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Comment by jim201 | Hacker News Reader

I am concerned that the App Store has become the norm. For many young people, iPhones and iPads have been their only computer. Many have never seen a world where app developers can distribute independently. The NYT had an article out about ruling, and the number of people supporting the App Store was astounding.

I think Apple has done a great job marketing the App Store as the reason for the security/UX of their platform, when in reality, it's the OS. It's the OS that requires apps to get permission before accessing my location, it's the OS that isolates apps from each other, it's the OS that provides an easy way to install/uninstall packages.

The confusion between benefits of the OS/benefits of the App Store combined with many peoples' unfamiliarity with third party distribution has made it more difficult to convince people of the merit of these antitrust suits.

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My brother in law (25 years old) mostly uses his phone for everything, which is obviously fine, but he needed help with something on his computer recently so he called me.

It was just asking for help getting stuff of a portable hard drive from work, so I tell him to plug it in and open up the file explorer.

He didn't know what the file explorer was, so I say "uh, the thing with the folders and shit in it, the little folder icon on the bottom". He eventually figured it out, and then I tell him to click on the drive on the left, which he figured out, and then I told him to open another file explorer window and drag the files from the first one to the second. The entire ordeal ended up taking him like ten minutes.

My brother in law isn't stupid or anything, he just didn't grow up with the typical desktop computer interface that most people who frequent HN did. He's been able to use a phone or a tablet for pretty much the entire time he's been using "computers", and those abstract away most of the lower level details.

one of my interns didn't know how to create a folder.

I'm glad my dad taught me mkdir at 9 years old.

> when in reality, it's the OS

I disagree. Application developers have always been absolutely terrible at packaging. We see this all the time on linux, where publishers just fail to follow the packaging standard of the system, and instead develop an "installer" for their special little snowflake application. The OS cannot save you from that unless you also control distribution and can tell that publisher "you don't get to publish to my very valuable user group if you don't follow my rules".

Publishers have shown time and time again that if given a permission system, they'll just ask for every single permission under the sun, unless somebody stops them from doing that. The user sure isn't. They'll run whatever garbage installer script the publisher gives them because they want the application.

I don't like Apple's monopolistic behavior. I personally believe it would be a great service to the western world to break apart Big Tech, but the incentives that drive application development ARE broken. Apple has good reason to try and fix that with the app store, they just don't get to do it by running a monopoly.

We don’t see this on Android, where you can install apps from outside the Play Store.

Does Android have just as good a security record as iOS? I honestly don't know the answer to this question.

F-Droid has a better security record.

Currently we do not. There's been some of it on the fringes of enterprise/corporate stuff, but in the mainstream the Play store has had a de-facto monopoly for a while.

I would argue that this doesn't change my previous argument. I'm talking about how the "modern" OS experience necessitates a near-monopolistic app-store. That the OS cannot be separated from the app-store. This is also the current state of the Play store, even if google technically allows competitors. I also think their reluctant acceptance of these competitors was relatively recent, and therefore that market is still young. I would think that by the time several competing app-stores exist with their own exclusive apps, you'd have a markedly different experience on these OS's than you have today.

> They'll run whatever garbage installer script the publisher gives them because they want the application.

OK, sure. Fine. Whatever.

Fuckin learn or get wrecked.

> it's the OS. It's the OS that requires apps to get permission before accessing my location, it's the OS that isolates apps from each other, it's the OS that provides an easy way to install/uninstall packages.

Sorry, you're just wrong. Only by analyzing the apps can Apple enforce several policies that many folks think contribute to users' security.

The prohibition against dynamic code, lying about the reason that an app needs a certain permission, and all the trust and safety policies are all stuff an OS can't do.

If you think there are zero scam/malicious/malwares/etc apps on Play Store or App Store.

I have a mountain I would like to sell ya.

I am not agreeing with the other guy that it's OS.

But App Store is hardly more safe than the usual internet. Stuff...

The App Store is much safer than the set of all internet accessible binaries.

> Only by analyzing the apps can Apple enforce several policies

Or they could secure the runtime and quit giving developers dangerous entitlements in the first place. Make no mistake, Apple doesn't need the App Store to develop meaningful security for their users. The Mac is living proof.

Without those entitlements, they would get slammed for being anticompetitive by not allowing 3rd party devs the privilege of building the things they want to build on the platform.

Fine by me. If Apple can't develop safe APIs for themselves, they shouldn't be allowed an unfair advantage through unsafe channels. Secure the runtime, and everyone is happy and you're inherently better-defended against attackers.

> The Mac is living proof.

Is Mac as secure as iOS?

No.

The Apple Watch is more secure than an iPhone. I don't think anyone would use that as reasoning to justify the same security model on iOS or Mac though.

At some point, the diminishing returns of "muh security" do obviate positive and pro-consumer change.

> The prohibition against dynamic code, lying about the reason that an app needs a certain permission, and all the trust and safety policies are all stuff an OS can't do.

It _is_ something a community of people empowered to control their devices can organize and achieve, but we were stripped of this capability when a small set of private concerns unilaterally locked us out. They just told us that they were the only ones they trusted to manage security, and everyone apparently believed them. The state of personal privacy has gotten unimaginably worse since. Not even the world's largest organizations can manage to fight, much less anticipate, the world's worth of bad actors.

It's not impossible according to the laws of physics or anything, but is there a real world example of a non-profit community run repository of software similar in scale to the App Store, with similar guarantees of quality and security that the App Store provides?

F-Droid [1] has a squeaky clean track record when it comes to malware [2]. Might be mostly just because the number of users is relatively low. Quality of course varies wildly, but that's to be expected.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-Droid

[2] According to the Wikipedia article there were (are?) some old unmaintained apps using vulnerable native libraries but that's not intentional malware and every app store has apps with vulnerabilities of some sort.

I like this decision. But I also like that I can cancel all my IAP subs in the settings quickly. Maybe stripe could set up consumer accounts to do the same.

And under this decision, you will be still be free to only subscribe to apps that go through Apple and allow you to cancel that way

Hmm. I'm already considering switching our app to stripe only to ease billing reconciliation. Managing users who made in app purchases who want regular web access as well has been a pain.

Perhaps the added competition will encourage Apple to improve this, they haven't had any reason to make it better so far.

The government should require credit card companies to introduce a system for recurring billing which would let you see all your subscriptions on your credit card web site and cancel them there. For the 3.5% they charge in fees it is the least they can do.

Sure but until that happens the App Store is the next best option.

I as a consumer would like a choice in the matter. Pay 30% more for a subscription dashboard or pay 30% less and cancel from the developers website.

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