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Comment by dingo_bat | Hacker News Reader

Every feature that gives any sort of flexibility to the user is an attack vector for the lazy developer.

Yeah that's a great truism but using that as an argument against a feature doesn't help your case.

Why not? There are plenty of “features” that Android has that has caused vulnerabilities due to Googles not thinking through how the features need to be implemented.

A simple one is why is there even a permission to let an app read and write all contents on an SD card instead of only allowing apps to read files that a user specifically chooses from a file picker? Or worse case read and write from your photo library or music library.

That was my point. Apple is so afraid/lazy that they don't implement useful features and cut out widely used ones.

Apple isn’t ‘afraid’ or ‘lazy’. SD cards sound like a good idea, but the problem is phone manufacturers can’t guarantee the quality or class of a card, which can bog down the whole phone or cause corruption of files. Apple being typically Apple wanted total control over the performance of their phone, and thus the iPhones never gained an SD card slot.

Those problems are pretty easy to solve. By your logic apple should not allow 3G sim cards in iphone either, but they do. And shitty wifi networks should be banned, but they aren't.

How are they easy to solve? Most people (decidedly not the ones browsing HN) will just buy an el cheapo microSD from some random phone repair shop or google for ‘cheapest microSD 64gb’ and end up ordering some crappy card from AliExpress. If you do what Sony did with the Vita and PSP and force people to use proper (read: your) card then the cards turn out horribly expensive because economies of scale don’t kick in. It’s also decidedly an Apple-esque move.

Besides that, Apple can’t control the entire worlds cellular and WiFi coverage. Some parts of countries only have 3G, some buildings only have shity WiFi. However, Apple can control how their iPhone’s storage performs by not allowing you to use crappy SD cards and just having you opt for more internal storage.

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