How to open your System Settings app screen
KeyboardKit has utilities to easily let you open your app’s System Settings screen. However, you may have noticed that it behaves a little random, and sometimes open the System Settings root instead of your app. Let’s take a look at how to improve this.
How to get the System Settings url for your app
KeyboardKit has a KeyboardSettingsUrlProvider protocol that automatically extends all types that implement it with a static .keyboardSettings url. Under the hood, this url just resolves to UIApplication.openSettingsURLString on iOS and tvOS, and nil on macOS and watchOS.
You can open this URL like any other url, by using UIApplication.shared.open(...) on iOS and tvOS and NSWorkspace.shared.open(...) on macOS, although in this patricular case there is no url to open on macOS.
Keyboard settings link
To make things even easier, KeyboardKit has a KeyboardSettingsLink view that can be used to render a SwiftUI button with any title, icon and URL. Tapping it will open the .keyboardSettings by default, although you can modify this behavior.
How to always open System Settings for your app
If you have used the url above, you may have noticed that it sometimes leads to your app’s System Settings screen, while at other times it just takes you to the System Settings root.
This random behavior makes for a bad user experience, since it may be hard for users to find your app in System Settings…if they even know that it exists.
Although this random behavior is bad, fixing it is actually very easy. All you have to do is just to add an empty Settings Bundle to your app. If you look at the demo app, you can see that it has a Settings bundle with a Root file that only contains a file name. By just adding this to your app, it will consistently take you to the correct place in System Settings.
Big thanks to Kévin Quisquater for coming up with such an easy solution to this annoying problem!