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Comment by ur-whale | Hacker News Reader

> App store were a mistake

Like most thing on the internet that are designed to make the end user's life easier while boiling the frog behind the scenes, centralizing control and taking away end user freedom.

Story as old as the world, if you think about it: relinquishing control and freedom in exchange for comfort and ease of life.

The list is endless (iOS, Android, App stores, Windows, censored search engines, YT ...).

Just yesterday there was a HN story about gitlab taking down the source code for some game emulator.

Exact same premises, exact same outcome: you can either be free or be lazy. You can't be both.

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Yes, my grandparents and parents, who barely had schooling and are not fluid in English are lazy because they have not spent their time learning the ins and outs of spotting malware.

They should have spent their time browsing the internet, reinstalling Windows over and over, and reading HN, hopefully learning the signals that can ensure they won’t have some program steal their login credentials to their bank accounts.

So lazy of them to do other things in life such as cooking, cleaning, raising a family, and building a business as immigrants in a foreign country.

This isn't a free or safe choose one scenario. As a platform owner Apple could offer a vetting service for known-safe popular applications, make those easy to install, and create a clear scare-screen when enabling installation from other sources, as well as management profile settings for disabling unvetted or 3rd party app installation all together. Then the only education anyone needs is to not install unvetted apps.

As a bonus, they could make the app curation system extendable, so other groups could run vetting programs. By default your device would only have Apple as a trusted vetter, but as part of a management profile or something you could also trust apps vetter by some security research group, or Epic, or Valve, or whoever. That way security isn't all-or-nothing.

And of course, if anything slips through and your layman user OKs all the warnings and installs a malicious app, it's still operating in a sandbox, and can't do much more harm than clicking a shady link and ending up on a scam website can.

> This isn't a free or safe choose one scenario.

And yet the choose one scenario is the one that has worked best for me. My dad would fill up his Android phone with malware regardless of scare screens. The solution was simple, and allowed at least him and I to spend more time doing other things.

It is hard to believe anyone would manage to fill Android phone with malware without going out of their way to do so. Google Play is the default app store. You have to enable installing from other sources. Google Play then still gets to inspect the app and warn you about possible malware. Of course you can disable all the safety feature and only use 3rd party stores...but you have to go out of your way to do that. If person has done that without knowing what they are doing then they will probably fall for the first, second and 10,000th phishing email or phone call and there is nothing anyone can do to protect them.

You can fill your phone with malware without ever leaving the Play Store. Similar is true of the App Store, with the caveat that at least hostile iOS apps can't replace your homescreen.

In the scenario I described, equivalent action would be to set up a device policy for him that disables installing untrusted apps. You wouldn't even need to have bought him a new phone!

Actually, probably lazy :) I know grandparents who actually try to learn IT stuff.

Sure, classify them as lazy. I’ll prefer to recommend the older people in my family to use iPads and iPhones, and they can spend the time they are not learning IT stuff to do things they are already good at or want to do.

You can both do things you love and learn the stuff this world is currently made of.

There are 24 hours in a day, and a limited number of days to live. Everyone makes tradeoffs. Between now and the time my parents die, there is zero value add on them spending time on how to navigate malware.

Just like I how don’t spend my time learning how to fix a tractor that my grandpa knows how to fix.

> there is zero value add on them spending time on how to navigate malware.

What about not having to deal with malware?

> you can either be free or be lazy. You can't be both.

Absolutes and dichotomies make appealing phrasings, but rarely in life is anything that cut and dry.

I think it would be fair to say: there's (often) a trade off between freedom and laziness. From there it follows that, in such situations, you cannot be both maximally free and maximally lazy.

Regarding what? People a hundred years ago would say that we are all lazy because we have robotic vacuums and dishwashers and we spend most of our lives on our ass.

Everything is a matter of perspective, and that's why neat sounding phrases that try and distill complicated things into if else statements are misleading.

Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure it all takes hard work/effort.

Which App Store would we say is the “open” one? I don’t know that one truly exists.. and I feel confident it would be hard work to make such a thing (but it might be worth it).

> Which App Store would we say is the “open” one? I don’t know that one truly exists.. and I feel confident it would be hard work to make such a thing (but it might be worth it).

There is none, and no matter how much you aren't lazy, you can't have one because Apple won't let you. Which is why that statement 'be free or be lazy' is nonsense.

I haven’t read the details of US vs Apple [1] (only recently heard about it), but presumably this may be part of it?

[1] https://www.theverge.com/24107581/doj-v-apple-antitrust-mono...

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