Yes, powerful tools can be abused....You're effectively ceding full control of EVERYTHING you do on your computing device to Google and Apple forever because you're afraid that powerful tool, drivers of innovation and progress, might hurt someone occasionally.

You’re speaking as if this is hypothetical. Thirty plus years of PC use and 10 years of Android is proof that third party developers can’t be trusted and the platform providers have a responsibilty to keep third party providers in check. Given the trade off of inconveniencing a few geeks and not allowing third parties to read text messages, phone logs, etc. I think that’s a fair trade off.

I am a developer and have been for 20 years. But the platform providers should be catering to the users. I will install any random app on my iPhone. I don’t worry about whether the app comes from a trusted developer. I know because of the security model that the app can’t do too much damage.

we NEED to make sure that people take responsibility for themselves. It's the only way you keep free market and freedom functioning.

Again, how has that worked out so far for the vast number of PC and Android users?

It has been drilled into computer users heads not to download random apps from untrusted sources on their computers because of the potential for harm. The fact that the iOS App Store does enforce a sandbox actually gave app developers a larger market of people who would try random apps without having to trust the developer.

But most importantly, Android has been around for a decade. Where are all of the Android “entrepreneurs” that are getting rich because of their “innovative” apps that are possible because of its lax security model?

But... the existence proof is also Windows and Android and the massive market share and staggering amount of innovation that's happened on those platforms.

You're forgetting that many of the capabilities that Apple eventually caved on and added to iOS came directly as a result of Android's "we'll let you do that" default motto. There was a period of time where you couldn't have custom keyboards on iOS. There was a period of time where 3rd party apps on iOS couldn't even multitask.

Don't get me wrong, Android's permission model needs serious work at this point. But the coin you're holding up has two sides on it. You're writing off a huge amount of innovation that has benefited everyone, Apple users included.

Platform power is a continuum -- there's no single right or wrong answer for everyone buying a device, which is why it's good to have multiple platforms with multiple philosophies.

Even if you don't care about that though, and you personally enjoy staying closer to the secure side of things, permissive platforms still benefit you as a user because they're testing grounds to find out which capabilities are beneficial enough to end-users to be worth back-porting to the more closed gardens. That's something we've seen repeatedly throughout the years with Android and iOS: both platforms feed on each other in different ways.

The massive market share is because of cheap phones. The average selling price of an Android phone is a 3rd of an iPhone.

And where is this “massive innovation” that is leading to profit either by app makers making apps that can only be made on Android or by device makers? As the old saying goes - “if they are so smart, why aren’t they rich?” The whole Android ecosystem is a race to the unprofitable bottom.

The same can be said about Windows PC makers - thin margins and low profits. Not exactly what I would consider a “success”.

There was a period of time where you couldn't have custom keyboards on iOS. There was a period of time where 3rd party apps on iOS couldn't even multitask.

And when Apple did it, it did it more securely. You can’t just press a confirmation button, the user has to be purposeful and go into settings, the keyboard runs out of process, and even then by default the keyboard doesn’t have network access. The user has to go out of their way to go back into settings to give the keyboard network access and they get a huge warning. Also, when you enter a password, it changes back to the system keyboard.

As far as multitasking, again Apple was more thoughtful and limited multitasking in iOS 4 to not allow a third party app to drain the battery. Even now that they have opened it up more, the user can still granularly control what apps are allowed to run in the background.

There is huge difference between the thoughtfulness of how Apple implements features and how Google implements features.

The cheap phones are because Google allows 3rd-party OEMs to install Android on their own devices, even though that carries an extra risk of having an outdated phone, or a 3rd-party back door, or just a crappy experience that degrades the overall Android brand. It's the exact same thing we're talking about -- Apple doesn't do that because they think giving random device makers that much control is insecure and hurts their brand. It doesn't mean that Apple's approach is wrong. But I'm glad that both exist.

> And when Apple did it, it did it more securely.

This isn't an iOS vs Android contest. It doesn't matter who has the better implementation.

Apple started from a perspective of "You don't need multitasking." Consumers widely said, "Yeah, we do. Those phones have it and we want it." Apple said, "fine, but we'll do it our way." Everybody won, because some people went out and did the experimental hacky thing, and Apple looked at them and said, "you know what, it has issues, but I guess that is worth supporting."

> And where is this “massive innovation” that is leading to profit either by app makers making apps that can only be made on Android or by device makers?

Innovation != profit. Otherwise, Open Source communities would be a lot richer. My metrics for user success are not primarily based on corporate profit margins, but the short answer to why people aren't getting rich on Android is because the app market as a whole on both iOS and Android is a race to the bottom. It just so happens that Android's bottom is slightly lower than Apple's is.

There certainly are apps on Android that can't exist on iOS though, if that's what you're getting at. Off the top of my head, the iOS equivalents of Tasker are way underpowered next to what's being offered on Android. 3rd-party non-Gecko web browsers still aren't supported on iOS, which actually does matter because the iOS browser engine is lagging on multiple web standards. Look backwards a little ways, and you have the swipe keyboard style, which started out as a 3rd-party app on Android and (I suspect) was a big part of Apple deciding to back-down on their 3rd-party keyboard restrictions. Go back even farther and you had 3rd-party tethering apps. On the OEM side, there are people who still swear by the Note series, and Apple seems pretty adamant that they're not interested in pursuing phone styluses. They're probably not gonna ever break on that, but I am about 65-75% sure that within 5-7 years Apple's gonna break down on touchscreen laptops; I feel like the convertible market is going to eventually be too big for them to ignore.

