I'm sure this will make the user experience even worse. It seems we've the wrong lessons from Windows Vista's constant "Cancel/Allow" prompts.
That page describes a couple of other scenarios, so Apple at least has given this some thought.
So, developers will have to do more. I think that’s acceptable for the additional security that the users get, but that’s another discussion.
Do what? As I said at the end of the article, there's no way for a non-sandboxed app to preserve the granted file access across launches.
Just sandbox a non-sandboxed app. Yeah, thanks for your input.
> and configure it properly.
This is nonsense. A sandboxed app only has access to its own container, so it's a non-solution to the problem of accessing the container of another app.
Another example: sometimes a developer has a sandboxed sub-application embedded inside the main non-sandboxed application, for the purposes of security or crash protection, if the sub-app is loading arbitrary content from the internet. So now there would be a scary dialog every time the main application is launched and needs to access the container of the sub-application.
There are countless scenarios that you've never thought of, and that Apple has never thought of. In fact, that's one of the main purposes of having a 3rd party developer ecosystem. You never know exactly what could be useful until someone clever and imaginative makes it. I've personally worked on a lot of software that users love but that would be banned by simple-minded fearmongering about "security". This is one of the reasons why the once thriving Mac software ecosystem is becoming quite barren nowadays. It won't be long before the Mac becomes nothing more than an ultra-expensive iPad.
If you resist sandboxing, yes, but the idea is to have the non-app store app sandboxed, too. If so, that would (at worst; possibly, the two binaries can be identical) be a one-time dialog, wouldn’t it?
> So now there would be a scary dialog every time the main application is launched and needs to access the container of the sub-application.
Isn’t that what the sections “Share file access between processes with URL bookmarks” or “Persist access to files with security-scoped URL bookmarks” cover? Launch a subprocess to do the dangerous thing, and have that send back such an url to the main process.
TLDR: I may be overlooking something, but I think Apple’s message is that they want all apps to be sandboxed (for what you call fear mongering about security, but I think opinions will differ on that), and are willing to take collateral damage of making non-sandboxed applications harder to use.