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Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

You're putting words in OP's mouth. S/he only said that iOS makes it harder for apps to access user's data without direct permission. Which is undoubtedly true; Android app permissions are very crude and usually granted when you install app, whereas iOS asks the user the first time the app actually tries to access data (e.g. camera, contacts, GPS).

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The permission model in Android changed in Android 6. Apps using the sdk that was released with Android 6 will have to ask users for permissions as well. I expect that eventually older SDK's will stop working on modern Android.

Less than ~25% of active Android devices are on Marshmallow or Nougat, which somewhat tempers the impact of this change.

iOS does offer a slightly nicer three tiered request strategy over Google's yes|no. iOS let's you grant location access only when the app is active

Actual EU/US realworld stats are >50%, not 25. Don't mislead.

So if we ignore more than half the world, 50% of users still don't get those improvement. If you're under the impression that Google isn't able to properly track devices that hit play services, that's an entirely different and more worrisome problem.

The pretty large plurality (if not majority) of Android devices in the wild don't have have Google's services installed and many of those also get no software updates -- so they're stuck on what old ROM they came with, probably Lollipop.

If the Android developer site dashboard [1] could be considered reliable, then the latest statistics show only 26.7% devices (as of yesterday, December 5, 2016) that run Marshmallow and Nougat. This leaves 73.3% devices that do not have the ability to control permissions individually (unless they've been modified with add-ons that allow it).

[1]: https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html

That dashboard practically never reflects the actual distribution of devices in use - at least according to analytics of app we've released (with several mil users across the globe).

That's because they count all the pings of devices that answered across the globe in a sliding window and that is a hugely different number than actual maket share across US and EU and comparable markets. Sure we can then go into details about how poor Indians / Chinese / Africans need secure phones too (and I agree!), but those people have no means to afford an iPhone either.

(And no, sorry, I can't provide you with NDA protected market data :/ )

I think everyone deserves basic security, not only the first world.

iOS usage with the tighter permission model is 100%. End of discussion.

Google already changed that in Android 6. You can install an app and only allow it certain permissions.

Of course, thanks to the Android ecosystem, it will take another year or two until a significant portion of people actually switches to devices running Android 6.

Actual usage stats from several widely deployed apps to US/EU show that Android 6 and newer is already over 50% of active devices.

Slower than iOS yes, but not as alarming anymore.

Please provide a citation for your stats if you're going to repeat it. As mentioned in my comment above, the Android official dashboard has Android 6 and newer at less than 27% as per the latest measurement yesterday. [1] I can't imagine how this couldn't be alarming.

[1]: https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html

That's not true. I WAS true a few years back which is what is probably misleading you.

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