Most consumers understand those concepts and fear those things. Most understand nothing about the economic impact of monopolies and anti-competitive business behavior and the harms they cause consumers in the form of higher prices, lack of innovation, reduced choice, and poorer quality products and services.
So Apple plays off those fears by using language consumers understand, making them actually want the very monopoly that is being forced on them and actually harming them while making billions for Apple.
It's unethical behavior, no more defensible than Sam Bankman-Fried's effective altruism, a.k.a. "mostly a front." This is all right out of Apple's standard playbook.
Which is ironic, considering that the App Store is likely one of the largest malware distribution vectors on the planet.
Looking at one virus alone, the App Store distributed half of a billion copies of it to iPhones and iPads[1]. Similarly, there are multimillion dollar scams on the App Store, as well[2].
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7bbmz/the-fortnite-trial-is...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/8/22272849/apple-app-store-s...
> But now, thanks to emails published as part of Apple's trial against Epic Games, we finally know how many iPhone users were impacted: 128 million in total, of which 18 million were in the US.
> "In total, 128M customers have downloaded the 2500+ apps that were affected LTD. Those customers drove 203M downloads of the 2500+ affected apps LTD," Dale Bagwell, who was Apple's manager of iTunes customer experience at the time, wrote in one of the emails.
> Apple also disclosed the apps that included the malicious code, some incredibly popular such as WeChat and the Chinese version of Angry Birds 2.
Still a huge deal, particularly in China, but considering all the virus really did was collect some device info (less information than most ad networks) (and maybe it was able to open URLs and popups on command)[1] and it was the biggest virus on the App Store ever (that I can find), maybe not as awful as you suggest.
The scams on the App Store, yeah that's pretty bad. Though, can you point me at a marketplace as big as the App Store without loads of scams?
[1]: https://www.lookout.com/blog/xcodeghost#what-does-it-do
You are shown that this is by no means as secure as they want you to believe.
Then you argue that "of course, with a market that big!"
So basically you are proving that Apple uses the excuse of security to hold a monopoly.
Suppose there were multiple app marketplaces for iOS. Then some of them could be extremely selective by finding a niche, and thereby be more trustworthy than any unified store that has to carry a million general purpose apps with only cursory evaluation from various publishers of little or unknown reputation.
Nah, that would mean that what really protects iOS users from malwares is just a good sandboxing mechanism and not the "human" control of the App Store. That would also mean that bypassing the App Store shouldn’t be a real security issue.
Not the person you're replying to but isn't that the point?
GNU/Linux repositories.
https://nitter.net/npm_malware has twenty postings in the last 19 hours, quite far from "without".
Maybe the issue is being so big then. Which is exactly why the EU did this in the first place. So Apple has yet another lever to comply: reduce their size.
Tech journalists have literally warned Android users that they need to be wary of apps from inside Google's walled garden.
> With malicious apps infiltrating Play on a regular, often weekly, basis, there’s currently little indication the malicious Android app scourge will be abated. That means it’s up to individual end users to steer clear of apps like Joker. The best advice is to be extremely conservative in the apps that get installed in the first place. A good guiding principle is to choose apps that serve a true purpose and, when possible, choose developers who are known entities. Installed apps that haven’t been used in the past month should be removed unless there’s a good reason to keep them around.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/09/joker...
so, is it "safer"? what's "safer" about it? or is it really just a meme apple has successfully perpetuated about it's limitations?
A year ago, I also saw a fake advertisement for a squid game. These fake advertisements have already become a meme, but they also offer to download from Google Play a slightly similar game, where after quickly clicking on the screen, the smartphone will suddenly prompt you to buy an expensive subscription and then you will not be able to cancel it, because Google does not provide for them refund. This idea comes from SMS scams since j2me platform, and judging by the comments on this game, people are still losing money, especially if they leave their phones to children.
I don't use ios and won't say whether manual moderation there helps prevent the same crap, but let's not ignore that if you're not tech-savvy, this Android security alternative is pretty easy to get around.
these questions are silly if you pivot them to be about other things rather than the fruit company, just like the arguments that "[company] needs to run open-infrastructure so other companies can build commercial products on [company] servers".
It's rather obvious they're being asked in bad faith with the intention of dragging down the discussion. You know perfectly well what SELinux and application sandboxing are for, and that they're net benefits.
I take care of Android devices used by elderly people, and they have just zero issues. Not anymore than they would have with iOS.
