That's fine and dandy - I'm all for it, in fact, I configure my systems thus with 3rd party tools as much as I can. Android is mostly like this (with a less than perfect implementation)

But when people talk of "walled gardens", they mostly refer to the guardian at the entrance. Only Apple decides what runs on iOS, only Microsoft decides whats in the App Shop. That's NOT good for anyone (except Apple and Microsoft).

Sure, make users jump through hoops to install alternate stores, and warn them up the wazoo when they do that. But do let them, or general purpose computing as we know it is gone.

Security professionals are almost completely unanimous about how effective Apple has been with it's "walled garden". I'm not even an Apple fan, but what they have done is pretty amazing from a security perspective. Like it or not it has worked to keep people safe from many many types of attacks.

Sandboxing and tighter security are orthogonal to app stores. The same security policy should apply to every app, regardless of whether it was installed through the official store or from another source.

What the grandparent is suggesting is akin to UAC, which received much hate when it first debuted in Vista but has now become a mostly accepted part of the Windows user experience. It has been done before, and it can be done again, with every Windows app, not just apps from the Microsoft Store.

They are orthogonal in theory, but so far not in practice - all three appstores in common use (iOS, macOS, Android) have mandated sandboxing and security.

grandparent was suggesting UAC, but started with:

> You know what? I'm starting to get excited for the walled garden to get more walls.

Walled garden is fine only if you build the walls. Please let the iOS stay the only such corporate build travesty.

It is good to have the ability to raise the walls. It is not good for apple and MS to decide what to use their OS for...

Yeah I don't want the only distribution model to be an App Store. And I don't want to lose the ability to run things with root access.

But I strongly believe that right now apps get too much access by default (read, write all my files is crazy). And if they need anything beyond that they just ask for root. There needs to be much more granular permissions, with more restrictive defaults and nice informative dialogs.

It's unsexy, and inconvenient for developers. But it's the right thing for our users. It's how I want random programs downloaded from the internet to behave.

>You know what? I'm starting to get excited for the walled garden to get more walls.

Yep. What developer types don't like to admit is that for the average user, who doesn't use the features excluded by the walled garden anyway, the tradeoff is well worth the security gains.

Why do you think people would treat them any differently from the UAC screen of Windows 7? That is, just click OK to grant whatever permission it wants, or disable it entirely to avoid the annoyance.

Thats probably true but you could enforce it at a corporate level with a whitelist of apps that should have access to certain permissions.

I'm not sure if you know, but Windows already has that - Metro apps (or whatever the name is now) are sandboxed and with a permission system.

But they are much hated.

> But they are much hated.

Most people wouldn't even know that they are sandboxed.

But we will see for sure with Windows 10S and its optional upgrade to Pro policy.