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Comment by keeganpoppen | Hacker News Reader

apps in windows are, and have always been, more like this than mac apps. it seems like the worst offenders on mac are ports from / native residents of windows. steam does this, for example. it drives me BONKERS. at least on Mac it's kind of rare. on windows, i swear to god every single thing you install does this. razer mouse? better run at startup! weird USB peripheral you use once in a blue moon? better run at startup!

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This is an abject failure of OS design. If an app is allowed by the OS to insert itself in the startup list without explicit user consent first an foremost I blame the operating system. You can’t trust every app and every developer out there. I would love if there would be a Linux distro out there that would adopt some of the principles and values embodied in iOS, without the draconian Apple walled garden.

I agree: this should be part of any reasonably secure OS. One thing you can do in absence of it is install Patrick Wardle's BlockBlock[0] which adds alerts for this behavior (also open source)

[0] https://objective-see.com/products/blockblock.html

Get Sysinternals' Autoruns and simply just run it on a Windows system. There are so many ways executable code can run automatically without you knowing.

Eh, I don't know if you can exclusively blame Apple for this one. I've observed the same behavior in the MATE environmment, both on Fedora and Pop! OS. I'd install Teams, it would autostart on login, I'd remove it from my list of startup items, then the very next time I fired up Teams it would reinsert itself. The only way to disable it was inside Teams' own preference dialog, which I found to be an extremely tone-deaf mechanic.

Honestly I’m surprised that Apple doesn’t block applications from inserting themselves into a user’s login items after the user has manually removed it. Or maybe only let the application do it by asking the use (and requiring one of the answers to be “no, and never ask again”.

Well, you can't really buy Teams from the App Store, now can you?

Maybe some day people will understand that this "walled garden" is a good thing

I helped my father install O365 via phone. It was a painful experience (he’s not great with computers). O365 was added to the Mac App Store the following week.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

I feel like steam is a good citizen in this regard. I had no problem with it starting at startup/login after I asked it not to do that.

i thought so too, but for some reason on my macbook air it keeps starting at login lol. i wouldn't be surprised if it's PEBKAC, honestly...

I know, this is a crazy design to start an app during startup. They better get user’s consent before user installs the app and provide an option to disable start on startup (login).

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