It’s worth keeping in mind that in the case of Apple platforms, a lot of this has roots in the revelation a decade and change ago that third party software on mobile platforms can and will exploit every affordance the operating system offers to extract data, often silently. It’s no different on desktop OSes, but users have been more acclimated to it there since full blown access to everything has been the norm there longer than it hasn’t.
That said I can certainly see the argument that Apple isn’t going about handling this set of problems correctly, but ignoring it or pretending it doesn’t exist isn’t right either.
> It’s no different on desktop OSes, but users have been more acclimated to it there since full blown access to everything has been the norm there longer than it hasn’t.
This is a problem with proprietary software markets in particular. You can largely escape this dilemma if you source your software from a free software distribution like a Linux distro, Conda, Pkgsrc, F-Droid, etc., because they have their own processes and standards for curating, vetting, categorizating and sometimes even patching software.
One of the reasons that desktop Linux has lagged with app sandboxing and binary attestation compared to macOS is that proprietary apps are marginal and few on most Linux desktops. Linux users are not choosing the bulk of their software from a giant pile of borderline malicious shitware like users of mobile apps generally are. (It's a good thing that Linux is catching up in this respect because some proprietary crap, like Discord, Google Chrome, VSCode, Steam, and Zoom, is extremely sticky for new users coming from proprietary operating systems where proprietary apps are the norm as well as strongly incentivized by powerful network effects. Vendors of such software have proven that they can't be trusted to follow reasonable conventions with DEB or RPM repositories, and Flatpak will suits untrustworthy vendors and other third parties better.)
> I can certainly see the argument that Apple isn’t going about handling this set of problems correctly, but ignoring it or pretending it doesn’t exist isn’t right either.
Apple is understandably prioritizing the realities of the ecosystems that the bulk of their existing users navigate, namely one of publishers selling software as commodities and services for financial profit. But it's not the only conceivable path forward because not all ecosystems of usable software are dominated by producers facing such incentives. You can answer the proprietary hellscape by stepping away from it instead of letting yourself be hampered by shit like this on your own machine.
Most people would not have an easy time completely eliminating proprietary software from day to day usage. Reducing the amount of it is certainly possible (though may come with caveats WRT ease of use/UX; F-droid for example is not fun to try to comb through to find the good bits), but some amount is going to linger even if it’s just games the user plays to blow off some steam at the end of the day.
Even if full-FOSS were practical, I’d still want robust sandboxing and permissions to help limit the blast radius if some malicious executable manages to find its way in and to feel confident that nothing is poking around where it shouldn’t be. There’s not really a good reason for everything to have access to everything except for convenience.
But if you're looking for a way out from Apple's paternalism without giving up too much practical security, getting your software from free software distributions as much as possible and treating F/OSS as your 'home base' is a doable first step for readers of this site that will go some distance. For example, on macOS, disabling Gatekeeper for software that you install via a package manager whose repositories have a code review process and which cryptographically verifies what it downloads is not a big deal. (Homebrew does such verification, but not for all packages. You can tell it to refuse to install what it can't verify in this way, though. So all my Homebrew apps get installed only if the package has a checksum in the repos, and when installed they get --no-quarantine.)
And if you can switch to Linux on the desktop, it's reasonable to approach app sandboxing in an opt-in way. It's nice to be able to do that, especially as some of the UX pain points are still being worked out. It's also nice to know that no matter what nice capabilities your OS offers for securing your system by treating apps as untrusted by default, you'll ultimately be in control.
Sandboxing is also somewhat a separate issue from code signing and notarization, and idk what's even really practically available on the Linux desktop for that. But I'm not really sold on those so much for use of those outside the enterprise. I imagine most people here would opt out of those given the choice.
That said I can certainly see the argument that Apple isn’t going about handling this set of problems correctly, but ignoring it or pretending it doesn’t exist isn’t right either.