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Comment by pan69 | Hacker News Reader

Anyone can make a website and publish it but for some reason when it comes to apps there needs to be a store with a review process. Aren't apps, in a way, not just specialised browsers (not talking about webview apps here) that run in a sandbox? Why the need for all this "reviewing", does it make apps safer or better quality? Is it a device ecosystem permission / security problem? I.e. why do apps need stores and websites don't?

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If they didn't review every app, someone might sneak in a paid app without giving Apple and Google their 30% cut.

If you have no gatekeeping, then all of the bad actors come in and you end up with a tragedy of the commons.

Apple did this correctly, IMHO, when the App Store first came out by both:

- reviewing all apps

- having it take 30 days to get the feedback

The 30 days seemed draconian or bureaucratic but it forced builders to be 100% sure that there app was working and ready for consumption. It probably also acted as major friction for scammers etc who figured it wouldn't be worth it.

What exactly would be the tragedy of the commons here?

Publishing a crap app on the app store doesn't make anyone else's app worse

> If you have no gatekeeping, then all of the bad actors come in and you end up with a tragedy of the commons

We need to put more money into human alignment research.

One example where there are problems is crypto wallets - fake ones can steal all your crypto. Not that it's solved that well with apps - Apple has run ads for fake crypto stealing ones as no 1 in the list on its app store.

The iPhone 1 only allowed web bookmarks. They aren’t as capable as real apps in dozens of ways. The fact that lots of Apps are just glorified web site browsers doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of apps that aren’t, and some that couldn’t be done with a web site at all.

It's not that apps should be websites, but that you should be able to load apps as freely as websites.

What the fuck are you talking about? How is Disco Elysium a specialized browser? Or banking apps? What does this even mean?

Yes they all run in a sandbox, but there's a permissions system that they can exploit.

> I.e. why do apps need stores and websites don't? your browser is, in a way, the store for your websites. You're only as protected from the site's fuckery as the browser is. And generally modern browsers are very well protected.

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