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The convention on desktop and mobile is not to have a submission at all. If you click one of these "mercury" buttons, you can always have up-to-date state.

Forms and submissions are mostly a web convention. I too think that's more natural, but there are a lot of existing contexts like settings where the expectation is that making the selection doesn't require an explicit "save" step.

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That's a bad excuse. There are plenty of widgets that need to deal with illegal states in an auto-saving form. For example, every text input that expects a numeric value needs to allow an empty string.

If you don't want to deal with validation logic in your app, you could just disable the last checkbox.

I like your last point.

Also in practice this state does not happen in “apps”. Before the user reaches the screen, you must have set a default. If you have default, then “deselect all” will eventually revert to that default.

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