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Comment by shaan7 | Hacker News Reader

That is an interesting take, so basically in your opinion the main thing that makes iOS better than Android is that Apple has tighter control over the apps? What I've heard from most iOS users is other things like smoother interface, better battery life, great camera etc. I've never heard "I like iPhone because Apple moderates the App Store" from laymen (i.e. non-HN crowd).

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I’ll chime in as one of them (and in every thread about this many more people do as well) - it’s one of the many things I like about an iPhone, the tighter control and gate keeping Apple does on the App Store. I like not having to worry so much on the App Store or wade through scams etc (I know there’s not none but seems less and it’s easy to find the apps I want) and for my parents and less tech savvy friends it’s great

But personally it comes down to it’s a phone not a computer to me and I don’t want to or care if I can run “anything” on it.

The lack of scam apps and crappy clones is the only real advantage that appeals to me. On the Play store you can type in the exact name of an app that someone has told you and it'll show you a whole page of fake and copycat apps.

I've never seen that. can you give me an example search term?

Look up any popular game, although a lot of the bigger ones are good about reporting their clones and getting them removed. An immediate example I can think of is 2048, the original by Gabriele Cirulli, is published by Solebon LLC on the Play store, when you look for 2048 using the search, it's not even the first result that comes up. Although to be fair to them, it's not the first that comes up on the apple store either.

Do you think 4096 is different from 2048? It is not developer friendly if they stop something similar publishing. And it already leck of creative, like just only can use gpt4o on iPhone.

No, I just think that when you search for 2048, you should get the original one that was published first, not one of the many imitation ones.

I love the tight control Apple keeps on the app store, just last week it forced an app update on me that deleted all my OTP keys, because the OTP app was bought by some malware vendor and I didn't get prompted that this prior personal project was now controlled by a literal scam artist company prior to them pushing an update. Their commitment to safety goes so far I can neither inspect the data saved by the app nor look at the app binary itself, can you help me understand how that makes the iPhone app store secure?

What app was this?

Probably Raivo, but it was acquired a year ago, not a week ago.

Its also a myth. Apple has so much trash in app store… including scams and direct decompiled copies of apps. Its probably better than Google Play but lets not pretend they care about the app quality - otherwise they wouldnt be banning and kicking high quality apps left and right.

It’s not a myth. Every week my parents or children request I’d remove malware or adware from their android device that they installed. On my other children’s tablet or family iPhone this has never been a problem once.

Doubt. This sounds like an Apple commercial from the early 00's talking about Windows malware.

iOS frankly has a ton of scam apps that ask for weekly subscriptions to resize a picture or other crap like that.

I love that Apple has a tight control over the App Store, but I would love to just shove whatever I want on a device I own and if it blows up on me, more the fool I.

I think we’d have to ask some non-technical people about this really, but I think there’s a nebulous perception that the Apple App Store is, like, somehow safer and good, while the Google one is somehow less safe and not good. The specific details, not so well understood.

> so basically in your opinion the main thing that makes iOS better than Android is that Apple has tighter control over the apps?

What Apple loves to make us believe is that Vendor, AppStore and ContentFilter are not three entirely orthogonal concepts that can be totaly separated from each other.

You can have:

- Company A be the hardware Vendor

- Company B host the App Store

- Company C be the provider of the ContentFilter

Why do you think the battery life is better?! Do people not get cause and effect? Ability to deny crap apps and ability to control what can run in background surely helps!

You say that as if deleting crapware isn't possible on any other platform. We've been doing it for decades.

GMS is most of power waste in android. Deleting it makes the phone borderline useless.

I'd argue that your latter point (optimizing background apps) is majority of the improvement and this is something you can do in the OS regardless of where an app comes from (excluding rooted/jailbroken devices from scope). This would've been a reasonable argument if Apple only ever denied apps because they did stupid things, not because they offered a payment gateway that did not pay Apple commission. Lets not pretend that Apple's control is only about curating an experience for the user, it is very significantly about maximizing profit as well.

As a side note, I've always understood that just stock iOS is way more optimized than stock Android simply because of better engineering. However, this is anecdotal and I don't have any references as such.

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