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I understand this is chaos, but it's chaos because it has to be. There's no way to move users from an world of opaque "if it's an application, it can do anythin

I understand this is chaos, but it's chaos because it has to be. There's no way to move users from an world of opaque "if it's an application, it can do anything it wants" to a world of "applications should ask me when they want to do something" transparency. The idea that Apple doesn't care about the Mac because it's trying to explicitly improve our privacy and security is … weird.

ixtli 7y ago
Yes their recent trend of moving user privacy to the forefront is one of the few really positive trends i've seen out of apple in the past 2-3 years. Ignoring that the questions being asked by the OS are good is very bizarre.
- danieldk 7y ago
  Yes their recent trend of moving user privacy to the forefront is one of the few really positive trends i've seen out of apple in the past 2-3 years. Apple has moved privacy to the forefront for a much longer time. Apple was the first to roll out end-to-end encryption of messages to hundreds of millions of people (iMessage 2011), the first to roll out end-to-end encrypted (video) calls to hundreds of millions of people (Facetime, 2010). They introduced the secure enclave, which was quickly used throughout the OS with iPhone 5s in 2013. Whatever reasons they have (and despite their failings), they have been pushing privacy for almost 10 years now.
rinchik 7y ago
Second this. It's a major security update that allows you to re-evaluate and more precisely manage access rights that your existing apps have. Not sure what "super user" author is really sad about. No one is keeping him from using windows.
- bsaul 7y ago
  I don’t think that’s intentional though. Otherwise a proper way would simply be to prompt the user with something like « you’ve just upgraded your system, would you like to take this as an opportunity to reevaluate all your applications access rights ? ».
  - Spivak 7y ago
    Almost every user clicks no and moves on with their life and then we’re put into a weird situation where apps installed prior to Catalina have a ton of permissions and apps post Catalina have comparably few. You could say this is fine but it does demonstrate that something bad probably happened because we’re they presented the immediate option for existing apps they would have made a different choice. Right now I have iOS 13 and it’s been great to see how many apps want but 1000% have no need for Bluetooth access — it’s nice to not have to comb through settings and revoke them manually.
- mtrower 7y ago
  Erm, preferring the old Apple experience (or even a perceived old Apple experience) to the modern Apple experience does not necessarily mean he would prefer the Microsoft experience to the modern Apple experience...
- agret 7y ago
  It really says a lot that he has no provision for comments on his posts.
berberous 7y ago
It's a bad onboarding though, full stop, and not very Apple like. For example, I imagine there could be a way to present the user a screen with all apps, and ask the user on one screen to check/uncheck any that it would like to receive notifications for. Similarly, for the apps requesting access to various things, if I were Apple, I'd wait a bit and then present the user a list with the apps requesting access, explaining why it's happening, etc. So two simple screens with clear explanations and helpful advice, versus a million baffling popups.
- etchalon 7y ago
  If you have one window, with checkboxes, the window would need to start with the boxes all unchecked. And users, being users, would then demand a way to check all of the boxes. And then what would the point of the notifications and requests be? If they didn't, people would complain that they had to click all these checkboxes, and then missed one. Or the window wouldn't have room for applications to explain why they needed that access. Or they would, and users would maybe read the first one, but skip others. There is no "better experience" which doesn't sacrifice the point of the prompts.
- Someone 7y ago
  ”I imagine there could be a way to present the user a screen with all apps, and ask the user on one screen to check/uncheck any that it would like to receive notifications for” All 150+ apps (I don’t know how many are installed by default, but I have 277 on my system), many of which the user won’t even know he has installed? (I just found out I have an “Adobe Air Uninstaller” and two “Abobe Air Application Uninstaller”s, something called “Computer.app”, and 11 different Java 8 updates, for example) And no, I don’t think such a dialog would be useful because users could delete applications they “don’t use” from there. The average user simply doesn’t know which applications he doesn’t use. I certainly don’t. I think they could do a bit better, but I don’t think this problem has an easy answer. For example, they could exclude all Apple apps from these questions, but I suspect that would (rightfully) give us “Apple gives its own applications preferential treatment” complaints.
- dpkonofa 7y ago
