Pretty much everything in UIKit, Cocoa etc. that uses native widgets use background frameworks and services that use things like searchpartyd, mediaanalysisd, k

Pretty much everything in UIKit, Cocoa etc. that uses native widgets use background frameworks and services that use things like searchpartyd, mediaanalysisd, knowledged, mds, touristd, and a whole bunch of other D's. That includes searching, previewing (QuickLook) and thumbnails. None of the applications do this themselves 'internally', they just use system frameworks for that. There are at least 1250 private frameworks and 215 shared frameworks, and all of them contain libraries, daemons, XPC services and all of them could be using networking features to act to their design. If you disabled SIP and deleted iCloud and Photos, not much would change. Your media panel widgets would break since they depend on access to the library functions (even if there are empty), but mediaanalysis would still work for all your image renderers. You might think "well that is wasteful, I never use this feature", but you forget that the product was not designed for your personal taste and use case, but for a much broader market. A market where a crapload of money is made every day and a selling point is that there isn't a whole lot to fiddle about with for users.