Feature Request: Detect Hackintosh and Virtual Machine Environments

[anosidium]

First of all, thank you for TelemetryDeck. It’s a fantastic tool and very easy to integrate.

I wanted to ask whether you would consider adding built-in detection for Mac apps running on a Hackintosh or inside a virtual machine.

At the moment, TelemetryDeck already provides environment flags such as:

• isSimulatorOrTestFlight
• isSimulator
• isDebug
• isTestFlight
• isAppStore

These are extremely useful. It would be helpful to also be able to identify Hackintosh and virtualised environments. For example, additional flags could look like this:

• isHackintosh
• isVirtualMachine

This would be particularly valuable for filtering analytics data and improving the accuracy of usage metrics for Mac apps.

I appreciate that this may not be trivial or always reliable, but I wanted to raise it as a potential enhancement.

Thanks again for your work on TelemetryDeck.

[kkostov]

Hi @anosidium, thanks a lot for this suggestion!

I did some research but I couldn't identify reliable ways of detecting such environments without bringing in a lot of extra logic into the library (that will end up running in every app). There are also legitimate use-cases for using the library in server scenarios and other platforms which we're very much looking forward to support.

If you already have some mechanism to detect a VM/hackintosh environment in your app, you can add these parameters as custom default parameters e.g. defaultParameters = {"YourApp.isHackintosh": "True"} - so they will be attached to all outgoing events from your app.