GPSLarp is asking for my Mac's administrator password
A macOS password dialog appears the first time you try to do anything with your iPhone, and you would reasonably like to know what it is for before typing anything into it.
It starts the connection between the Mac and the iPhone. macOS restricts that connection to administrators, so it raises its own dialog — GPSLarp does not draw it, does not read what you type, and never receives your password.
01What the prompt is actually starting
GPSLarp does not talk to the iPhone directly from the app window. It opens a connection over Apple's device-development protocol — the same one Xcode uses — and that connection needs a low-level network interface on the Mac that macOS only lets administrators create. Hence one password, once, before any phone is visible.
Three things follow from that, and each is the answer to a question people reasonably ask before typing a password into anything:
- The dialog is macOS's, not ours. It looks like every other administrator prompt on your Mac because it is the same one. What you type goes to the operating system's authorisation service; the app is handed a yes or a no.
- Nothing is sent anywhere. The prompt is a local authorisation on your own machine. There is no network request involved in it and no part of it reaches us.
- Nothing is left behind with those rights. GPSLarp installs no background helper that keeps administrator access — that was a deliberate decision, and it is the reason you are asked again next time rather than once forever. A tool that stopped asking would be a tool that kept the privilege.
02When you should and should not see it
01Once per session, and only if the connection is not already up
If the connection is already running when GPSLarp looks — because you have used it since the Mac last restarted — there is nothing to start and no prompt.
02Never before you have signed in
The app checks who you are before it goes anywhere near this prompt. That order is on purpose: being asked for an administrator password and then being told you cannot use the thing it started is the wrong way round, so a signed-out user is never shown it at all. If you are seeing a sign-in screen instead of this prompt, that is why — sign-in trouble is the page.
03Not from a standard account, unless you know an administrator's password
macOS will accept an administrator's name and password typed into the prompt even when the account you are logged into is a standard one. What it will not accept is a standard account's own credentials.
03What happens if you dismiss it
Nothing bad, and nothing useful. The connection does not start, so no iPhone can be found — whether or not one is plugged in. The app says it could not start the connection, which is a different message from the one you get when the connection is running and no phone is behind it.
That distinction is the whole diagnostic. If you are looking at "the connection could not be started", the prompt is the thing to fix. If you are looking at "no iPhone detected", the connection is fine and the problem is on the iPhone side.
To be asked again: quit GPSLarp and reopen it, then try to reach the phone. There is no separate button for retrying the prompt.
04If that did not work
You typed the right password and it was refused. Check the account you are typing is an administrator: System Settings › Users & Groups, where an administrator account is labelled as one. Your Apple Account password and your Mac login password are different things, and the prompt wants the second.
The prompt appears again immediately after you approve it. Something is stopping the connection from staying up. Restarting the Mac clears the most common version of this, which is a previous connection that did not shut down cleanly.
Your Mac is managed by an employer or a school. A management profile can prevent administrator authorisation for this kind of request entirely. Nothing in GPSLarp works around that.
The prompt is approved, the connection is up, and no phone appears. Then this step is done and the remaining causes are elsewhere — GPSLarp can't find my iPhone.