Originally published at: Apple Reduces Excessive Sequoia Permission Requests, Shifts to Monthly - TidBITS
Seemingly in response to the strongly negative feedback that arose from the potential in macOS 15 Sequoia of having to approve permission for each of your apps that require screen recording permissions every single week and after restarts, Apple has changed to a monthly schedule and made the prompt text more specific. The repetitive prompts remain too frequent: they are still unnecessary and bad for security.
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even I don’t know what “requesting to bypass the system window picker” means
Think about Safari. When you use it to share a window on Google Meet, say, you get the system-level “select the screen element you want to share” picker. That picker is a macOS feature. The user interacts with the user to pick a window, and macOS gives Safari a video stream of that window. Safari doesn’t get access to a list of available windows, and therefore doesn’t need screen sharing permissions, as the user explicitly picks a window to share each time.
Compare this to Chrome, where the “pick a window to share” UI is built by Chrome. It needs to get access to all windows, so it needs screen sharing permissions ahead of time. It then calls the system API to get the list of windows, etc.
If you don’t use the system provided “pick a window” API, you get that warning alert. Technically speaking, that’s the SCKContentSharingPicker. See WWDC 2023 session 10136.
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Aha—thanks, Avi! That makes perfect sense, but I still can’t see most ordinary users understanding it. Many of the people I do video calls with can’t reliably share screens in Zoom, much less identify an interface element as the system window picker.
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A post was merged into an existing topic: Revisiting “Trust This Computer” with local iPhone backups
I received a reply from Apple about this. Apparently this is an older API and there’s a newer one that developers are supposed to switch to: “As mentioned in Developer and AppleSeed for IT release notes, applications utilizing deprecated APIs for content capture such as CGDisplayStream & CGWindowListCreateImage can trigger system alerts indicating they may be able to collect detailed information about the user. Developers need to migrate to both ScreenCaptureKit and SCContentSharingPicker to prevent these alerts.”
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Interesting! @peternlewis @gotow, is this something you’ve looked into?
I just talked with a screenshot utility developer, who said the new APIs aren’t appropriate for their app.
The new ScreenCaptureKit works well in apps like Zoom, where you select what to share each time, but for a screenshot tool, we want to show our own interface for screen capture. Aside from the picker itself, the new API is much slower and less reliable compared to the old API.
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@tomdar2 The reply you received from Apple is wrong. I built a test app using only ScreenCaptureKit (no old APIs) and it still resulted in warnings in Sequoia.
Using SCContentSharingPicker may eliminate Sequoia’s reminders, but that API isn’t appropriate for my use-case - it’s only useful for picking the screen area or window you want to capture. My app programmatically captures an image of a specific, known window, so interactive picking isn’t necessary or desirable. And as Adam already pointed out, developers of screenshot apps want to bypass the SCContentSharingPicker to make a more complete, feature-rich and reliable screenshot user interface. SCContentSharingPicker is fairly bare-bones, making it generally useless to developers.
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As Jon said - Apple will bypass the alert if you use their screen picker (maybe), but that is not a practical solution for an application that wants to allow the user to control the area they pick via other means. Keyboard Maestro lets you pick the area as being 100 pixels inset from the front window’s borders, let’s see the Apple screen picker do that… And that’s just a trivial case.
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I’ve spoken with another screenshot app developer who did the same thing and came to the same conclusion.
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I can confirm this. I’m the developer of a screenshot app and also wanted to see if the claims are true that, if only modern ScreenCaptureKit APIs are used, no permission dialogs (or less thereof) would appear - but it is not the case (macOS Sequoia 15.0 beta 7).
- I still got the “would like to record this computer’s screen and audio” permission dialog.
- I still got the “is requesting to bypass the system private window picker” “allow for one month” dialog
- After setting the test system ahead two months, sure enough, the same “requesting to bypass” appeared again
Unless you use the actual ScreenCaptureKit window picker, which is not the best experience for screenshooting apps (your mileage may vary), there is no way around those permission requests and reminders.
I actually implemented a “Standby window capture” mode into my app, made possible by ScreenCaptureKit, where my app will appear as a capture option in any window’s green zoom button hover menu, but I’m not entirely sure it’ll catch on. It’s just not made for this stuff.
– Matthias
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Nick Heer discusses more of what might be going on and suggests that Apple’s terrible wording in the current version of the dialog might imply that the initial versions of macOS 15 Sequoia won’t ship with this limitation. Fingers crossed that he’s right, or that Apple rethinks what it’s doing.
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