We give developers powerful APIs to build incredible capabilities

Full Disk Access largely sidesteps these controls

That's because you don't really. Just like you don't give users "powerfulf" controls, so instead they have to resort to dumb ones like "Full disk"

For example, if you care about "mail, messages, and even browsing history", why isn't there a subset of "full disk access except for reading mail/messages/browsing history"? Or if vibe code have some basic disk sizing functionality to ask questions about your files, why can't it have a more granular "full disk read only access for file sizes only" so that your vibe coded disk visualization app can't destroy your data or your privacy

can only do so with very explicit user action.

Which is in the same vein and is mostly useless, just another inconvenient bump

- Ghostty (fine, it's my terminal)

- Alfred (fine, I use it for searching everywhere)

Then I have a few turned off:

- Spotify (why does it need full disk access) ??

- Gemini (nope, don't need it to know everything about my computer)

I don't think there's anything wrong with people not knowing how to use a computer properly. In fact, I wouldn't expect a normal person to, why should they? So what I would love to see is normies be given iPads, and my computer left the hell alone.

It's like if we over-simplified all the controls in a cockpit because someone who likes playing flying games finds it too difficult to fly a real plane.

One niche issue resulting from this : it broke the ability to access my own screensaver settings and files from it's settings app, because those settings live inside a container for a system extension that belongs to Apple (because Apple still hasn't publicly released it's "modern" screensaver api, it's still old style plugins run by a legacy extension).

Several screensaver developers I know got bitten by this and there's no proper workaround, you just have to use "/Users/Shared" and hope that doesn't go away any time soon.

In my case it silently broke migration for Aerial from 3.X to 4.X in Golden Gate (where I moved away from the legacyScreenSaver extension to the new undocumented wallpaperextension format). I did move to "/Users/Shared" earlier this year but some people will inevitably get caught by this if they didn't update, and there's no recourse, FDA doesn't work, you can't even ask for access, nothing works. And since it's a silent fail, I didn't even notice before this week.

If that's the direction things are moving in, I welcome the change. Fine-grained folder access controls (rather than only full iOS-like sandboxing or full disk access) make me much less hesitant to try new apps or have agents access more parts of my system.

But they really need to solve the issue of low-level utilities triggering dozens of permission prompts when walking $HOME. Having to approve or decline Documents, Downloads, Google Drive etc. directory access, all separately, is extremely annoying.

That feature was so stupidly nonfunctional before. Some apps got stopped by it, others didn't. Often you'd be able to install an app from homebrew and it had full ride access to the disk, while App Store apps had to request consent for any folder whatsoever. It was completely random.

Apple Intelligence is a great example of this. Everything can funnel up to Siri, but neither you nor any other app on your computer can see what is fed to it by all of the APIs that would provide it data. So anyone who adds support for it is enabling Apple to do their usual slow broken thing with Siri and not enabling any other way you might want to use software or AI with that data.

   For communication apps, this can also compromise the privacy of the people users are communicating with.

For the "greater good" as usual.

Just look how deceptive is the Apple post "full disk access" is not even a thing. You have access to your user files and that is all. You need sudo to have more rights.

A normal copilot/Claude/facebook like app shouldn't ask you for such a right except exceptionally for a very good reason.

So when they speak about backup apps, that are the one that could need sudo to backup the whole system, is to tell you that soon only notarized apple approved and app store delivered apps will be allowed to do that, but certainly not you willingly. Maybe not in version 1 but in version 2 for sure.

Then, like for iOS, they could have proprietary apps like Netflix, Facebook and co storing data on your device that you will not have access to.

I simply do not understand how Adobe manages to bypass every single toggle available there. I can block access to every folder on my computer but the moment I open any Adobe app, they recreate that goddamned folder.

Why? How? Fucking hell Adobe. It’s 2026, you just don’t store cache and setting files in the fucking Documents folder.

The simple root/user separation has long since ceased to be secure because, on a desktop machine, all sensitive information is, by definition, accessible to the user; having root privileges ultimately offers little advantage when it comes to exfiltrating data.

we will introduce additional controls to ensure that users who genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access can only do so

"Extraordinary" is a funny word choice. It was completely ordinary for most of the history of personal computing that any app you ran under your normal user account could see everything you had.

(I'm not saying this is a bad thing. As long as they allow informed users to continue to do whatever they please, I'm all for it.)

Thus, I'm not sure what more Apple can do here, but I'm definitely afraid of what they're going to do.

Who decided that hidden folders are a good thing anyways? .agent, .agents, .aws, .bun, .cache, .cargo, .claude, .codex , .config, .docker, .gemini, etc. I just end up having to show hidden folders all the time, which defeats the point.

It's gotten truly ridiculous. I want the OS to strictly enforce my root directory. There should be a few global preference files in there for like .zsh, and everything else organized in proper, unhidden folders.

I had 3 duplicate files on each drive and it was impatient and rushing and didn't keep one drive around before formatting them all.

Completely saved me the week of migrating files project I was dreading, thanks. Nothing invaluable but an insane amount of downloading to do and I'm on 5g in the woods.

Sometimes its just draw dropping at how stupid these can be, basically giving a 6yo RHCSE root access.

Huh? Seems like a disingenuous statement. I hope they update that sentence with something more accurate.

However, I've wanted much more granularity and pervasive permissions so I'm glad they're adding them.