Review the background portal
We discussed this in today's design call and agreed to follow up here.
There are some obvious issues with the "run in the background" permission as it stands:
- The permission dialog is a GtkMessageDialog, with no parent
- I don't think it's easy for users to answer the question that's being presented in the dialog - often it isn't clear why the app wants to run in the background, or what will happen if it can't. It isn't clear why someone, as a user, should care. This isn't helped by the fact that other platforms don't ask this question.
- There are some cases when the dialog is shown when it shouldn't be:
- The most obvious being when you build and run apps in Builder.
- Are there others?
- The setting under Applications is presented as a switch, but it's actually a tri-state?
I've previously argued that we should drop the dialog and make run in the background opt out rather than opt in, but there are other directions to consider.
A good first step would be to get a good understanding of the problems. In particular, it would be good to get an accurate picture of how often the dialogs are shown, and for which cases and apps.