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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

And virtually unavoidable in the smartphone app space because of the gatekeeping function of the stores. I don't know exactly how we got here given that nobody would have accepted this sort of curation on a desktop, but we somehow just walked into it on our phones.

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Mass market is how we got here.

The phone made the flow of non tech savvy users the main source of income.

Before, you had to please geeks, and they thought about products, compared, communicated, criticized and decided where to spend their money.

Now, you have to please people that chose products based on ads, design and trends, but don't have any basic understanding of their device yet makes a lot of noise when they get them self in trouble.

That's the same story anywhere you start with a group of passionate people on something that proves successful: amateurs arrive, then money, then policy.

Any job, hobby, venue, city, sport, product, etc. is susceptible to this problem.

It's why the mt Everest is now an expensive highway full of frozen shit, why battle net turned into an insult party, why Adventure park now have those unusable security systems that take the fun out of it, why websites abuse "target=_blank", why you have weird safety messages on microwaves and why you need to provide medical certificates for so many stupid things now a day.

But.

It's also why you can have a device in your pocket that act as your camera, tv, music player, news provider, landline, game console, pager, gps, phonebook for a 10th of the price of a gigantic calculator from 40 years ago.

In the hilarious canadian comedy, "The Decline of the American Empire", the main character makes a point, stating there are 3 things that makes a winner in history: 1, number. 2, number. 3, number.

You should do a post about your comment's first 4 paragraphs, something we can point our "almost there" non-geek friends to.

And arguably far more necessary. We have our phones turned on and with us almost 100% of the time we are alive. They can track our locations and hear everything we say. It's more important to control what apps can have access to with smartphones than it was on any prior platform.

Yeah, a difference between my phone and my laptop is that my phone needs to basically be an appliance: it needs to work consistently in all sorts of situations so I don’t get stranded somewhere in an emergency. For this purpose, having a really strict gatekeeper that limits what apps can do is a feature, not a bug.

And yet open source solutions seem way less popular on mobile than their desktop equivalents.

Seems more like a justification for passive acceptance to me.

My phone is on and with me for less than 50% of the time.

Just saying; phones are not as important to everyone as you think.

(yes, I am over 40)

Good for you. Unfortunately, your personal habits aren't really relevant to the global impact of these policies.

I'm sure you probably "haven't owned a TV in 10 years" and wonder "do people still watch TV".

Yes that was a popular post on Slashdot years ago.

Why would you be sure of that? As it happens, I have a TV and watch it every day.

In fact, research (in the UK) suggests that people who use phones less are more likely to watch TV than people who use them a lot.

It wasn't my intention to "boast" that I don't use a phone much. The post I responded to was making a point based on the assumption that "we" have our phones on 100% of the time. I was just trying to point out that there are people in that "we" for which that is not true.

  control what apps can have access to with smartphones

But the Play store doesn't do that. It just documents what permissions are sought by the app, not whether this privileges are appropriate... hence flashlight apps seeking Contacts and Location.

Play Store is at the other end of the spectrum where you can literally upload massive amounts of malware and no one bats an eye.

The issue is not that a manual review process should catch bugs. The issue is that Android’s permission system allows it.

It's great that it allows it.

The problem is that a lot of users don't want to admit that they are not competent to decide whether the app truly needs those permissions or not.

If there would be a power user subscription for Android, it'd be great. It'd pay for itself, etc. (Of course purists still could just root the device and so on.)

Who said anything about bugs? The point is to do something proactive to stop apps that don't conform to your policies (whichever they may be - maybe you don't allow collection of data, or using a specific interface, definitely not malware, etc.) instead of just reacting, and even that too late.

Apple is at one extreme blocking even legitimate things for obscure and esoteric reasons. Google is at the other, letting all kinds of crap in the store only to review it later, maybe. [1]

I'm sure my remark ruffled feathers on some Android fans but it doesn't make it less true.

[1] https://venturebeat.com/2018/01/30/google-play-removed-70000...

The point is to do something proactive to stop apps that don't conform to your policies (whichever they may be - maybe you don't allow collection of data, or using a specific interface, definitely not malware, etc.) instead of just reacting, and even that too late.

I’m saying that with millions of apps in the store and seeing that all app testing is black box testing, the reviewers are not going to catch most things. The operating system itself should not allow certain things. There is no reason that most of the permissions that SpyPhone needs should be allowed by Android.

Then to what would you attribute the fact that the AppStore is much better curated than the Play Store? Fewer application submissions? More honest coders?

