I still don’t see why you would want your parents to run untrusted software on their devices, but you do you I guess.
Its a smokescreen.
You want less liberty because of the “least competent” user?
A phone/tablet is a tool, with very intense usage, and huge privacy value, not an engineer's toy.
Editing to add: it seems particularly ironic that you think iPhone users make great purchasing decisions when they buy the phone, but are incapable of making good decisions when selecting software. What accounts for the discrepancy?
60% of society could be raptured tomorrow and the world would be better off.
Allowing third party installations does not mean uncontrolled third party apps. It merely means users have to option to install software on their phones - which continues to limit the softwares capabilities until the user was prompted to allow each.
You could argue "but a braindead person can randomly go on a phishing website, randomly download some .app file and suddenly - through magic go through a theoretical installation dialog to finally explicitly grant this malware problematic permissions... And I'm sure there are going to be people that will do exactly that... But without it, they'll still manage to do the same to the same effect, just without the app installation by inputting their bank credentials in a phishing site or similar
The thing your citing as a problem solved by disallowing app installs isn't actually solved - and it would not become more problematic either.
Finally, the fact of the matter remains that almost nobody would actually use the capability to install from third party stores, as you've correctly insinuated. But if anything, that should be another proof that allowing third party installs doesn't reduce security.
People just like to have everything provided to them from a single source, and will usually pay a premium for that.
And, the app store does absolutely nothing to prevent "dangerous" apps. Apple doesn't review the code. In fact, if your code is reviewable, it's even harder to get it on the app store.
At the end of the day, the App Store and Play Store are filled with adware, spyware, and other malware - because Apple and Google like it that way. That's what they want. They don't give a single flying fuck about your security. They care about extracting 30% while simultaneously doing as little as possible. That's completely at odds with security, yes, and they know that. They just don't care.
I actually don't have (much) of an issue with walled garden approaches as long as the wall has a gate that is easily opened, give me an OS level toggle with a warning of "Here be dragons" and I can live with it - it's not ideal but it's not a terrible trade off.
It's something Android has had previously (but they seem to be trying to lock that gate) and iOS less so.
Invariably, the argument is: "users will just be instructed to open the gate by the bad guys, so we can't have a gate!"
and the purported purpose of notarization is "blessing" trustworthy software.
I don't trust Apple's App Store review. They've approved countless scams that have tricked Apple users out of a lot of money, perhaps $billions in total.
We also can't count on every person being able to check every single thing they do: how do you check if some food or drug you get is good or not? you can't really, you have to trust someone who knows.
Yes - the democratically elected government, not a monopolistic entity with capital interest.
Society should be more dangerous as a means to force people to learn more about technology they rely on.
Which is exactly as it should be
Nobody else would bother. That’s why meme language repositories continuously lead to hacks and vulnerabilities.
Right now you have a lot of piracy apps which are disguised as a "note taking app" and they passed the appstore review without any issues.
[0] https://appstoreconnect.apple.com/WebObjects/iTunesConnect.w... [1] https://developer.apple.com/support/downloads/terms/apple-de...
All the relevant agreements can be found here, so if there's something that specifies this kind of overreach, I'd both be very surprised and interested.
Edit: oh, are you saying that such requests would be "Apple confidential information" so nobody would say if it happened?
> any information disclosed by Apple to you in connection with Apple Events will be considered and referred to as “Apple Confidential Information” and are subject to the confidentiality obligations of this Agreement
The definition of Apple Events:
> As an Apple Developer, you may have the opportunity to attend certain Apple developer conferences, technical talks, and other events (including online or electronic broadcasts of such events) (“Apple Events”).