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Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

The pop-up permission boxes don’t make a great first impression since I saw at least 5 of them within 2 minutes and they tended to have really obscure descriptions like access to “System Events”.

While probably technically much more difficult, maybe they could have the first Mojave launch of every app occur in a separate and invisible “everything allowed” area, where the system just pretends to allow things and tracks everything that the app did on launch that would require permission. And then, it can display one box with a summary of features that seem to be required for that app, relaunching the app in the real system sandbox if approved.

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How would the system simulate user interaction required to get to a point where the popup would be necessary?

An application could access the protected APIs it needs during a first run in order to force the authorization dialogs. If I were designing an API for that, I'd allow a single call to declare as many permissions as needed, so all authorization dialogs would be triggered at once.

But then you just have a model where an app asks for a dozen permissions upfront, which may not even make sense in context. For example, should your bank's app (assuming it had one) get camera access? On the surface this seems a bit strange, until you realize that it has check scanning functionality.

You could pop up a box that says "Bank of America is asking for access to the following parts of your Mac:"

Followed by a table with the function (I.e Camera, mic), a description from the developer about why, and a checkbox to accept or deny.

You are more likely to understand the reason an app wants a permission if it is requested the moment it tries to use it.

The behavior you describe is the old Android take it or leave it approach. It doesn’t work because then all apps refuse to work if they don’t get ridiculous permissions.

iOS has permission explanations. I imagine this should probably carry over to macOS.

It does. The issue is that even with a permission explanation, it can be hard to see what the reason for a certain permission is if it’s asked out of context.

On iOS users have selectable permissions control; I could allow an app to access my location but not the camera or microphone, and the apps are expected to even work with no permissions granted.

That all depends on context, if an app asks for all the permissions on first run, the user doesn't have any context to help him/her deny access.

I suppose this would be less of an issue if the first launch didn't try to open every single app/service that was running before the reboot all at the same time.

This is frustrating behaviour in general when you have a bunch of apps open at work. Slack will repeatedly attempt to steal focus on launch as it displays a splash screen and then the real app (a chat client requires a splash screen now!?), most apps using Sparkle for auto-updating will throw more prompts at you as new versions roll in, a different updater from Microsoft or Adobe will boot up to check on those installs...meanwhile all of them are trying to resize to full screen or appearing in some next-best position, because they're all competing for the foreground.

You can't do shit until you're sure the computer's settled down. And that's before you get the extra permission prompts.

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