What you’re describing is literally the iOS (and increasingly, macOS) security model that gets derided by power users for being too restrictive. The system owns

What you’re describing is literally the iOS (and increasingly, macOS) security model that gets derided by power users for being too restrictive. The system owns the photo picker. When an app asks for photos, you can either give it access to the whole library, or you can choose specific photos to share with it from the system picker. The system owns location services. When an app asks for location, you can either choose to allow it indefinitely, choose to deny it, or choose to allow it once. Even if you allow it indefinitely, iOS will follow up with a prompt a while later explaining that the app has been using your location in the background, show you a map of the locations it has tracked over that time period, and ask if you want to continue allowing it indefinitely or deny access. What you claim about reducing gratuitous choices is pretty clearly not how Apple views these things. They have been adding more and more granular permissions with every update, in response to developers abusing the wider permissions. I also have no idea what you mean by the user being reminded they don’t have a say. The user does have a say. What irritates the people who don’t like the prompts is they think they shouldn’t have to click through anything. It’s not a complaint that the permissions are too wide, it’s that they’re too granular. I will also note that the cryptographic verification (and App Store review) side of things makes these measures a lot stronger, because developers can’t just hack around in private APIs and system-level frameworks to circumvent the restrictions. They are forced by a contract only to access the restricted resources through approved channels. Even though Apple is not perfect with review, the evidence from other platforms and their own data is that they catch the vast majority of abuse that happens and we never see it.