CocoatechMacOS · From the file manager’s desk
Apple’s planned Full Disk Access changes have concerned some Mac developers. After years of dealing with its limitations, we see reasons to be cautiously optimistic.
Apple’s recent announcement about changes to Full Disk Access in macOS has understandably raised concerns among some Mac developers. For applications that need to work with files throughout the system, additional restrictions could mean more complications for developers and more interruptions for users. But here at Cocoatech, we’re cautiously optimistic.
We’ve been developing Path Finder, an alternative file manager for macOS, for more than 25 years. Full Disk Access has been part of our development experience since Apple introduced the permission in macOS Mojave. And while we understand why it exists, we’ve also spent years dealing with its limitations.
So when Apple says it wants to revisit Full Disk Access, we see an opportunity for Apple to improve something that has needed attention for a long time.
When your own files are off-limits
Full Disk Access is one of macOS’s broadest privacy permissions. It allows applications to access protected information that would otherwise be unavailable to them.
That’s a sensible security measure. Your email, messages, and other private data shouldn’t be accessible to arbitrary applications simply because those applications happen to be running on your Mac.
But consider what happens when the application is a file manager.
Take ~/Library/Mail, the folder where macOS stores Mail data. The folder exists within your home directory, and its ordinary filesystem permissions might indicate that you should be able to access it. Yet macOS applies additional privacy protections.
Without Full Disk Access, Path Finder would be able to show that the folder exists but couldn’t even list the files inside or calculate how much space they occupy. For an application designed to help people navigate and manage their files, that’s a fairly fundamental limitation. Therefore, Path Finder requests Full Disk Access because it needs to perform operations in locations the user chooses to work with, including protected ones.
The trouble with knowing whether you have permission
There’s another complication that most users never see: macOS doesn’t provide a straightforward public API that an application can use to ask whether it currently has Full Disk Access. And when permission detection goes wrong, this becomes more than a developer problem. Users are the ones who encounter confusing dialogs, failed operations, or an application that won’t open.
As our developers know from experience, even checking whether an application has Full Disk Access can be surprisingly complicated:
“macOS doesn’t give us a simple way to check whether Path Finder has Full Disk Access. So we have to work around it: we try to access a folder we know macOS normally protects, and if that fails with a particular error code, we assume we don’t have permission. It’s not exactly an elegant solution, but that’s what we have to work with and sometimes it goes wrong. A couple of years ago, we had customers whose Macs showed Full Disk Access as enabled, but Path Finder kept asking them to turn it on. The users couldn’t even open the app. We fixed that problem in an update, but it was a pretty good example of why we’d like Apple to give developers a better way to check permissions.”
We also encountered another frustrating situation when we changed Path Finder’s code signing from an individual developer account to Cocoatech’s company account. As a result, users had to grant Full Disk Access again. Nothing had changed about what Path Finder needed to do with their files, but macOS treated it as a different application for permission purposes.
Not everyone wants to grant access to everything
More granular access control would also help users. As Mike Bombich, developer of Carbon Copy Cloner, points out, granting Full Disk Access is a significant decision. We’ve heard from Path Finder customers who were uncomfortable granting such broad permissions, including people using company-managed Macs where IT policies prevented them from granting Full Disk Access at all. The current system doesn’t offer a satisfying middle ground: when it comes to Full Disk Access, the choice is essentially “yes” or “no”. Path Finder currently requires Full Disk Access to operate, even when a particular user’s everyday tasks might involve only a relatively small portion of the disk. That all-or-nothing approach isn’t ideal for anyone.
Adam Engst recently explored many of the shortcomings of the current system in his excellent TidBITS analysis of Full Disk Access. His discussion makes clear how many established Mac utilities depend on this permission and how much room there is for improvement.
A more flexible authorization system could potentially allow users to make more precise decisions about the locations and operations they want to permit. It could also give applications a clearer way to understand those decisions and respond appropriately when access is denied.
Of course, there’s a practical balance to find. Nobody wants to approve another permission dialog every time they open a folder.
What we’d like Apple to improve
In its October 2 announcement, Apple said it plans to introduce additional controls around Full Disk Access, citing concerns about applications that can access large amounts of private data, particularly increasingly autonomous AI agents.
Apple’s announcement doesn’t yet explain how the new controls will work. We don’t know whether Apple intends to introduce more granular permissions, better APIs for requesting or checking access, or simply additional confirmation steps before granting existing permissions.
Our hope is that Apple will make it easier for users to control which files applications can access, while giving developers a more reliable way to determine what they’re allowed to do. Better protection for users and fewer permission-related problems for legitimate applications should go hand in hand.
Will Apple’s changes deliver any of that? We don’t know yet.