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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

Yes, assuming that iOS's entitlement security has not been broken.

As if the App Store had any sort of those guarantees. I know of people have been scammed via WebView wrappers that purported to be some benign app to pass app store review, which were then pointed at fake exchange websites afterwards. GitLab which was hosting their C&C mechanism took action faster than Apple or Google did to take down multiple scam apps across multiple different developer identities, but the scammers spun up new apps the next day.

WebView wrappers don't have any more ability to siphon data out of the phone than any other app. Scammers can always scam users if they can trick them into entering data into a website. There's nothing anyone can do about that (besides blocking web access).

The point is Apple isn't really helping with the problem because the weakest link is people. If you can get someone to install malicious software how much more difficult is it to have them willingly give it via phishing?

I don’t see how going back to the Wild West of the PC era is supposed to help these nontechnical users be safer. The App Store isn’t perfect but it’s far, far safer than that.

I have vivid memories of loads of relatives in the Windows XP era with browsers laden with toolbars that spy on everything they do and slow the computer to a crawl. Those users see something like the iPhone as a massive breath of fresh air. Nothing you install on the App Store can inject adware into the rest of the operating system like that.

> Nothing you install on the App Store can inject adware into the rest of the operating system like that.

That has literally fuck all to do with the app store. That's called sandboxing - the app store has nothing to do with sandboxing. They are different things.

Why are we being dishonest.

So... what's the point of all the onerous restrictions in the first place?

Point me to an Apple document that says they'll reimburse me if I'm scammed by an App Store app. If Apple cannot offer a guarantee, that means they don't trust their App Store to protect me and if they don't trust their App Store to protect me then they can hardly claim in court that they deny user choice to protect users.

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