glTF viewer registers via iCloud as a file type provider for GLB and similar files on macOS and breaks Preview.app (it's wild)

[NSBrianWard]

I've verified this is the case. The issue causes the Preview app on macOS to be unable to open GLB files entirely due to the fact that the binary doesn't exist on macOS. I'm unsure why it breaks Preview.app, but it does.

The only solution is to remove the iOS app's data in iCloud entirely and to disallow it from saving any data there. Although it turns out this isn't enough as there are a few files in iCloud that macOS holds onto that you have to purge manually via the terminal.

The problem happens when the Launch Services database is rebuilt and the system is restarted.

[NSBrianWard]

Some of the files I had to purge from the system:

sudo rm -rf "/System/Volumes/Data/Users/brianward/Library/Application Support/CloudDocs/session/containers/iCloud.org.khronos.gltf.glTFViewer"
sudo rm -rf "/System/Volumes/Data/Users/brianward/Library/Application Support/CloudDocs/session/containers/iCloud.org.khronos.gltf.glTFViewer.plist"
sudo rm -rf "/System/Volumes/Data/Users/brianward/Library/Daemon Containers/CA53E0B0-6280-4FB7-A753-766B1F8FA006/Data/Library/Caches/Placeholders-v2.noindex/org.khronos.gltf.glTFViewer-1.0"
sudo rm -rf "/System/Volumes/Data/Users/brianward/Library/Mobile Documents/iCloud~org~khronos~gltf~glTFViewer"

You can find these on your machine with sudo find / -name "*glTFViewer*" 2>/dev/null

[NSBrianWard]

You can verify that the incorrect association exists by running: /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -dump | grep -A 10 -B 10 "public.glb" on your system

To delete the bad data after purging the files I mentioned above. Make sure you've disabled on the app's ability to use iCloud from your phone. Then go into iCloud on your phone and purge all data for the app. Removing the folder will not be sufficient. There's an option to purge the data for the app in Settings... somewhere.

To reset the Launch Services database, do the following:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user
qlmanage -r
qlmanage -r cache
killall Finder
killall Dock

Reboot your machine. if you've purged everything correctly, it won't show up again and GLB/GLTF files will magically open in Preview.app again. I really don't understand why the presence of these file associations bricks Preview.app, but that seems like a macOS design issue to me.

It takes a couple of minutes after reboot for the issue to re-appear (it won't reappear if you manually purge those files I mentioned via the terminal in my first comment). Hopefully something can be done to mitigate this issue from being triggered by the iOS app. It's a really cool app and I enjoyed using it on my phone.

Thanks!

[NSBrianWard]

I want to emphasize that merely changing the file association back to Preview.app does not resolve the problem without performing the steps above.

[NSBrianWard]

It's also worth mentioning that while the bug is happening, you can see from the Console log that both Preview and Finder complain the following in the logs: Unexpected bundle class 16 declaring type public.glb