ADAM ENGST 23 September 2024

I’m sorry to share that the release version of macOS 15 Sequoia has shipped with the excessive permissions prompts I wrote about in “Apple Reduces Excessive Sequoia Permission Requests, Shifts to Monthly” (19 August 2024). There is a workaround—keep reading—but whenever you trigger a feature in an app that requires screen recording permissions, which may have nothing to do with recording the screen, you’ll see a prompt like these.

These prompts are examples of poor user interface design in multiple ways:

• Excessive jargon: They use obscure terminology that few people understand. How many of your friends, family, and colleagues know what the system private window picker is? (It has to do with selecting a window for capturing or sharing live, such as via videoconferencing software.)
• Confusing buttons, part 1: The buttons don’t offer meaningful choices. One continues to grant the app screen recording permission, whereas the other opens System Settings, a seemingly unrelated action. What the prompts don’t say is that if you want to revoke screen recording permissions, you need to turn off the appropriate switch in System Settings. If Apple were serious about this, the second button would revoke permission.
• Confusing buttons, part 2: Clicking Open System Settings and doing nothing there has the same effect as clicking Allow For One Month. That creates confusion and reduces trust in the system.
• Style guide violations: “Allow For One Month” violates Apple’s own style guide, which states that “for” should always be lowercase when using title-style capitalization.
• Too frequent nagging: Even though Apple has reduced the frequency to monthly and remembers the continued permission across restarts and logouts, they still interrupt the user’s work too frequently. Worse, because these prompts appear only when the user triggers a feature that requires screen recording permission, they will seem entirely random to most people, increasing the sense of being nagged.

They’re also problematic from a security standpoint for three reasons:

• User fatigue: As the prompts continue to recur for every affected app, every month, they become big “Blah blah blah, click here to get your work done” buttons. The longer this goes on, the less users will read them.
• Overall reduced security awareness: Beyond these specific prompts, the more macOS prompts for permission to do something—anything—the more it conditions users to grant permission unquestioningly.
• Circumventions: The more annoyed users become, the more likely they are to seek out ways of sidestepping the prompts, potentially creating a situation where legitimate prompts are missed.

Speaking of circumventions, here’s a possible workaround. I say “possible” because it requires lightweight time travel, and Apple is guaranteed to release new versions of macOS that may change things. We know you can trigger the monthly permission prompt again by setting your clock forward a month. Once you approve that faux future prompt and return your Mac’s clock to the current time, you won’t be prompted again.

The workaround is to open System Settings > General > Date & Time, turn off the “Set time and date automatically” switch, set your Mac’s clock forward in time by multiple months, trigger and approve the prompt for each app that requires screen recording permissions, and then return the clock to the current time. Note that time traveling to the future like this will trigger upcoming calendar notifications and may cause other confusion—my Setapp subscription was temporarily deactivated—so be sure to turn “Set time and date automatically” back on as soon as you’re done. I restarted afterward to ensure that everything understood that I had returned to the present.

I could test this workaround only in the macOS 15.1 beta, but when I set the clock to 21 January 2025, triggered and approved the prompt in Zoom, set the clock back to 21 December 2024, and tested again, I wasn’t prompted. To confirm, I tried again, setting the clock to 21 February 2025 and verifying that macOS asked me to continue to allow Zoom’s screen recording permission.

After the initial publication of this article, I learned that developer Jordi Bruin has written Amnesia, an app that makes the process even easier. It’s additional evidence that people feel that Apple is overreaching.

I hope Apple comes to its senses and removes these monthly permissions prompts in macOS 15.1. That’s not just wishful thinking—I’m basing it on being surprised that Apple shipped macOS 15.0 with such egregious user interface errors and on the fact that macOS 15.1 beta 4 still shows an improperly capitalized “Continue To Allow” button rather than the “Allow For One Month” button in macOS 15.0. The two versions aren’t fully in sync, suggesting that Apple may still be working on this part of the code.

To keep this constructive, I’ll reiterate and add to my suggestion that Apple should be smarter about asking the user to continue granting permissions for various actions. First, a “Continue to Allow” prompt could appear a small but random number of days after an app was initially granted screen recording permissions. That would cause the user to think about the permissions while the app installation was still fresh and allow them to revoke permissions or delete the app if it was no longer needed. In the hypothetical scenario where a malicious recording app has been installed by a domestic abuser with admin access, a randomly scheduled second prompt would be harder to conceal or intercept.

Second, if macOS knew how often individual apps were launched, it could present the dialog only for apps that are used infrequently. I use CleanShot X most workdays, so asking me to continue to allow it to record the screen is counterproductive. However, when I look through the other apps in System Settings > Privacy & Security > Screen & System Audio Recording, I also see GlanceGuest, which I believe I had to install while reporting a bug in QuickBooks Online to Intuit support. Since that was an unusual installation, I wouldn’t be offended to be asked again if it came up in the future. (Regardless, I’ve rescinded that permission for now.)

I continue to encourage you to tell Apple what you think. The best approach may be to use Apple’s Feedback page for your Mac. If you’re testing a beta of macOS 15.1, use Feedback Assistant to file a bug against these unnecessary prompts.