  I disagree but only for one major reason: the entire reason this is coming up is because the OP is using an old version of Alfred that wasn't prepped for the new permission settings of Catalina even though there's a fully compatible version that's been released since. The vast majority of users will never, ever get something this obnoxious so it's not a bad on-boarding experience as much as it's a side effect of running old software.
js2 7y ago
Apple could have figured out a way to coalesce all the individual pop-ups into a single window. I'm sure they considered it and deemed it not worth the effort since this is a one-time pain... of course it's one-time pain shared by millions of users. :-(
- etchalon 7y ago
  An individual window would have completely destroyed the point. The point was to make you aware of what permissions the applications you use require access to. And to get explicit permission from the user.
  - toomim 7y ago
    You could do that within a single window.
    - burk96 7y ago
      You certainly could, however I guarantee a huge majority of users wouldn't read a lick of what they were agreeing to. Individual popups don't completely solve this, but it makes more obvious that a specific application is requesting a large amount of permissions. They're a bit more digestible to the crowd that won't bother to read an alert longer than one line.
    - 72deluxe 7y ago
      How? It shows it at the point of access request. If 2 programs request access 5 minutes apart, how would you show that in a single window? Do you suspend the first program and wait until another application makes an access request? What happens if another doesn't make a request in a given time period? Will the user wonder why the first application has stopped doing anything useful for 5 minutes? Honestly, how would you show this in a single window?
  - inferiorhuman 7y ago
    An individual window would have completely destroyed the point. Hardly. Apple could have used the OSX installer to scan two or three common locations for applications and do a bit of static analysis. Apple could have put the permissions notifications in the notification center with an annoying nag screen every hour or two for the first ~30 days turning into an immediate prompt after that (or after all detected programs have been processed).
bsaul 7y ago
I don’t think you read the post properly : all those popups appeared after an OS migration. I don’t see why upgrading the OS would need you to reauthorize apps, and even parts of the OS like icloud shouldn’t require you to relog (unless the security mechanism of icloud itself has been upgraded to a new system with no migration possible of the credentials).
- azinman2 7y ago
  These are new permissions that didn’t previously exist.
  - gowld 7y ago
    No, they are new restrictions that didn't previously exist. Users were already "owned" before Catalina, so waiting 5 minutes to avoid spamming 100 popups isn't a major risk.
draw_down 7y ago
I disagree. The solution to this situation where there are a bunch of dialogs popping all over the screen, asking for some permission, is not to throw up your hands and say "best we could do".
mathemagics 7y ago
Agree that it is overall an improved experience. After upgrading, I discovered that a VPN app wanted access to my Documents folder. No reason it would need that, so I simply denied it. Lo and behold, the app continues to work just fine as expected. IMO, this alone is a big reason to upgrade to Catalina.
- cactus2093 7y ago
  I wonder if maybe it just stores a settings file in there or something? I've seen similar things with apps that request access to Dropbox or Google Drive just not being scoped granularly enough, so they just ask for access to your entire account to control a single file or folder. Which leads to a shitty situation, either you give up functionality like being able to declaratively override settings and sync them between machines, or you compromise your security and allow access. There's no way the PM for the product actually cares about granular permission scoping, so of course nobody actually implements in a safer way where you don't have to make this choice. I haven't looked closely at the new MacOS permissions and how granular they can be, but I'm kind of curious how this will turn out. I suspect the average person will just get used to clicking allow on everything, so developers won't actually care about only asking for what they need, and not much will actually improve about security. But I hope to be proven wrong.
  - mathemagics 7y ago
    Apple provides APIs for saving app settings in the app's sandbox. They require no additional permissions. You're probably right that it's not nefarious in this app's case, but rather just developer ignorance. But even so, this is the right path to nudge developers towards better security practices. Also, the permissions are contextual. I didn't see this dialog until I launched the app. Similarly, the first time an app wants to show a notification, the system prompts you to allow / deny it. I'm sure Apple can polish this more over time. But I will take this over the "nearly full-system access by default" paradigms that dominate desktop OS's.