It's a two part answer probably: Apple's store policies are discouraging some of the unwanted behavior, and the actual enforcement of those policies is stricter. Not just a second though.

Most of the “honesty” comes from iOS and it’s just a better thought out model than Android when they introduce new features.

Ad Blockers - the framework is built in a way that third party ad blockers can be installed but they don’t have access to your browsing history. They basically just submit a JSON file that is integrated into Safari and some types of web views

Third party keyboards - because of the opportunity of keyloggers, you have to explicitly go into settings to install one, then you have to give it permission to access the network as a separate step after a huge warning, and even then when you enter a password, iOS switches back to the default keyboard.

SafariViewController - with traditional embedded webviews, the hosting app has complete access to everything you are doing. The SafariViewController runs as a separate process.

The only way that an app on Android can (could?) know if it should stop playing sound was to ask for full permissions to access your phone state.

Why does any app need full access to my storage like Android allows? With iOS, an app has full access to its own file store in iCloud, you can grant it access to your photo library or music library (read only) but it’s very explicit. Any other document outside of those, the user explicitly tells it what file to open.

Why would I ever give a third party app access to my SMS messages? Why is that even an option on Android?

I download stuff without regard on my iPhone because I know that it can’t do anything crazy.

Even if SpyPhone didn’t go through any review process, it’s a track surface is limited on non jailbroken iOS devices.

> Most of the “honesty” comes from iOS and it’s just a better thought out model than Android

That's essentially what I had to say. Apple enforces these policies - and sometimes will go overboard. I still very much prefer it to what Google does where as a user I feel they are completely neglecting to "take my side". I am not their valued customer, I am just a source of personal data.

Since PRISM, we know the players you really don't want to be able to track your location have a backdoor in those systems anyway, and the manufacturers are forbidden by law to talk about it.

It's annoying that candy crush get a piece of your private life.

But it's nowhere close to the problem of big entities that already have a huge control on your life to be able to know everything about you while you can't know anything about them.

The app store is just a symptom of it though, and a small one.

Desktop OS where designed for physical media first (side loading). The freedom came first, became part of the expected feature of a desktop, and it would be difficult to take it away.

iPhone defined the image of the smartphone and they started internet first with a curated appstore.

Also remember that in day to day life, from a user perspective, there are more benefits than downsides to the AppStore. Even today, finding software, software update, compatibility, license management, consistent original media availability, ... are actual problems in the desktop (especially windows) world and almost non existent in the iphone/smartphone world.

To go back on the topic. I do hope that the TVApp does succeed, otherwise eventually a market actor will solve the problem and someone will wonder in 10 years how we ended up with cable companies again.

We got here rather simply... Apple introduced the iPhone with no apps at all, then gave a half-assed open solution (bookmarks on your home screen, essentially), then they introduced the App Store, with their rules. Since there was no other way to get apps on the phone (short of jailbreaking), App Store won and Play Store was built in this model.

Other smartphones in this space at the time (Windows Mobile and Blackberry) didn't quite capture the imaginations like Apple did. WM was fairly easy to sideload apps to; not sure about Blackberry.

Unless they've changed it recently, you can install anything you want on an Android phone. You just have to change a setting to allow apps from unknown sources. It takes a few seconds.

I believe this is still the only way to get the Humble Bundle app/game installer on your phone. https://www.humblebundle.com/app

Not to mention you can download other app stores to your device if you wish, including Amazon's and FDroid.

Play Store itself behaves similarly to App Store. Android lets you sideload through a separate mechanism, and all Google has to do is remove that switch from Android

They could do lots of things, but absent any evidence that they're likely to, it's just wild speculation.

And it's not "sideloading." There's no other local device involved. Once you've flipped the "unknown sources" switch, you just go to a website, download, and install, same as you would on a desktop.

This is why I was always bemused at the glee with which people reacted to the deaths of all the other smartphone endeavors.

And the tech press played a huge role in this with their blatant bias as well in my opinion.

A healthy platforms war would have ensured that Apple/Google would have had to think twice about some of these practices.

You have to get there from the start; the app store has to be there from day one. Since that didn't happen on the desktop, it's pretty hard to retroactively introduce one (although Microsoft is trying hard).

Which major operating system doesn't have an app store equivalent?

Thats being pretty pedantic. Introduce one successfully is a pretty obvious implication. Even after almost a decade of desktop app stores they’re still really struggling to get user acceptance outside a few niches. In fact the only one I’d count as an actual commercial success is Steam.

indeed, my mistake I misunderstood the post

Classy, +1

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