macOS Files & Folders System Settings Confusing UI

macOS Files & Folders System Settings Confusing UI

July 27 2026

I use an M1 Mac mini for testing different major macOS versions. Currently the Mac has six boot volumes, macOS 12 Monterey through macOS 27 Golden Gate. While booted into macOS 26 Tahoe, I noticed a couple of strange things in the Privacy & Security section of System Settings.

The Privacy & Security subsections Files & Folders and Full Disk Access are inextricably intertwined. Let’s look at Full Disk Access first.

In case you’re wondering, smbd is the Server Message Block daemon for macOS file sharing, and siriactionsd is a daemon associated with the Shortcuts app. Notice that Full Disk Access is enabled only for smbd and Find Any File, the excellent and exhaustive file searching app.

Now let’s look at Files & Folders.

Strangely, siriactionsd, Terminal app, and Xcode app indicate Full Disk Access, even though Full Disk Access is disabled for them, as we saw in the other preference pane. This user interface is confusing and ill-conceived. Indeed, it seems like a design mistake to put the Full Disk Access controls in a separate preference pane from Files & Folders.

The second strange thing here is Xcode-beta app showing access to the Downloads folder. There is no Xcode beta installed on the Tahoe volume!

Show in Finder reveals that the Xcode beta in question is from the macOS Golden Gate beta boot volume. I’ve never launched the Xcode 27 beta on Tahoe.

I can make an educated guess about the specific causes of the confusing user interface. (The general causes are that Apple is no longer good at user interface design or quality control.) First, the Xcode 27 beta and the non-beta Xcode 26 apps have the same com.apple.dt.Xcode bundle identifier. (I believe that dt is short for developer tools.) Second, folder access is a per-user setting, whereas full disk access is an all-user setting. On Tahoe you can view the files in which these settings are stored, but the files are protected, so you have to grant full disk access to Terminal app.

sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/com.apple.TCC/TCC.db .dump

The above Terminal command shows that the bundle identifier com.apple.dt.Xcode has kTCCServiceSystemPolicyDownloadsFolder access enabled.

sqlite3 /Library/Application\ Support/com.apple.TCC/TCC.db .dump

And the above Terminal command shows that the bundle identifier com.apple.dt.Xcode has kTCCServiceSystemPolicyAllFiles access disabled.

Since these all-user and per-users settings need to be accessed separately, we can assume that the System Settings app source code has separate functions to query them. If each of the separate functions also has its own method of querying the location on disk of an app with a given bundle identifier, that could explain the discrepancy and duplication in the user interface. There is more than one app on disk with the com.apple.dt.Xcode bundle identifier, so which to display in System Settings? Apparently the per-user folder access code prefers the app with the higher version number, Xcode 27, whereas the all-user full disk access code prefers the app on the same boot volume, Xcode 26. In other words, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

I won’t file a bug report with Apple Feedback Assistant about this confusing UI, because I’m once again boycotting Feedback Assistant, so my blog post will have to serve as my bug report to Apple, if they’re reading. If they’re not reading, then someone in Cupertino needs to subscribe to my RSS feed.