  - 72deluxe 7y ago
    Settings should be under ~/Library somewhere (perhaps ~/Library/Preferences?) and not in the Documents directory.
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
I expect applications to have access to my desktop. I do not need to be asked. It would be like asking permission to access my clipboard, or use my speakers, or read my keyboard. If you bombard users with dialogues for every little thing, all you will do is train them to habitually click yes. Now you have lowered security, because users will ignore the more serious warnings too. And you've wasted everyone's time in the process. This was exactly why UAC dialogues were largely a failure. And to think that UAC appears only once per app...
- dpkonofa 7y ago
  You expect applications to have access to your desktop? You should only ever expect the user to have access to the desktop and, even then, the only apps that would ever prompt for access to the desktop are those that aren't updated for High Sierra and above. On the latest versions of macOS, the Desktop folder is shared by iCloud. This is definitely not an instance where security has been lowered nor is this the standard behavior of the new OS.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    > You expect applications to have access to your desktop? Yes! That's what applications do, they read and write files. Most other software is, more likely than not, either a game or a web page. Does every app need to access my desktop specifically? No. But if we're trying to protect "normal users", I don't think most of them have the wherewithal to think through "what exact locations does and doesn't app X need to access?"
    - CDSlice 7y ago
      But they should only read and write files that you give it permission to. E.g, Word should only be reading and writing whatever files you open to edit, it shouldn't be able to access all the files in your Applications folder. If it needs temp files it can write those to it's designated section of the file system.
      - 7y ago
DevKoala 7y ago
Very well said. It is a rough upgrade, but a step forward in security and privacy.
api 7y ago
It's just change = bad without looking at what is being changed and why.
fbelzile 7y ago
The "privacy" dialog popups are just marketing. Sure, there may have been an issue with a few bad apps, but Apple found a way to continuously remind you that they are the only ones that 'care about your privacy'TM. Meanwhile, they still happily take Google's money to make it the default search engine in Safari.
- etchalon 7y ago
  … how is an actual functional limitation imposed on applications through an operating system's APIs "just marketing"? If you click deny, BEHOLD, the application is denied that permission.
microcolonel 7y ago
I don't know about this somehow being proof that "Apple doesn't care about the Mac" or something, but I remember distinctly when Apple themselves, and the fanboys, were ragging on Microsoft for UAC (which really only asks you to confirm occasional administrative operations). As for the general quality of Catalina, there seems to be a deluge of amateur-hour flaws that affect real workflows for real users.
GeekyBear 7y ago
Not being asked to grant all permissions that an application wants up front (before you even get a chance to use the app) has a positive impact on the user experience. If the application asks for permission to access my contacts only after I select an option to share information with others, for instance, I can feel more confident about granting that permission. Asking for all permissions up front is the permissions model that Google just abandoned.
charredbacon 7y ago
I disagree that there's no transition. This looks like a pretty good alternative: https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/bparno/papers/user-driven.pdf https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/bparno/papers/user-driven.pd... Instead of the OS displaying an annoying prompt when the application tries to use a privilege, the application embeds an OS-drawn access control gadget inside its UI, such that the user interacting with the UI grants the privilege.
- comex 7y ago
  macOS does something similar already for file open/save dialogs: they’re drawn by a trusted OS component instead of directly by the app, and the user’s act of selecting a file grants the app permission to access that file without an additional dialog.
- misterdata 7y ago
  Actually not far from how it works on macOS. Usage of a system "open file" dialog automatically creates a permission for the application to access that file from inside its container. https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Security/Conceptual/AppSandboxDesignGuide/AppSandboxInDepth/AppSandboxInDepth.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Se... (search for "Powerbox")
celadevra_ 7y ago
> a world of "applications should ask me when they want to do something" transparency. Why not make the user know what applications do: which files, ports, devices it has to access, and what data it emits, to begin with?

