I don't even care if they make the dialogue look a little different since they're system apps you need to use the features of your phone, but the "extras" they support should default to "Ask First" in an ideal world that is.
Same with the Camera App. It can ask "Camera App wants to access your Camera" and you can say "No" and then download some other camera app and make that your default and grant it camera permission.
The built-in Photos app is just a basic built-in photo viewer. So the user is not allowed to view their own damn photos without clicking through a bunch of permission prompts like they're running Windows Vista.
The app even comes from the same developer as the operating system. If you don't trust that developer to make an app that views your photos, why did you buy a phone that runs that operating system in the first place?!?
Where's the common sense?
Music as well, it's not just an audio player for local tracks, it's upselling a music streaming service.
It kinda seems stupid to have no choice there, or predatory rather, given how the lack of choice is never just coincidental with apple, and it's very much an intentional lock-in first, and then whatever marketing spin second or third. "Privacy, that's iphone ... that's why you should give us access to all of your data, cause you trust us, right? choose yes or yes." Getting suckered into "trusting" something is kind of a pathetic argument regardless of wherever it comes from.
Ah, it was OpenHaystack: https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack#installation
Mail plugins are kind of a special case, they're REALLY "legacy", so they work by sharing process memory and being able to access way more than they should, like all your messages, possibly even passwords if the developer is clever enough.
Also notoriously difficult to build, since the Mail internal API breaks from time to time, so they're a rarity these days.
Also notoriously difficult to install.
Maybe you'd like to use a competitor to the Photos app and don't want to use the one Apple provides?
But what does the "Access to photos" permission really do here? It's not like not having that permission would stop Apple from accessing them against your will, as they have access via the OS anyway. And it's clear, that when you open the Apple Photos app, that it will access your photos.
On the other hand, when you open a third party app, it may not have been clear to you that it wants to access your photos, and the company did not have prior access to them.
I still think apps should only be pre-blessed sparingly. For example, the camera app should not have GPS permission by default, as many people probably aren't aware that camera apps use that information.
"Access to Photos" is a complicated one: Lots of apps only needs this permission when building a custom photo selector. Like Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram do, also Slack.
For every other app, they can use the system's default photo picker and it works without permission.
For example, the "Lunch Receipt Scanner" that my company uses: I'm happy to allow it on my phone, as it saves a lot of time, but I wouldn't want a company app having access to my entire camera roll!!!
I personally also don't like that WhatsApp/Instagram/Facebook/Slack asks for access to the whole album just to display the photo picker, but I'm pretty sure some designer or product manager made a strong case for it internally. (EDIT: Not saying having a case justifies it, I'm more lamenting the situation)
Main reason I don't use the in-app photo pickers for these but "share" the photo I want to upload from Photos into the app. Zero trust for these companies.
I'm sure he'd love to buy Slack as well
This presumes the OS is something other than a bundle of apps.
Does the filesystem driver have access to your photos stored in the filesystem? Naturally. As would a third party filesystem driver, e.g. if you wanted an app to let you plug a USB drive into your iPad and use NTFS or ext4 filesystems or use various network filesystems.
And then the obvious question is why Apple should be able to give iCloud or its filesystem software access to things the user can't give Dropbox or some open source NFS app permission to do. Or why the user can't deny that permission to the Apple code, or remove it, when they want to use a competitor instead.
The point of having a bundled photo app is to deliver a complete product, not to suppress competition. Imagine the reviews on for a digital camera if you couldn't view photos without downloading extra software.
Apple still makes a commission from app store sales, right? Doesn't bundling a photo app hurt their bottom line by reducing the number of people who feel the need to pay for a 3rd party app?