Ok, I was exaggerating. Rather - It is either the dominant or one of the major strategies for VC funded SV companies at early stages. Aggressively lose money acquiring users. Even happens outside VC. The wired article linked in this article includes many good reasons why it's losing money: https://www.wired.com/story/temu-is-losing-millions-of-dolla...
Look, temu sounds scummy as hell - sounds like they can't compete in the Chinese market and trying to make a hail mary in the US market by being incredibly aggressive and using manipulative techniques.
> overall I find the evidence they've laid out to be highly compelling.
Have you ever worked on smartphone apps? There is nothing out of the ordinary, you can see that in the matrix of "security issues" - all other major apps use those things. The only thing that could be confusing is using the jit but temu includes games so it's probably a scripting language in those games. The jit isn't a security threat in itself - maybe an insecure language could run exploits, but there is not evidence of that happening. It can't create whole new programs with whole new permissions like this article implies.
> What evidence would you demand to concur that this is dangerous / spyware / a risk?
Anything out of the ordinary, other than a bunch of stuff that's normal plus big scary china. Specifically an example of it escalating access privileges would be a smoking gun.
Now - the fact that big companies have massive databases with names and addresses of people is a real issue. This is not unique to Temu or Chinese companies, and doesn't make Temu a spyware app.
