Eshu Marneedi

Chance Miller, reporting for 9to5Mac:

If you’ve been using the macOS Sequoia beta this summer in conjunction with a third-party screenshot or screen recording app, you’ve likely been prompted multiple times to continue allowing that app access to your screen. While many speculated this could be a bug, that’s not the case.

Multiple developers who spoke to 9to5Mac say that they’ve received confirmation from Apple that this is not a bug. Instead, Apple is indeed adding a new system prompt reminding users when an app has permission to access their computer’s screen and audio.

I’ve seen this dialog in practically every app that uses screen recording permissions, even after they have been enabled. They show up every day, multiple times a day, and every time after a computer restart. “Incessant” is too nice a word for these alerts; they’re ceaseless nuisances that I never want to see again. They’re so bad that I filed a bug report with Apple within weeks of the beta’s availability, thinking they were a bug. Nope, they’re intentional.

I see these prompts in utilities I don’t even like to think of as standalone apps — they’re more like parts of the system to me. One such utility is Bartender, which I keep running continuously on my Mac and which I’ve set to launch at login. About one in every five times I mouse over the menu bar to activate Bartender, I get the message, which I have to move my cursor down the screen for to dismiss. After every restart, every day, multiple times a day. To make matters worse, the default button action is not to continue to allow access — it’s to open System Settings to disable access. These are apps I use tens of times an hour. This is my computer. Who is Apple to ask if I want to enable permissions?

Another case is TextSniper, which I activate by pressing Shift-Command-2, a play on the standard macOS screenshot keyboard shortcuts: Shift-Command-3 and Shift-Command-4. Doing this enables TextSniper’s optical character recognition to easily copy text from anywhere in macOS. I forget that TextSniper even powers this functionality because it always works in every app and looks just like something macOS would provide by default — but not anymore because I’m prompted to renew permissions every time I want to use TextSniper. This isn’t privacy-protecting; it’s a nuisance. Whoever thought this would be even mildly a good idea should be fired. This is not iOS; this is the Mac, a platform where applications are, by design, given more flexibility and power to access certain system elements. This is nannyism.

Other apps, like CleanShot X, are completely bricked thanks to the new alert because the whole app freezes up since it expects it will always be given permission to record the screen. This is an important part of macOS. Do Apple employees who develop the Mac operating system never use third-party utilities? Who uses a Mac like that? Average users may, but average users aren’t installing custom screenshot utilities. Give developers the flexibility to develop advanced applications for the Mac, because without these essential tools, millions of people couldn’t do their jobs. Developers and designers use apps like XScope to measure elements on the screen, but now, it’s much more annoying. Video editors, graphic designers, musicians — the list goes on. People need advanced utilities on the Mac and don’t want to be pestered by unnecessary dialog boxes.

Miller writes that Apple should only ask for renewed permissions once a week, but that’s far from the actual user experience. And now, due to this reporting, I don’t even believe the current cadence is unintentional. This seems like a deliberate design choice made to pester users — exactly what Apple does with iOS and iPadOS, which is why those platforms are never used for any serious work. I don’t know, care, or even want to think about the possible rationale for such a prompt. Stalkers, domestic abusers, etc. — the best way to stop bad people from spying on a computer is by requiring authentication or displaying some kind of indicator somewhere in macOS announcing an app is recording the screen. Perhaps a red dot would work, like, gee, I don’t know, how iOS handles it. A dialog box should only be used when input from the user is absolutely necessary, not as an indication that an app may be accessing sensitive information. This is how camera and microphone permission in macOS works — why isn’t it the same for screen recording?¹

The solution to this problem is obvious: a simple, non-intrusive yet educational alert mechanism, perhaps as a dot or icon in the menu bar that displays every time an app is viewing the screen, just like the camera and microphone. It alleviates problems caused by rogue apps or bad actors while remaining frictionless for professional users who want to use their professional computers to do professional things. This is not a difficult issue to solve, and Apple’s insistence on making the user experience more cumbersome for advanced users continues to be one of its dimmest areas.

Similarly, Apple has also changed the way non-notarized apps are run on the Mac. Before macOS 15 Sequoia, if an app was not signed by an authorized developer, all a user needed to do to run it was Control-click the app in Finder, click Open, and then confirm. After that, Gatekeeper — the feature that identifies these apps — would learn an app is safe and would open it normally without a prompt henceforth. In macOS Sequoia, Control-clicking on a non-notarized app and clicking Open does nothing — Gatekeeper continues to “intelligently” prevent the app from launching. To dismiss the alert and allow a non-signed app from running, you must go into System Settings → Privacy & Security, then scroll down and permit it by authenticating with Touch ID. (Of course, macOS doesn’t actually say that, though that’s more an example of security through obscurity than malicious intent.)

Nobody except the savviest of users would ever know to Control-click an app to bypass Gatekeeper. If the idea is to prevent social engineering attacks, scammers will just instruct victims to go to System Settings to enable the app anyway. Scammers evolve — Apple knows this. Rather, this change just makes it even more cumbersome for legitimate power users to run applications left unsigned. These alerts must be removed before macOS Sequoia ships this fall — they’re good for nothing.