How to disable default keyboard navigation in Mac Catalyst app?

Question

I noticed that I can step through rows in a UITableView in a Mac Catalyst app by pressing the up and down arrow keys on my Mac keyboard. However, this interferes with the existing functionality in one of my view controllers. Is there a way to disable this?

I can't find any reference to this functionality in the UITableView documentation. The Human Interface Guidelines for Mac Catalyst mentions "automatic support for fundamental Mac features, such as ... keyboard navigation," so I guess this is an intentional feature, but I can't find any further reference to it or documentation for it.

I haven't seen any other examples of "automatic" keyboard navigation in my app, but ideally Apple would publish a complete list so we could know how to work with, or if needed, disable, the built-in functionality.

Answer 1

Here's another solution I received from Apple DTS. Just add this to the table view delegate:

func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, canFocusRowAt indexPath: IndexPath) -> Bool {
    return false
}

This works in macOS 11.6 and 12.0. I don't have a 10.15 or 11.5 Mac to test with, so I'll keep my earlier resignFirstResponder solution, too.