With the app store you're still vulnerable to state actors and zero day vulns. And on Android you're vulnerable to permissions scope creep. The app stores contain malware.
You're never truly safe.
You can't point to the old days of Windows in the 90s and early 2000s as a case for app stores, either. Installers and downloaded executables were great, but Windows had a broken, unsandboxed model that made it easy to break. History would have played out much better if Windows itself weren't so permissible and was more hermetic back then.
If we invested the same billions of research and development dollars that Apple and Google did into their walled garden platforms, an open web with truly cross platform native wasm apps would work just as well or better than anything on the app stores, and it'd be just as "secure". And cross platform. And couldn't be shut down by Apple, Google, or an angry government.
Imagine going to Netflix.com and getting the native app experience. On any mobile device. Windows Phone. Ubuntu Phone. That's how it should have worked.
Walled gardens must die.
And on Android it's the default you can't uninstall.
No.
As a user, I am grateful for "walled gardens" like the App Store, Steam, etc.
Because I remember the chaos that was before them, with developers/publishers preying on users all the time, which they still try to do by working around App Store restrictions and so on. I'm grateful for curated marketplaces putting the foot down on them.
See all the recent news about Chrome, Dropbox, Zoom etc. installing malware on our systems. Steam wiping your disk on Linux when you uninstalled a game. Uber recording your screen.
And those are the big players, caught because they're under constant scrutiny (but still try to act as if they're above the "law").
Life before the "walled gardens" was rife with cases like that, from developers on all scales. There was no single authority for your platform to complain to. It was chaotic and miserable even for techie people.
This is actually what Apple capitalized on during the "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" days, and it gave them the credibility to carry on to the App Store. Now I see mostly developers complaining about the walled garden, which makes me wary of their true intentions.
Do note that almost all of those examples are of apps that are -NOT- delivered via the App Store.
Now you're picking favorites. So the App Store is okay, but Google Play and Steam aren't?
I don't own Apple devices, so I lack familiarity, but I find it hard to believe that Apple is so good this doesn't happen.
Why do we put our faith in corporations to do right by us?
Apple and Google do not care if users are taken advantage of as long as they don't complain in volume. Both platforms allow play to win games that are designed around extorting "whales". They knowingly allow at-risk individuals to pour thousands of dollars into games, which is an outright travesty.
These companies have too much power and they're abusing it.
Apps downloaded via the App Store (and I assume Google Play) are sandboxed.
Chrome on the desktop, Steam, etc. are not sandboxed.
Most malicious activity is not possible from within a sandbox. For example Steam wouldn't have been able to delete the user's entire disk if it only had access to its own folder.
> Why do we put our faith in corporations to do right by us?
Why should we put our faith in random individual developers to do right by us?
I'd rather have to trust just one corporation instead of thousands of developers who may pack up and disappear overnight.
> These companies have too much power and they're abusing it.
See comments above. Much of the recent malware is in apps that are not distributed via the App Store.
Developers have always abused their power, and still do. "Walled gardens" check that abuse.
Can't install anything they don't pre-approve, either from DMG or Brew or whatever, only from the Mac App Store.
I don't know if it's just me and the people i work with, but we think the Mac App Store is fucking useless, to the point we actively go out of our way to download Xcode through other means.
I for one would not be happy with only being able to install apps through the Mac App Store, and I don't see why iOS should be treated any differently.
I wouldn't be OK with that, and I've said so in other comments here (like when they announced the additional security features in macOS during this year's WWDC - which I appreciate, with concerns), but the iPhone/iPad/etc. are different classes of devices, and I'm fine with their restrictions. They make sense there.
I do prefer the Mac App Store to downloading from random websites or manual updates. How is it "fucking useless?"
Matters of convenience aside, see the Transmission BitTorrent client ransomware fiasco for a grave example.
If someone really really wants to circumvent the App Store on iOS, distribute it via TestFlight, or make the source code available and ask users to compile it on their own Macs.
> If someone really really wants to circumvent the App Store on iOS, distribute it via TestFlight, or make the source code available and ask users to compile it on their own Macs.
How many protesters in Hong Kong have a Mac to compile source code and even know how to compile something? TestFlight has a user limit. Can people install an app through TestFlight as easily as they can through the normal app store?
I suppose I just don't understand why, they seem just like computers with a different form factor.
"Fucking useless" might have been a bit too passionate, but it's happened multiple times with me and the people I work with that Xcode installed through the App Store updates itself but gets stuck in the update forcing a full re-download.
First time it happens ok it's just a bug, by the 3rd time I'd just given up on the App Store altogether.
> If someone really really wants to circumvent the App Store on iOS, distribute it via TestFlight, or make the source code available and ask users to compile it on their own Macs.
Those aren't really feasible though, external testing on Testflight requires a review (plus it might need the $99 developer fee to put it on Testflight?). And the source code route is the same issue, either pay $99 or reinstall the app every 7 days.
I suppose I just don't see the downside other than "Some people need to be protected from themselves" which I don't agree with in this case.
That's a frustration that I share, regarding large downloads/updates on unreliable connections, but that doesn't make the App Store useless. I have received thousands of successful app updates over years and maybe <50 failures.
