No, they (and I) want it to work like the web browser file upload component where you don't need to grant permission ahead of time because it's nonsensical.

Imagine if every time you wanted to upload a file online, you first had to allow the one website to access that image first in one menu before you could select the image in the normal file upload menu. That's the UX they're complaining about.

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Zanfa 5 days ago | parent [-]

But you don’t have to do it ahead of time. When you click add photo, you get the system picker to choose the photo and once you’ve selected what you wanna grant access to, that’s it. Literally not a single menu needs to be opened, nothing needs to be configured.

Any UX other than this is something the app developer has implemented on top. iOS works exactly like you described.

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hombre_fatal 5 days ago | parent [-]

You're not understanding the complaint or you have Full Access turned on without realizing it.

Set an app like WhatsApp to No Access or Limited Access.

Now try to upload a photo into chat.

Instead of just presenting you with all of your photos so that you can upload one, you first have to click "Manage" -> "Select more photos" -> "Add the photo".

Now you can select that one photo for upload.

That could obviously be trimmed up into Grant + Upload in a single operation, but instead it's so clunky that people grant Full Access just to avoid it.

It doesn't make much UX sense since I want to push one image into the app one time, while priv granting is for future pull operations that don't make sense 99% of the time.

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Zanfa 5 days ago | parent [-]

> Instead of just presenting you with all of your photos so that you can upload one, you first have to click "Manage" -> "Select more photos" -> "Add the photo".

That's not a OS limitation, this is a UX dark pattern from WhatsApp that they've purposefully added to make the UX terrible to push people into granting "Full Access".

I just tested it with both "Add Photos Only" and "Limited Access" modes with Signal and iOS does exactly what you described as the perfect UX. It's literally the following:

1) Tap Add Photo in a chat

2) System photo picker appears

3) Select which photo you want in your entire gallery (not limited to photos previously granted to Signal)

4) Photo is sent to chat

Again, this is with both non-Full Access modes. I think your beef is with Meta, not Apple.

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hombre_fatal 5 days ago | parent [-]

Hmm, I can confirm that Signal does work the way you describe.

It looks like there is a separate API for "Private Access to Photos" that is less common than the UX I describe (WhatsApp, Reddit, Twitter, Discord).

Maybe one thing we can agree on is that if apps have to opt-in to the API that's better for users, then we can also blame Apple.

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d1sxeyes 5 days ago | parent [-]

Seems you can just `get` the result?

Not sure what I’m missing that means so many apps don’t do this, vastly better UX.

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/blob/0151cfdee27cb03...

	▲	Zanfa 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		You’re right! They’re all using the same API, there’s no other better “opt-in” API. Some developers just want to make the UX worse for their own nefarious purposes. Nothing to do with Apple.