Take a look at where Windows UAC eventually ended up. A lot of this can definitely be streamlined by having the action itself also be the permission approval, a

Take a look at where Windows UAC eventually ended up. A lot of this can definitely be streamlined by having the action itself also be the permission approval, as UAC now does. Doesn't necessarily help with 3rd party apps, but it's a bit insane that the bundled apps on the OS itself have all these issues, too (like iterm fighting finder??) EDIT: Or for notifications they could take a page out of Android's book. Default allow notifications, but after the user dismisses a few of them without interaction prompt if they still want to keep receiving them. Take a spam-filter type approach instead of allow/deny prompts everywhere.