No, just no.
They're our computers.
This is why I really hoped for the Ubuntu and Firefox phones to happen.
That's nice that you get to experience that. I think the protesters may have a different opinion than you.
Android lets you install applications without having to jailbreak your phone or do any other trickery. This should be a prerequisite for any OS (with all the necessary warnings).
If you are going to argue, do it against the most generous interpretation of someone else's words.
The concept of a wild west free speech utopia sounds great (and I would still like to see that), but it's filled with repetitive white nationalist bullshit. That's the early adopter group.
Because of that early group, it's a horrible experience for anyone else.
I am skeptical of the "wild west free speech utopia" as a lot of people seem to conceive of it, because some forms of speech have chilling effects on others. For example, if I pass a group of angry people chanting "blood and soil", I'm certainly not going to say or do anything that makes me legible as Jewish.
Also, I think you bith are exaggerating a bit about Gabhere is obviously a lot of alt right though.
> "Gab welcomes everyone, but sees a unique opportunity to carve a niche in a massively underserved and unrepresented market. We estimate that there are over 50 million conservative, libertarian, nationalist, and populist internet users from around the world who are seeking an alternative to the current social networking ecosystems. These users are also actively seeking out alternative media platforms like Breitbart.com, DrudgeReport.com, Infowars.com, and others," Gab stated in a company filing dated July 11, 2017.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/30/tech/gab-anti-semitic-speech-...
This is in addition to white supremacist statements made by the company's official social media accounts: https://twitter.com/ClenchedFisk/status/1027690034718224384
And white supremacy is more authoritarian than libertarian. And it's not conservative in the current political sense and it's populist.
I'm not sure what to make of that Twitter link except that there's a whole bunch of folk so embedded in their own political bubbles that they're incapable of communicating with anyone beyond.
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/heres-h...
[2] https://www.revealnews.org/blog/the-hate-report-infowars-is-...
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benjamin Franklin
I'm not sure about iOS, but Android still allows installing unsigned APKs (F-Droid and similar platforms work because of this), and what has already been installed stays on the phone until the user removes it.
The kind of "freedom" you're talking about generally has a high cost. At times, that cost is, well, "freedom".
Frustrating actually. There is no platform out there that delivers on the promise of getting you security and freedom. Certainly none that get you privacy. Right now it's all marketing and fanboys, but where the rubber meets the road, there's just no grip.
I don't understand what you mean by the first sentence. Can you be more specific when you say freedom?
What does it even mean? I am pretty sure that you don't mean someone is 100% free to murder someone else. So you clearly believe in some restrictions.
I can already imagine the counter argument: "Well, 100% freedom unless your freedom infringes on someone else's freedom!"
Ok, but what does it mean to infringe on someone else's freedom? Murder is the easy case; what about polluting a river? I think we would all agree dumping enough chemicals to kill all life in a river would be infringing on other's freedoms, so lets prevent that... but where do you draw the line? It will take judgement, consensus, and compromise to find out where that line is.
So suddenly we are back to needing rules around curtailing freedoms that some people aren't going to like.
In the case of user privacy, I'm against any backdoors or outlawing of encryption (pretty much any government intervention in the messaging space)
So, on one hand, android gives me freedom to install any app I want and to install a firewall like netguard, on the other hand, it destroys my privacy.
I'm really looking for a guide about how to properly secure and prevent data leaking an android phone beyond the basics that I've seen online but without that I'm leaning toward Apple despite finding it abhorrent that I cannot install what I want on my own device (I can obviously side load by using my dev certificate but that's still not something I'm happy with)
You can do this even using the Google Contacts app. Just go into the account settings and turn off contacts sync. To be extra sure, just use a different contacts app.
> not have my privacy completely invaded.
Android has strictly less privacy invasion than iOS, even on Google phones. You can set an offline maps app to be your default. Getting your GPS location doesn't have to send it to Google, while doing the same thing on iOS always sends it to Apple, no matter which app asked. You can install your own apps usably without telling Google who you are.
That is not a trade off at all, if you believe that you have already fallen for the propaganda. Security in and of itself has no value that you could trade off against freedom, only the freedom part of that pair is valuable. Security is a means to the end of freedom: You may need a certain kind and/or amount of security to gain and maintain freedom. But security is also a means to authoritarianism if you do it wrong. Which means: Security is only valuable in so far as it causes a net increase in freedom. If you are actually giving up freedom to make space for more security, that is, you are trading off freedom against security, you have failed.
Gab was removed for hate speech, not free speech.
If so: you are equipped with the necessary building blocks to define hate speech in a non-political way.
If not: your definition of “political” is so broad as to be meaningless.
Well yes tbh. The fact that a certain group of people in power at a certain point in history made a "universal declaration" about something says very little about whether I or anyone else should care about it or agree with it. In other words it is the epitome of political. I am happy to make up my own mind on the nature of "human rights".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_Declaration_on_Human_Rig...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...
"Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech"
A company removing an app is not Congress making a law that abridges anyone's freedom of speech. This isn't a First Amendment issue.
Gab is not a "free speech app". In fact, the term "free speech app" is itself laughable.