Wrong.

Apple sandboxes everything. The data lives in a private CloudKit container.
There’s no public API. Forums are full of people asking the same question with no answers.

The only options:

1. Poke the filesystem — maybe there’s a plist or SQLite DB somewhere

2. Screen-scrape the UI using the Accessibility API

So I built both, with automatic fallback

MCP-Powered Research Workflow

Exa.ai for Web Research

Query:

macOS Sequoia Apple Stocks app data location plist sqlite database 2024 2025

Exa surfaced:

• Sandboxed app container:
  ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.stocks/

• Group containers for widgets

• Old forensic references to plist locations

Then I searched:

Swift macOS Accessibility API AXUIElement screen scrape application window extract text rows table 2024

This surfaced code patterns from AXSwift and AXorcist.

Firecrawl for Deep Dives

When I needed detailed docs, firecrawl.dev MCP endpoints let me scrape pages instantly.

Filesystem Exploration

I inspected my machine:

find ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.stocks.widget -type f

Found the jackpot:

• stock-record-source — binary record of all tracked symbols

• fsCachedData/* — JSON files with cached prices

I could see all my tickers — AAPL, MSFT, GLTR, GOLD, TLT…
413 symbols total.

Planning With Parallel Agents

I launched two independent planning agents:

1. Accessibility API approach
   How to scrape the running Stocks.app

2. Filesystem cache approach
   How to parse Apple’s widget cache format

Each agent explored references, returned patterns, and produced a spec.
Result: a complete blueprint for a dual-extraction CLI with fallback.

Swift 6.2 on macOS 26

Building this gave me space to try Swift 6.2’s newest features.

Strict Sendable Concurrency

struct StockItem: Codable, Sendable {
    let symbol: String
    var name: String?
    var price: String?
    var change: String?
    var changePercent: String?
}

The compiler forced me to fix non-Sendable types crossing actor boundaries — exactly the kind of concurrency bug that causes random crashes.

Global Actor Isolation Fixes

In Swift 6.2, this raised warnings:

let options = [kAXTrustedCheckOptionPrompt.takeUnretainedValue(): true]

The fix:

private let axTrustedPromptKey = “AXTrustedCheckOptionPrompt”

ArgumentParser 1.6

@main
struct StocksExportCLI: ParsableCommand {
    static let configuration = CommandConfiguration(
        commandName: “stocks-export”,
        abstract: “Export Apple Stocks watchlist to CSV”
    )

    @Option(name: .shortAndLong, help: “Output file path”)
    var output: String?

    @Flag(name: .long, help: “Output as JSON instead of CSV”)
    var json: Bool = false

    @Option(name: .long, help: “Extraction method”)
    var method: ExtractionMethod = .auto
}

No custom argument parsing. Just clean declarative Swift.

Deep Dive: Using the Accessibility API

The Accessibility API exposes every UI as a tree of AXUIElements.

Traversal pattern:

func dfs(_ root: AXUIElement, where predicate: (AXUIElement) -> Bool) -> [AXUIElement] {
    var result: [AXUIElement] = []
    var stack: [AXUIElement] = [root]

    while let node = stack.popLast() {
        if predicate(node) { result.append(node) }
        stack.append(contentsOf: axChildren(of: node))
    }
    return result
}

To extract rows from Stocks.app:

1. Locate process via bundle ID

2. Get main window AXUIElement

3. DFS into AXTable / AXOutline

4. Extract AXStaticText children

5. Parse fields by position/heuristics

This can break if Apple adjusts its UI hierarchy — which is why the filesystem fallback exists.

Parsing Apple’s Widget Cache Format

Example cache JSON:

{
  “GLTR”: {
    “query”: {
      “results”: {
        “item”: {
          “response”: {
            “data-series”: {
              “series”: {
                “p”: [
                  {
                    “v”: [
                      “138.14”,
                      “138.50”,
                      “137.80”,
                      “138.00”,
                      “1234567”
                    ]
                  }
                ]
              }
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

v = [close, high, low, open, volume].

To avoid confusing timestamps for prices:

if strValue.count >= 10, Int64(strValue) != nil {
    continue
}

The Result

A 1.6MB native macOS binary that:

• Extracts 413 stocks in under 1 second

• Works offline using filesystem cache

• Works live using Accessibility API

• Exports CSV or JSON

• Includes debugging modes

Example:

$ stocks-export -o watchlist.csv
$ head -5 watchlist.csv
Symbol,Name,Price,Change,Change%
AAPL,Apple Inc.,203.96,+1.23,+0.61%
MSFT,Microsoft Corporation,378.91,-1.45,-0.38%
AMZN,Amazon.com Inc.,211.92,+2.15,+1.02%
GLTR,abrdn Physical Precious Metals Basket,138.14,+0.56,+0.41%

My Vibe Coding Workflow

1. Research first — exa.ai + firecrawl MCP

2. Plan in parallel — competing agent approaches

3. Iterate fast — Swift 6.2 caught every race condition

4. Dual extraction — UI scrape + filesystem cache

5. Ship — README, repo, binary, all in one sitting

Total time: one coding session.

Try It Yourself

Open source:

https://github.com/zetsuchan/apple-stocks-export

Commands:

git clone https://github.com/zetsuchan/apple-stocks-export.git
cd apple-stocks-export
swift build -c release
.build/release/stocks-export -o ~/Desktop/watchlist.csv

What’s Next?

This whole pattern — MCP-powered research, parallel agents, modern Swift — generalizes.

What other data in your apps is locked away behind sandboxes and forgotten APIs?

Time to free it.