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Comment by GordonS | Hacker News Reader

I just upgraded to Catalina today on my MBP, and that screenshot of Allow/Deny notifcations hits the nail on the head! Likewise the popups about allowing apps to control other apps - what a wonderful way to introduce me to Catalina!

I mean, come on, there has to be a better way than this, especially from a company supposedly famed for it's user-orientated designs and thinking?

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How would you choose to handle it?

Maybe Apple could have gone through all the apps on their own App Store, built a whitelist out of the privileges that each of those apps effectively needs to do its job at all (not optional features, just the “makes the app more than a paperweight” feature-set), and shipped Catalina with said whitelist.

For example, if, when you upgraded to Catalina, the App Store version of Alfred was already installed on disk, then macOS should assume that you’re an Alfred user, who wants to continue to be able to do “the thing Alfred does” (launch apps) without asking.

And before you say “but what if this whitelist authorizes malware to continue being malware”—if there’s malware on the App Store, then they should probably solve that by removing the app from the App Store and deauthorizing the developer’s code-signing cert, so that Gatekeeper won’t run it any more. Just kill the vampires; don’t ask the user if they want to let them in.

> if there’s malware on the App Store, then they should probably solve that by removing the app from the App Store and deauthorizing the developer’s code-signing cert

Apple has been spectacularly poor at spotting bad apps on the Mac App Store.

So the solution is to punish the users of the platform because the company won't spend enough money to hire people to properly vet the app store?

"its a bold move cotton..."

Well, I'm not famed for my user-orientated designs and thinking!

But there are numerous ways this could be handled. A few off the top of my head:

1. Do nothing - leave things the way they were pre-Catalina 2. Default all apps installed pre-Catalina to "Allow", so you only get the prompt for newly installed apps 3. Make it configurable at the OS level, so you can set the default you want, and then tweak individual apps as you see fit

Honestly, I just want an off switch for TCC. (It can be in the Terminal-only.) I'm kind of surprised there isn't one—Apple is usually pretty good about providing this stuff on macOS (at least relative to that other platform).

Even with SIP turned off, there's no way to just blanket dismiss the dialogues. (Although, I'm sure without SIP someone could use code injection, but no one has, and given the amount of work it would require I'm not surprised.)

With SIP disabled, it might be possible to directly modify the TCC database…maybe someone can write a script to do this so it includes all your applications already.

I once put a 200 point bounty on an Ask Different question for how to directly edit the TCC database (when SIP is off). No one answered. No one answered :(

It's just a SQLite file, so you should be able to perform operations on it pretty easily (make a backup first!)

Maybe handle it with a sidebar that lists all of the requests. Apple knows people are going to get flooded with these requests, they should have had a queuing sidebar to list all of the requests and that you can go through them one at a time.

I haven't upgraded yet, but I would expect there to be a one-time user flow when upgrading. Walk the user through new features and then bring up a single page with a list of apps that need modified permissions. Let the user select all for 'Allow' and have them type in their password once. Done.

How does the OS know what permissions an app will try to access before it actually makes the attempt?

Because the maker of the OS runs the app store. They could have tested the popular ones?

Not all popular apps are on the App Store.

I would have given all already-installed applications the permissions they had in the previous version of macOS. If I've been using an app for years it's a bit late to worry about it reading things that I don't want to read, and in practice showing a giant wall of permission prompts on first startup is just going to result in users clicking on Allow on all of them anyway.

What about coalescing the lists of applications requiring specific permissions, for instance, and presenting that to the user at the end of the setup process in a more structured step? I'm imagining a list of "here are XYZ applications requesting location services access, pick which ones you don't want to give location access to" and then a list of "here are ABC apps that want microphone and camera access". It's not great, but it does eliminate the myriad popups. The more "Apple" solution would be to just have sensible defaults (deny) and only prompt the user when the app in question wants to access that specific item (the way iOS implements it).

> The more "Apple" solution would be to just have sensible defaults (deny) and only prompt the user when the app in question wants to access that specific item (the way iOS implements it).

This is how it works; it’s just that macOS applications are not used to delaying authorization prompts to the appropriate time so they ask for it on startup.

Detect when there are multiple apps that are asking for new permissions simultaneously and then ask the user if they want to go to the "bulk permission editing page" to manage them.

On that page there could be a grid of apps vs permissions with the permissions each app is requesting highlighted. One click to switch on each permission and even a power user could be on their way in a couple minutes.

LineageOS has a similar permissions list for all apps installed (albeit without a nice overview grid) that I think makes it very easy to manage what each app is allowed to do.

Take a look at where Windows UAC eventually ended up. A lot of this can definitely be streamlined by having the action itself also be the permission approval, as UAC now does.

Doesn't necessarily help with 3rd party apps, but it's a bit insane that the bundled apps on the OS itself have all these issues, too (like iterm fighting finder??)

EDIT: Or for notifications they could take a page out of Android's book. Default allow notifications, but after the user dismisses a few of them without interaction prompt if they still want to keep receiving them. Take a spam-filter type approach instead of allow/deny prompts everywhere.

"please review permissions" opens a table with your applications listed in rows and permissions requested by each in columns. Popups like this remind me of the internet in 2003.

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