Nobody sane is arguing for a vulnerable computer.
The desire is just less friction and fewer restrictions on what code can be written and executed by the owner on the device. Really this is what virtualization is for, and the only thing keeping mobile operating systems working as they do is that most consumers don't demand the same features as businesses, but in my opinion they should.
That level of friction is $99 :/
This gives all the control back to the user. Nobody should be bullied into just accepting all permissions the developer wants. The developer should be forced to gracefully degrade their UX when their dependencies are denied without preventing access to the core service and should be sued into oblivion when they violate this basic promise under accessibility laws.
From a developer perspective virtualization would also make accomplishing this much easier since they no longer have to be limited to crappy APIs that are not just sometimes vulnerable and incompatible but restricted on purpose under bogus pretense.
If the user can't determine what an app does with the resources it wants it should be trivial for the OS to mock the resources, see what happens, and report it back to the user. i.e. when enabling networking the app attempts to phone home somewhere shady, when enabling file system access it attempts to read/write outside its own directories, etc. I am pretty sure this would not scare off users, but make them curious.
Then it auto-deletes and there's nothing you can do about it.
The only class of malware that the currently-mandated friction is preventing is the kind that appears benevolent for 7 days then strikes on day 8.
For me it is just a terrible feeling to not really own a device I bought, so I avoid them wherever I can. Annoyingly, this is getting increasingly more difficult.
As a potentially interesting aside, today lack of programmability seems to be a sign of a maturing market. I recently researched e-cigarettes that I can program to time me, those that have a computer in them basically all allow for writing your own programs. Same with the smart watch market, although Apple is trying its best to ruin that as well.
In the Windows XP era, a freeware game or utility you downloaded turning out to be a virus was 100% your fault. It wasn’t a defect in Windows that your whole computer got owned, that was just how computers worked. Crazy to me that people want to go back there.
XP security was atrocious, and there were already better, functional models of how to structure things out there.
Even today, no file sandboxing solution I'm aware of really properly handles more complex file formats that don't consist of a single atomic file.
Only macOS goes beyond the simple "allow the user to pick a single file or directory and that's that" model, and even then according to the documentation I found it only handles simple sidecar files that only differ in the file extension from the main file, but still breaks down for anything more complicated than that.
The push for containerization and sandboxing is in right direction if user have control over it.
By all means run the new app I downloaded in nice little box and ask me when it wants to access any file from outside of it, but if I want to I should have option to give it permission to whatever I want.
It's not so crazy if you understand that there are people who want to be able to have complete control over their own machines. These modern security measures trade that control for security.
But there are many circumstances where that tradeoff is undesirable. Perhaps the machine will never be connected to a network. Perhaps the owner of that machine is willing and able to take responsibility for the security. Etc.
Video game consoles are just as locked down as iPhones, but ~nobody complains about that since you can just buy a PC instead. There is no good equivalent (in terms of compatibility and privacy) to iPhone/Android, though.
Lenovo was one of the more famous abusers of its freedom [0] so sticking with popular and well known consumer brands did not save you, just as I expect it doesn’t now with Android.
You are talking about privacy from rogue app developers. I certainly laud Android (and iOS) for their approach here, and I agree that the situation is much better than on desktop operating systems.
I, on the other hand, am talking about privacy from the OS developer, i.e. from tracking that's built-in to the OS by the OS developer. The situation on Android is certainly much worse here than any other operating system.
(One could argue that the tracking is not built into the Android OS, but into Google's Play Services. Since all mainstream Android vendors ship Play Services, this is a distinction without difference.)
It is possible to make an OS which is private in both senses. De-Googled Android distributions and Flatpak/Snap prove this. So far, there has been no mainstream interest in this, though.
Fortunately systems are designed for multi users, with sandboxes and access controls and heuristics now, and it's less of a problem for most people.
Our ability to sideload apps, or install pwa that are full featured doesn't need to affect your safe little bubble of protection. You'll be ok, I promise.