The above screenshot is from my computer. There are 16 apps that have screen recording permissions, and each one of them not only needs that permission, I intentionally gave them that permission when I installed them. I've been carrying along with my life, happy with how these apps were working, and then macOS Sequoia decided that I could not be trusted to give this permission permanently, and I needed to re-approve all of these apps once a month.

"It's one pop-up a month, that's not so bad," the apologists will say, but dear reader, this is 16 pop-ups at random intervals throughout the month, typically interrupting me in the middle of me trying to actually use these apps for my work. That's damn near one alert every weekday of the month and I gotta tell you, I hated it during the beta.

In the grand scheme of things, how much work is it to dismiss a pop-up, right? I click my mouse hundreds of times a day, so why is adding 1 to that count such a big deal? I would ask if you'd be okay with someone kicking the back of your seat every few minutes in an airplane or at a movie theater. The vast majority of the time you're not getting kicked, it's just a fraction of a second every so often, right? Neither one kick nor one pop-up is the issue here, it's that much like a kicker that shows no sign of stopping, these unending pop-ups grate on me because they are useless to me and I know there is no stopping them. I could be 80 years old, rocking my CleanShot X license, blogging my old-ass off, and macOS would still be pestering me to make sure I wanted to let CleanShot take screenshots.

This can't be the vision for macOS because I truly dislike it. I don't bring out this name lightly, but this feels very much like Windows Vista, and while macOS has been heading this direction for years (Jason Snell has documented this very well), the numerous new alerts in Sequoia are what pushed me over the edge. I downgraded my Mac to Sonoma, all those alerts have gone away, and I'm happier for it. Do I miss the new Messages effects and reactions? Of course! Do I wish I had iPhone mirroring? Sometimes! Do I miss Apple Intelligence? Honestly no, but I guess one day it could be cool. Do I enjoy being free of the pop-ups that were pestering me with no end in sight more than I miss those features? Every single day.

I don't mean to suggest everyone is like me and I can get behind the idea that some people do need to be protected against apps getting this permission without their knowledge, but I am suggesting the current solution is obnoxious and is bad enough for me that I'm not upgrading for the time being.

And again, I'm an "install the betas immediately after WWDC" guy. I'm the "see the MacRumors post about new updates released at noon central on a Monday and get all my devices updated ASAP" guy. I'm not someone who sits and waits for updates, but this one did me in.

Solutions

I try to present solutions whenever I complain about something, so I have two ideas for how to make this experience better.

First, I would like there to be a way for me to tell macOS that I want to trust an app forever. Make this a terminal command that requires admin permissions, or tuck it away in System Settings so almost no one will find it accidentally. I understand that this means a bad actor with physical access to my Mac might be able to install something without my knowing, but I feel like this argument could be made about anything. Find My has given my wife real-time location access to me for a decade, and iOS has never once prompted me to check if I still wanted that to be active. Obviously, there are privacy concerns with an app seeing your screen, but there are privacy concerns with dozens of permissions we give apps on our devices. I think we should be able to give away lifetime permissions despite the potential risks.

Second, if we can't live with lifetime access, then we should consolidate these reminders. I'd suggest a single pop-up on the first of the month that tells you:

1. These are the apps that currently have permission to record your screen
2. You can disable any apps that you don't want to have this anymore
3. You can uninstall these apps as well if you don't want them anymore
4. Once you're good, approve the rest of the list with one click

This is not ideal for me, but it does turn it into one pop-up per month no matter how many apps you're using, and it turns it into more of a thoughtful action since it's not burning you out with a bombardment of alerts. Also if the doomsday case for this security feature is to stop apps that you didn't want to have this access, it seems like letting you remove the app from your Mac entirely would be good, which is something the current pop-ups don't do – you can remove the permission, but you're on your own if you want to remove the app.

In the meantime, Jeff Johnson has posted a workaround you can use for now to push the "next check" date for apps you've approved way into the future, effectively making it so you never see them again. However, I would expect this to be patched out by Apple in a future update, so I don't expect it to last forever, but enjoy it while you can. For my part, I'll just keep working from macOS Sonoma, being slightly annoyed that I need to react to messages with "haha" instead of "😝".

Update: there is also a free app from Jordi Bruin (of MacWhisper fame) called Amnesia that lets you do the same thing as the above post in a basic UI.