I'm confused, how have you not reassociated the files with the app of your choosing? Is Xcode somehow changing associations back? Does it do it only at updates?
As far as Apple providing anything, why are they the expected ones providing it? There are a gigabazillionumpteen text editors that can reformat JSON. I have Xcode, and have associated JSON with a different editor. Not once has it ever changed on me.
Something is different. Right Click->Open With->Other->Always Open With 100% did not have any effect when I needed it in the past. Not sure what current behavior is. This was a huge thing for me.
I have noticed something similar. I feel like I have done that so many times for XML files. Perhaps it is re-establishing the settings when any kind of update gets installed.
Not something I've ever experienced. Open As... Always works just fine.
>Not once has it ever changed on me.
I don't know how did you achieve it, but I was doing it countless times.
Open with -> other -> enable all applications -> always open with.
For a short while it works, but somehow, something always reverts it back to xcode. Maybe it is restart. Maybe it is little evil cron job discreetly changes it back to xcode, but I was never able to get rid of it. It is happening to me on many different machines since Sierra. One calm day I casually double-click an STL or JSON and it prompts me to install some xcode packages, and I get angry at the machine.
You're right that you can fix it via Get Info → Change All.
I know the procedure.
The issue is that Xcode updates and macOS updates tend to reset those associations back. There's a long-running Apple Community thread titled literally "Stop hijacking file extensions with xcode" ( https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253702137?sortBy=rank ) and another I saw recently where a user documents their .md associations reverting after closing their laptop lid.
It's not universal, but it's not delusion either.
The deeper annoyance is extensionless files and edge cases -- log files, build artifacts, random output from scripts ... where there's no clean association to override.
Those fall through to whatever macOS thinks is clever, which is often Xcode.
As for "why should Apple provide it" -- because the company was founded by a guy named Steve who believed that details and care matter. Someone who said how the insides of a computer looks is as important as the outside and nagged his partner until the circuits looked right in their home-brew project.
Also yes, fair point, I should just fix it and stop complaining.
I failed at that today. Please forgive me.
There is a way to do it, but it’s not the most typical way MacOS users do it for everything else, which involves Right Click->Open With->Other->Always Open With. Xcode’s file associations are super aggressive.
I believe that “Get Info”->”Open With”->”Change All…” still works, and there are command line methods or third party tools.
This has driven me to madness too.