ixtli 7y ago

Yes their recent trend of moving user privacy to the forefront is one of the few really positive trends i've seen out of apple in the past 2-3 years. Ignoring that the questions being asked by the OS are good is very bizarre.

danieldk 7y ago
Yes their recent trend of moving user privacy to the forefront is one of the few really positive trends i've seen out of apple in the past 2-3 years. Apple has moved privacy to the forefront for a much longer time. Apple was the first to roll out end-to-end encryption of messages to hundreds of millions of people (iMessage 2011), the first to roll out end-to-end encrypted (video) calls to hundreds of millions of people (Facetime, 2010). They introduced the secure enclave, which was quickly used throughout the OS with iPhone 5s in 2013. Whatever reasons they have (and despite their failings), they have been pushing privacy for almost 10 years now.

rinchik 7y ago

Second this. It's a major security update that allows you to re-evaluate and more precisely manage access rights that your existing apps have. Not sure what "super user" author is really sad about. No one is keeping him from using windows.

bsaul 7y ago
I don’t think that’s intentional though. Otherwise a proper way would simply be to prompt the user with something like « you’ve just upgraded your system, would you like to take this as an opportunity to reevaluate all your applications access rights ? ».
- Spivak 7y ago
  Almost every user clicks no and moves on with their life and then we’re put into a weird situation where apps installed prior to Catalina have a ton of permissions and apps post Catalina have comparably few. You could say this is fine but it does demonstrate that something bad probably happened because we’re they presented the immediate option for existing apps they would have made a different choice. Right now I have iOS 13 and it’s been great to see how many apps want but 1000% have no need for Bluetooth access — it’s nice to not have to comb through settings and revoke them manually.
mtrower 7y ago
Erm, preferring the old Apple experience (or even a perceived old Apple experience) to the modern Apple experience does not necessarily mean he would prefer the Microsoft experience to the modern Apple experience...
agret 7y ago
It really says a lot that he has no provision for comments on his posts.

berberous 7y ago

It's a bad onboarding though, full stop, and not very Apple like. For example, I imagine there could be a way to present the user a screen with all apps, and ask the user on one screen to check/uncheck any that it would like to receive notifications for. Similarly, for the apps requesting access to various things, if I were Apple, I'd wait a bit and then present the user a list with the apps requesting access, explaining why it's happening, etc. So two simple screens with clear explanations and helpful advice, versus a million baffling popups.

etchalon 7y ago
If you have one window, with checkboxes, the window would need to start with the boxes all unchecked. And users, being users, would then demand a way to check all of the boxes. And then what would the point of the notifications and requests be? If they didn't, people would complain that they had to click all these checkboxes, and then missed one. Or the window wouldn't have room for applications to explain why they needed that access. Or they would, and users would maybe read the first one, but skip others. There is no "better experience" which doesn't sacrifice the point of the prompts.
Someone 7y ago
”I imagine there could be a way to present the user a screen with all apps, and ask the user on one screen to check/uncheck any that it would like to receive notifications for” All 150+ apps (I don’t know how many are installed by default, but I have 277 on my system), many of which the user won’t even know he has installed? (I just found out I have an “Adobe Air Uninstaller” and two “Abobe Air Application Uninstaller”s, something called “Computer.app”, and 11 different Java 8 updates, for example) And no, I don’t think such a dialog would be useful because users could delete applications they “don’t use” from there. The average user simply doesn’t know which applications he doesn’t use. I certainly don’t. I think they could do a bit better, but I don’t think this problem has an easy answer. For example, they could exclude all Apple apps from these questions, but I suspect that would (rightfully) give us “Apple gives its own applications preferential treatment” complaints.
dpkonofa 7y ago
I disagree but only for one major reason: the entire reason this is coming up is because the OP is using an old version of Alfred that wasn't prepped for the new permission settings of Catalina even though there's a fully compatible version that's been released since. The vast majority of users will never, ever get something this obnoxious so it's not a bad on-boarding experience as much as it's a side effect of running old software.

