Thank you for the reply and I just tried reinstalling ios-deploy using brew and removing that setting in Preferences, but then got this message:
Resolving ios-deploy location…
Could not find ‘ios-deploy’ on this system, please install it and try again.
If it’s already installed, configure its path in the Preferences’ Tools pane.
Not sure if there’s something strange with my system (vanilla OS X install) since the “Resolving” message obviously shows Defold looked for ios-deploy in a well known location.
Either way, this is a permissions issue and not a Defold one AFAIK… unless some entitlement needs to be requested from OS X to use automation in Privacy & Security? Like I said, I’m not an expert with Macs and posted this in case others have seen it and can help out. I’ll go the scripting path to manually push apps to my devices. The bundle feature is nice in Defold and a big help btw.