How’s that compare to android though? For the most part apple’s walled garden IS safer and more privacy preserving than android.
Tech journalists have literally warned Android users that they need to be wary of apps from inside Google's walled garden.
> With malicious apps infiltrating Play on a regular, often weekly, basis, there’s currently little indication the malicious Android app scourge will be abated. That means it’s up to individual end users to steer clear of apps like Joker. The best advice is to be extremely conservative in the apps that get installed in the first place. A good guiding principle is to choose apps that serve a true purpose and, when possible, choose developers who are known entities. Installed apps that haven’t been used in the past month should be removed unless there’s a good reason to keep them around.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/09/joker...
Many, many people game the system in terms of in-app payments, e.g. showing a link to subscribe on their website but hiding the link for the review.
If they can't catch that, why do you they can catch anything?
Also, most of my apps come from fdroid anyway.
That part of the market not being separate from the other part of the market is the issue. There could be a dozen different reasons that someone might want an iPhone over some competitor, and if they buy one for that reason, they're stuck with Apple's store even if they would have chosen something else given the option.
Not only that, the markets are tied together in both directions.
Suppose that you do want to go into competition with Apple and Google and make your own competing phone platform. The biggest problem you're going to have is that people expect you to have a lot of apps available for your phone before they'll buy one, but you have to have a lot of customers before anyone will make apps for your platform.
The traditional way to solve this is by creating a cross-platform framework and then giving developers an incentive to use it, generally by making it easy to distribute apps to existing platforms. For example, Valve wants game developers to develop for SteamOS, so they provide cross-platform frameworks and a distribution system that also works on popular incumbent platforms like Windows. Then developers make games that run on Windows and incidentally also on Linux/SteamOS, and now there are more games available for SteamOS than ever before and it's the most promising competitor to Windows for PC gaming in a long time.
Conversely, Microsoft is prevented from making an app store for iOS, so they can't do that and their ambition to create a viable competitor to Apple and Android faltered. Likewise Ubuntu Touch and Firefox OS and every other attempt to create a viable alternate phone platform. And then you say "just buy a different phone platform" -- as if that wasn't the problem.
Apple is well aware of this and plays into it hard.
That's because people are idiots. There's nothing that iMessage does that whatsapp, telegram, kakao, line can't do. In fact, US/Canada are the only ones that actually use SMS or iMessage, as far as I know, and the rest of the world use other messaging apps. I have been living in Canada for 5 years already, and in no instance I had any issue whatsoever. I now use iPhone, but nobody talks to me via iMessage, it's all either Messenger or Whatsapp, or Instagram
If Apple is able to hold such a stronghold over Americans because of something so easily bypassed, then you deserve to be controlled, really.
Apple has been repeatedly requested to change the colour to a less ugly shade, or to give users the choice to disable the feature or to give Android apps an API of some sort so they can comply with whatever Apple's requirements and get the blue text boxes.
Apple hasn't taken action because they like the current state of affairs, they want the social ostracism of non-Apple users.
so, is it "safer"? what's "safer" about it? or is it really just a meme apple has successfully perpetuated about it's limitations?
A year ago, I also saw a fake advertisement for a squid game. These fake advertisements have already become a meme, but they also offer to download from Google Play a slightly similar game, where after quickly clicking on the screen, the smartphone will suddenly prompt you to buy an expensive subscription and then you will not be able to cancel it, because Google does not provide for them refund. This idea comes from SMS scams since j2me platform, and judging by the comments on this game, people are still losing money, especially if they leave their phones to children.
I don't use ios and won't say whether manual moderation there helps prevent the same crap, but let's not ignore that if you're not tech-savvy, this Android security alternative is pretty easy to get around.
funnily enough, some bits of it might be worse because ios and app store are promoted as 'being secure' period, almost unequivocally - so it ends up being a thing like 'well, ios is secure and this app is on the store, so it's all good, right?", which doesn't always happen to be the case.
AFAIK, This cannot happen on Apple.
I think that this is faith, not objectivity - which is misplaced in this specific scenario.
The challenge isn’t market dynamics, but rule breaking and predation on victims.
Non tech inclined people are targets/marks for bad actors.
Malicious websites, innocuous messages, hard to avoid buttons - are all designed to circumvent good intentions.
This is resolved with rule enforcement, retributive and governance powers.
If we are adamant about competition, then apple being locked down while Android remains open is about the best you will see.
these questions are silly if you pivot them to be about other things rather than the fruit company, just like the arguments that "[company] needs to run open-infrastructure so other companies can build commercial products on [company] servers".
It's rather obvious they're being asked in bad faith with the intention of dragging down the discussion. You know perfectly well what SELinux and application sandboxing are for, and that they're net benefits.
I take care of Android devices used by elderly people, and they have just zero issues. Not anymore than they would have with iOS.
All this is nonsense talk trying to help the indefensible position of Apple. Most people also use Windows computers with no monopolistic app store and even though sometimes they are problems they almost always come from user errors. Most of the time it's poor choices, generally from greedy behavior (trying to get stuff for free without knowing much).
If a user doesn't know what it's doing, it can ask someone for help or stick with Apple's App Store if that suits him. Allowing other possibilities for more competent people doesn't change this fact one bit.
Her phones become really slow because of this.
In fact, their notification system makes it complicated to just allow specific behavior and not something else. It's not better than the notification settings in typical web apps. As a day one user of iOS, I find it funny that you complain about notification out of all things, because if there is one place where iOS is just as fucked as every other platform it's notifications...
Nowadays I have resorted to basically denying notification for everything but the few stuff where they are actually relevant...
Also, you should correctly set things up for your mother and refuse notification prompt for every website and just whitelist the few that might be usefull..