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Comment by burkaman | Hacker News Reader

You definitely can't win, but those two complaints are not mutually exclusive. Instead of locking down apps to solve the first problem, in theory Microsoft could have redesigned Windows to make third party executables less of a risk. Obviously that's harder, but it's not hypocritical to make both those statements.

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I'm not exactly a fan of those, but I think MS is already doing that with UWP, which apps weren't exactly greeted with rejoice.

UWP apps can't be run outside of the MS store. So that's the lock-in he was talking about. It would be nice if Microsoft enabled "mini-VMs" for legacy x86 apps at least.

That way it could shoot two birds with one stone - make x86 apps a little slower and more resource intensive, and thus give both users and developers a reason to switch to UWP, while at the same time it would also make legacy x86 apps vastly more secure.

I think you can sideload them since 1607 (or even 1511?), there's a developer switch in new Control panel for that.

Windows 10 allows you to turn on sideloading. Going through the Windows Store is no longer a requirement.

but then again, how is that different from android of today?

The problem with that is that you can't tell programmatically if a potentially risky action is performed by a program acting as the user's agent or by a program acting on behalf of some malicious fuckwit.

You can just forbid it, sure, but then you're reducing the usefulness of your platform.

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