Comment by wtallis
11 hours ago
I'm sure at least some of those macOS permissions prompts are spurious, but for the most part I think they're genuine red flags of poor software quality if not actual security/privacy threats. When a video game prompts for full disk access, it's probably because it wants to spray config and save files all over my home directory instead of putting them in a platform-appropriate location. When it triggers a permissions prompt about Bluetooth, it's probably using the wrong API to get input from a game controller or the wrong API for identifying what kind of input devices are present. If it triggers the "wants to control your system" prompt, it's probably trying to keep responding to input even when it's no longer the foreground application.
Sometimes the right API might not actually exist, but most of the time it's just lazy developers half-assing a port with no care for making the application behave appropriately for the platform. The prevalence of "Please don't turn off your computer while the game is saving" warnings is pretty clear proof that game devs in particular don't make any platform-specific adjustments they aren't forced to. (Game consoles usually require those warnings, but they're stupidly out of touch on a computer.)
My point is that the notifications are less specific now, so whether or not someone is being a normal dev, which nearly all if not all of them are in my experience, you still get a giant "FULL DISK ACCESS" because a game wants access to your download directory or something ridiculous. The errors used to be worth stopping to check things for. The OS shouldn't be scaring a user from running an application that broadly, they just become red herring alerts that people stop paying attention to.
You're of course correct in the os APIs, etc, my frustration comes when you're modding games and what not and the Apple notifications make it sound like you're giving your system to the app, when it IS acting for the low permission.