js2 7y ago

Apple could have figured out a way to coalesce all the individual pop-ups into a single window. I'm sure they considered it and deemed it not worth the effort since this is a one-time pain... of course it's one-time pain shared by millions of users. :-(

etchalon 7y ago
An individual window would have completely destroyed the point. The point was to make you aware of what permissions the applications you use require access to. And to get explicit permission from the user.
- toomim 7y ago
  You could do that within a single window.
  - burk96 7y ago
    You certainly could, however I guarantee a huge majority of users wouldn't read a lick of what they were agreeing to. Individual popups don't completely solve this, but it makes more obvious that a specific application is requesting a large amount of permissions. They're a bit more digestible to the crowd that won't bother to read an alert longer than one line.
  - 72deluxe 7y ago
    How? It shows it at the point of access request. If 2 programs request access 5 minutes apart, how would you show that in a single window? Do you suspend the first program and wait until another application makes an access request? What happens if another doesn't make a request in a given time period? Will the user wonder why the first application has stopped doing anything useful for 5 minutes? Honestly, how would you show this in a single window?
- inferiorhuman 7y ago
  An individual window would have completely destroyed the point. Hardly. Apple could have used the OSX installer to scan two or three common locations for applications and do a bit of static analysis. Apple could have put the permissions notifications in the notification center with an annoying nag screen every hour or two for the first ~30 days turning into an immediate prompt after that (or after all detected programs have been processed).

bsaul 7y ago

I don’t think you read the post properly : all those popups appeared after an OS migration. I don’t see why upgrading the OS would need you to reauthorize apps, and even parts of the OS like icloud shouldn’t require you to relog (unless the security mechanism of icloud itself has been upgraded to a new system with no migration possible of the credentials).

azinman2 7y ago
These are new permissions that didn’t previously exist.
- gowld 7y ago
  No, they are new restrictions that didn't previously exist. Users were already "owned" before Catalina, so waiting 5 minutes to avoid spamming 100 popups isn't a major risk.

draw_down 7y ago

I disagree. The solution to this situation where there are a bunch of dialogs popping all over the screen, asking for some permission, is not to throw up your hands and say "best we could do".

mathemagics 7y ago

Agree that it is overall an improved experience. After upgrading, I discovered that a VPN app wanted access to my Documents folder. No reason it would need that, so I simply denied it. Lo and behold, the app continues to work just fine as expected. IMO, this alone is a big reason to upgrade to Catalina.

cactus2093 7y ago
I wonder if maybe it just stores a settings file in there or something? I've seen similar things with apps that request access to Dropbox or Google Drive just not being scoped granularly enough, so they just ask for access to your entire account to control a single file or folder. Which leads to a shitty situation, either you give up functionality like being able to declaratively override settings and sync them between machines, or you compromise your security and allow access. There's no way the PM for the product actually cares about granular permission scoping, so of course nobody actually implements in a safer way where you don't have to make this choice. I haven't looked closely at the new MacOS permissions and how granular they can be, but I'm kind of curious how this will turn out. I suspect the average person will just get used to clicking allow on everything, so developers won't actually care about only asking for what they need, and not much will actually improve about security. But I hope to be proven wrong.
- mathemagics 7y ago
  Apple provides APIs for saving app settings in the app's sandbox. They require no additional permissions. You're probably right that it's not nefarious in this app's case, but rather just developer ignorance. But even so, this is the right path to nudge developers towards better security practices. Also, the permissions are contextual. I didn't see this dialog until I launched the app. Similarly, the first time an app wants to show a notification, the system prompts you to allow / deny it. I'm sure Apple can polish this more over time. But I will take this over the "nearly full-system access by default" paradigms that dominate desktop OS's.
- 72deluxe 7y ago
  Settings should be under ~/Library somewhere (perhaps ~/Library/Preferences?) and not in the Documents directory.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

