It's time for Apple to open up

It is worth noting that Xsser only affected jail-broken phones so the point of the article, that Apple's "closed-ness" was to fault here, is a factual error. In fact, it is that very closed-ness that prevents these types of software off of the AppStore.

Wow, what a worthless article, they conveniently left out that Xsser only affected jailbroken phones (Which in the course of jailbreaking them opened up new vectors of attack that are not Apple's fault).

Also AV on my phone? NO THANK YOU. I even stopped running AV on my windows machine before I switched to Mac/Linux because it was more trouble than it's worth and at the end of the day the user has to be smart enough not to fuck themselves over or not have enough permissions to fuck themselves over. Apple solves this by not giving them enough permissions. It works quite well and has kept the iOS platform very secure.

I really do believe that iOS and Android have nearly equivalent levels of outside security. The difference is that Android allows for apps to do nearly anything while iOS apps are limited. These limits are why we have never (or at least I haven't) heard of a malicious app in the iOS store yet we have heard of countless malicious apps distributed through play and other third-party apps. You can't have full access and "free" security (Free as in you don't have to think or worry about it) in one package. Android chose full access and iOS chose security, end of story.

Power users like most people on HN are going to complain about iOS because it's so locked down but let's please take a step back and realize that a large majority of the population need that protection. If you want more freedom go jailbreak your phone (I do) and just know that you are doing it at a risk to your security and you need to be careful.

Anti-virus is crap. Most AV apps I've used might as well be viruses themselves. Thankfully I now use Linux and Android, which are both fairly secure so long as you follow a few common sense rules.

As far as Apple is concerned, their sandboxed apps, closed stores and Unix-y way of handling code and permissions should also be secure enough to negate the need for anti virus...

An anti-virus vendor really wishes Apple would let them sell software to Apple's customers. Of course, they'll need Apple to first remove the sandboxing requirement so they can snoop on other apps. Conveniently, that will open up a brand new attack surface...

This piece is bullshit. Show me any piece of malware running on a non-jailbroken iOS device! Apple opening up their platforms would be nice for many reasons, but this is not one of them.

It would be great for the security industry if Apple opened up.

History shows that they won't even do that under extreme competitive pressure, which they don't really have now in the market segments they care about. The last time someone won an "openness" argument at Apple was when Woz pinned Jobs to the mat over slots in the Apple II.