is to validate the technical feasibility of communicating with our USB devices from iPadOS before committing to Apple's platform for our enterprise solution.
The lack of progress on these requests has effectively blocked our evaluation for three weeks, making it difficult to assess whether iPadOS is a viable platform for our intended use case.
Apple Developer Team ID: R4PSRJ28G7
We are genuinely interested in adopting Apple's technology for our enterprise operations, but we need to establish technical feasibility before proceeding.
I would appreciate any guidance that could help us move forward.
Best regards,
Alon Bar-Lev
We also use macOS as our primary development and debugging environment, so we would like to maintain a consistent DriverKit-based implementation across both platforms in macOS only for development.
As a minor note, macOS also provides the IOUSBHost framework, which allows direct user space access to USB accessory which aren't claimed by any other driver. There are significant advantages to using it over DriverKit, depending on your requirements. I'll also note that the API structure of the two APIs is similar enough that maintaining two implementation is less difficult than it might seem.
At this stage, our work is strictly a proof of concept (POC). We are not requesting public distribution or App Store publication. Our immediate objective is to validate the technical feasibility of communicating with our USB devices from iPadOS before committing to Apple's platform for our enterprise solution.
You already have everything you need to proceed with this kind of testing. You can find the configuration instructions for development only signing in "How to sign a DEXT". That configuration will let you match against any USB device and the development only variant of com.apple.developer.driverkit.allow-any-userclient-access will allow communication on macOS.
One small comment here:
...validate the technical feasibility of communicating with our USB devices from iPadOS
I would STRONGLY recommend you do your initial development and testing on macOS, NOT iPadOS. This post goes into this in detail, but the summary is that the friction and lack of diagnostic tools on iPadOS mean that it's easier and FAR faster to get something working on macOS and then move that driver to iPadOS than it is to bring something up directly on iPadOS.
This is PARTICULARLY critical if you're relatively new to IOKit/DriverKit, as the lack of basic tools like IORegistryExplorer/ioreg on iPadOS mean that you can't easily see what's actually happening in the kernel quickly enough to be useful. Most of the iPadOS issue I've seen are very straight forward mistakes like the driver not loading correctly which have been completely misunderstood due to a lack of visibility. It isn't just that the issue is "easier" to understand on macOS, it's the the better tooling on macOS means it would have been a glitch you immediately worked on sorting out, not "a bug" you spent days "investigating".
__
Kevin Elliott
DTS Engineer, CoreOS/Hardware