I expect applications to have access to my desktop. I do not need to be asked. It would be like asking permission to access my clipboard, or use my speakers, or read my keyboard. If you bombard users with dialogues for every little thing, all you will do is train them to habitually click yes. Now you have lowered security, because users will ignore the more serious warnings too. And you've wasted everyone's time in the process. This was exactly why UAC dialogues were largely a failure. And to think that UAC appears only once per app...

dpkonofa 7y ago
You expect applications to have access to your desktop? You should only ever expect the user to have access to the desktop and, even then, the only apps that would ever prompt for access to the desktop are those that aren't updated for High Sierra and above. On the latest versions of macOS, the Desktop folder is shared by iCloud. This is definitely not an instance where security has been lowered nor is this the standard behavior of the new OS.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  > You expect applications to have access to your desktop? Yes! That's what applications do, they read and write files. Most other software is, more likely than not, either a game or a web page. Does every app need to access my desktop specifically? No. But if we're trying to protect "normal users", I don't think most of them have the wherewithal to think through "what exact locations does and doesn't app X need to access?"
  - CDSlice 7y ago
    But they should only read and write files that you give it permission to. E.g, Word should only be reading and writing whatever files you open to edit, it shouldn't be able to access all the files in your Applications folder. If it needs temp files it can write those to it's designated section of the file system.
    - 7y ago

DevKoala 7y ago

Very well said. It is a rough upgrade, but a step forward in security and privacy.

api 7y ago

It's just change = bad without looking at what is being changed and why.

fbelzile 7y ago

The "privacy" dialog popups are just marketing. Sure, there may have been an issue with a few bad apps, but Apple found a way to continuously remind you that they are the only ones that 'care about your privacy'TM. Meanwhile, they still happily take Google's money to make it the default search engine in Safari.

etchalon 7y ago
… how is an actual functional limitation imposed on applications through an operating system's APIs "just marketing"? If you click deny, BEHOLD, the application is denied that permission.

microcolonel 7y ago

I don't know about this somehow being proof that "Apple doesn't care about the Mac" or something, but I remember distinctly when Apple themselves, and the fanboys, were ragging on Microsoft for UAC (which really only asks you to confirm occasional administrative operations). As for the general quality of Catalina, there seems to be a deluge of amateur-hour flaws that affect real workflows for real users.

GeekyBear 7y ago

Not being asked to grant all permissions that an application wants up front (before you even get a chance to use the app) has a positive impact on the user experience. If the application asks for permission to access my contacts only after I select an option to share information with others, for instance, I can feel more confident about granting that permission. Asking for all permissions up front is the permissions model that Google just abandoned.

charredbacon 7y ago

I disagree that there's no transition. This looks like a pretty good alternative: https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/bparno/papers/user-driven.pdf https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/bparno/papers/user-driven.pd... Instead of the OS displaying an annoying prompt when the application tries to use a privilege, the application embeds an OS-drawn access control gadget inside its UI, such that the user interacting with the UI grants the privilege.

comex 7y ago
macOS does something similar already for file open/save dialogs: they’re drawn by a trusted OS component instead of directly by the app, and the user’s act of selecting a file grants the app permission to access that file without an additional dialog.
misterdata 7y ago
Actually not far from how it works on macOS. Usage of a system "open file" dialog automatically creates a permission for the application to access that file from inside its container. https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Security/Conceptual/AppSandboxDesignGuide/AppSandboxInDepth/AppSandboxInDepth.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Se... (search for "Powerbox")

celadevra_ 7y ago

> a world of "applications should ask me when they want to do something" transparency. Why not make the user know what applications do: which files, ports, devices it has to access, and what data it emits, to begin with?