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Comment by throwaway290 | Hacker News Reader

> Does nobody in you family own MacOS or Windows? Because there you can install malicious apps so your point is selective.

macOS doesn't allow that by default, though unlike iOS it is possible to social engineer users to launch shady apps

> apps that are not possible because would be rejected or cannot use private API that apple apps have

The range of spyware that will become possible is much bigger than potential new apps that somehow can do a good thing with a private API. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43197091

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As I said shady apps are/were also in App Store. Today they are not able to manually really review and detect all malicious apps. MacOS is still more open and the world didn't collapse. At minimum they could provide similar mechanism like MacOS but on iOS.

1) apps still notarised so if app later detected to be malicious it can be remotely uninstalled

2) if it's you grandma/grandpa phone - allow to setup iphone as more limited parental control that only other from family can install apps

3) do automatic apps scanning before installation to detect app is malicious - revoke developer certificate in this case or ask them for clarification

> MacOS is still more open and the world didn't collapse

the world didn't collapse because the world is not using laptops/desktops as dominant computers for many many years.

Ordinary people use phones. Anyone using laptop is to a degree professional especially in any third world country. Somebody who mostly abandoned using laptop literally yesterday told me "I got a new laptop from work but I'll just get a virus in a week won't I". This is the adversarial reality the rose-eyed takes about freedom of computing are contending with. Maybe most of them live in the past when computers were used by tech literate and blackhat hacking was in intancy.

Laptop and computers still is used as dominant for writing software including for mobile - you know software that could be infected. Still no collapse. Smartphones were not main device 10 years ago and people did bank transfers on laptop and world didn't collapse 10 years ago

> Laptop and computers still is used as dominant for writing software including for mobile

Yes and infected Xcode and various SDKs you get on your laptop are actually the biggest threat to iOS security (other than just literally malicious devs). Devs torrenting an xcode and then infecting their users is a thing.

> Smartphones were not main device 10 years ago and people did bank transfers on laptop and world didn't collapse 10 years ago

See blackhats in infancy part...

> Yes and infected Xcode and various SDKs you get on your laptop are actually the biggest threat to iOS security (other than just literally malicious devs). Devs torrenting an xcode and then infecting their users is a thing.

Would it happen as often if the tooling was free?

...

Xcode is free

So why are you talking about people torrenting it? Am I missing something?

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