All this is nonsense talk trying to help the indefensible position of Apple. Most people also use Windows computers with no monopolistic app store and even though sometimes they are problems they almost always come from user errors. Most of the time it's poor choices, generally from greedy behavior (trying to get stuff for free without knowing much).
If a user doesn't know what it's doing, it can ask someone for help or stick with Apple's App Store if that suits him. Allowing other possibilities for more competent people doesn't change this fact one bit.
Her phones become really slow because of this.
Sorry but the actual statistics from mobile security companies that track this stuff show otherwise. From Nokia's Threat Intelligence Report 2020 (https://pages.nokia.com/T005JU-Threat-Intelligence-Report-20...):
Among smartphones, Android devices are the most commonly targeted by malware. Android devices were responsible for 26.64% of all infections, Windows/PCs for 38.92%, IoT devices for 32.72% and only 1.72% for iPhones.
Android malware infections are an order of magnitude higher compared to iPhones.
(I tried to look for data from more recent years but iPhones don't show up in the reports after 2020.)
They need to “investigate”
>you’re arguing from imaginary evidence
Thanks for the laugh.
> If someone posts an app before you that is to similar to what you post, they will tell you no.
search "2048 game" and let me know how many similar games they said no to.
> search "2048 game" and let me know how many similar games they said no to.
I don’t know how old the rules are for this. I just know it currently exists. Also, it’s possible that a number of them were submitted at the exact same time and there was a race condition allowing the market to be flooded.
iOS apps bring in more money and that absolutely shows in the time and effort companies put into their apps. The big names (FAANG) might have equality but once you leave the top apps the quality difference can be stark.
Tim Cook is parroting Steve Jobs when he says that Apple deeply cares about users' privacy and security. Jobs was smart enough to realize that emphasising security and privacy protections would increase sales because Apple is a company which sells computer products instead of advertising solutions and services like Google and others(although Apple is increasingly thinking about how to monetize their Big Data).
Because when you know how things work and what they are capable of, the last thing you want to do is fight with them so that they work. At least, someone who doesn't know better cares much less because he is clueless about the existence of a better way.
Jobs was in the business of selling bicycles for the mind, not dumb consumption machines. The latter development of basic consumer focused products is just after the success of the iPhone and happened basically precisely when he left (while officially he was still managing apple, it's pretty clear that after the launch of the first iPad, jobs didn't have a lot of impact at Apple his health condition not allowing).
It also made sense because before Apple was something to exhibit to display wealth nobody that wasn't competent enough with technology would have spent so much money on it. Which is exactly why current Apple offering is absolutely terrible for its price.
Most of the crap told on Apple nowadays are complete memes from the second wave of Apple cultist (most of them arriving with the iPhone) that completely ignore the true history of Apple and how it got to launch such successful products.
Competent in other fields of endeavour, sure.
Jobs was in the business of selling computers that looked (and worked) good to people who would otherwise hate computers. Dealing with geeks was always (and still is) a necessary evil, so he'd have enough of an ecosystem to sell to "normies".
Jobs fundamentally hated the Macintosh and tried very hard to get away from it very early (Newton, anyone?). Once he got back on the saddle, his first Big Idea was to wrap them into colourful shells, and fuck the tech inside (jesus, was the first iMac dog-slow!). His second idea was to co-opt FOSS and Java developers, again to have enough geeks building stuff for his platform; they would be unceremoniously dropped once the iPod got traction and he could finally get to run the "better Sony" he always wanted to have.
The rest is just stories he told to power his reality-distortion field.
Apple Watch, Apple TV and HomePod would like a word.
And now you know why I call Tim Apple the iPope.
Remember all the times when a computer could be compromised via a bug in the jvm that was supposed to safely run the java applets?
Normally it would be fixed immediately on linux and windows, and take months on osx because apple had their own jvm (that had the same bugs because it was just a fork).
It's the same sales pitch that Canonical is using to justify its centralized snap store.
When someone claims he's the only one who can protect the public I immediately see some question marks.
Especially the constant mentioning of the "EU" when this applies to the EEA, leaving out two entire countries. I hope they actually realize this internally.
That playbook really gets around huh.
What, their shitty app sandbox isn't all that good or something? Methinks the real reason is money.
But tbf, even though I can install APKs on Android I don't really do that as there's still the fear of bad actors; maybe the Android sandbox is safe & secure but I don't _know_ that, they haven't _told_ me explicitly about it. And if it's not safe for Android too, then why not?
And now they cracked down on small developers to revert that. So it's not a totally invalid point from Apple.