One big thing for me personally is that I use a file manager on Android to handle syncing -- I basically treat my phone like a USB drive. A really nice part of that is it's all web-based. I don't have anything installed on my computer, I can boot up essentially a local server from my phone and drag videos/music into or out of any app's data storage from any computer with a web browser. Even from other phones :)

Again, this doesn't mean that Android is better than iOS. It means iOS and Android serve different niches. If you like the iOS niche, that's great. Some people genuinely like the Android niche; they're not just buying Google phones because they're poor. The high-end Pixel phones sell.

In a thread about how Facebook invades users’ privacy because of lax security controls on Android, it does matter that one method of allowing third party keyboards is “secure” and the other isn’t.

Innovation != profit. Otherwise, Open Source communities would be a lot richer. This is like saying, "well if newspapers have such good reporting, why aren't they making money?" Because the app market as a whole on both iOS and Android is a race to the bottom. It just so happens that Android's bottom is slightly lower than Apple's is.

One of the posts in this thread was talking about “entrepreneurship” a Nd business opportunities that can’t exist because of Apple’s policy. If that were true, you should see a blossoming of business opportunities that exist on Android.

Go back even farther and you had 3rd-party tethering apps.

Tethering restrictions was the one thing that Apple did to cowtow to phone providers. Why would Apple care about third party tethering otherwise?

One big thing for me personally is that I use a file manager on Android to handle syncing -- I basically treat my phone like a USB drive. A really nice part of that is it's all web-based. I don't have anything installed on my computer, I can boot up essentially a local server from my phone and drag videos/music into or out of any app's data storage from any computer with a web browser. Even from other phones :

There are plenty of apps that do that with the iPhone. But, all of the cloud storage apps have web interfaces that you can copy files to and from.

The high-end Pixel phones sell.

Barely....

Estimates are that Google sells about 4 million phones in a year - the same number Apple sells in a week.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/13/17007104/google-pixel-tot...

And if Andy Rubin can’t convince people to buy high end Android phones - the Essentisl phone - who can?

...no. iOS doesn't have a user-accessible file browser. On Android, I can use my browser to access system files from any other application. Apps in iOS are sandboxed from the file system. I'm confused -- isn't that one of the things you like about iOS?

Maybe that's changed since the last time I used an iPhone? Did Apple break and add a system-wide file access permission recently? I don't see any iOS apps advertising that feature, but maybe I'm missing something.

The point I'm getting at is not whether or not iOS is more secure than Android. It's that the open app approach, while flawed for many reasons, allows developers to pursue innovative applications like weird keyboards that let you swipe instead of tap, and background apps that let you turn parts of your phone on and off when you walk into your house, and custom stylus-oriented devices that let you scrawl notes on your home screen while your phone's locked, and firewalls that let you monitor system-wide network requests and block ads, and homescreen widgets, and, yes, even network-level privileges that allowed 3rd-party OEMs and developers to add tethering regardless of what service providers wanted.

Some of these ended up being bad ideas, and some of them ended up being good ideas. And since then, some of the good ideas have gotten copied to iOS, with tweaks.

This is good for everyone. It's especially good for Apple users.

The point I'm getting at is you can't only focus on one part of this equation. Android is less secure than Apple because it's open. But it also, objectively, has a wider array of low and high-end devices and applications than iOS does. The same is true of Windows. Windows is insecure. But they also have Surface Books, which are cool. It's a trade-off.

When you talk about going wholesale down the "we control everything" approach, you are treating a multidimensional issue like it has exactly one right answer. It is in everyone's best interest to have multiple different systems trying out multiple different approaches.

> One of the posts in this thread was talking about “entrepreneurship”

Okay. But I'm not.

As far as generic files again the user chooses which files the app has access to outside of the sandbox via a standard file picker.

Besides the built in iCloud, if you install Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, etc. you can choose any of those as destinations when you want to save or load a file from the standard file picker. They all just “storage providers”.

But if you want a local file storage solution that is accessible by all apps, you can install a storage provider for that too.

https://www.howtogeek.com/204010/how-to-get-an-android-style...

You can do SFTP etc.

> With iOS 8, your iPhone or iPad can now have a local file system like the one Android users have.

The evolution of file access on iOS is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. A rough feature that came out of Android's laissez faire permission model that was later tweaked and adopted by iOS after it proved useful and was demanded by users.

And I feel like this is still happening - to me the new Files app in iOS 11 is a pretty clear step towards unifying disparate storage solutions in a single interface, and opening up the Files app to third party integrations is another cautious shift towards Android's more permissive model. I would not honestly be surprised if at some point in the future Apple introduces a way to access some system files -- every desktop OS supports it, and the iPad is slowly positioning itself as a desktop replacement. But I dunno, it'll be interesting to see.

When you say, "oh, there's nothing innovative about this", you're glossing over that it took a heck of a long time to get file access at all in iOS, and that Apple is still evolving how file access works on its devices. Android served as a testing ground for that feature while Apple stood back and watched and thought about how they wanted to approach it. Which (again) is a process that's good for users on both platforms.

That’s kind of the point, the way that Apple allowed third party storage providers were done in a method that is still not “permissive”. Apps don’t have access to users files except for the files that the user chooses. If an app wants full access to their Dropbox or Google Drive storage, they still have to have a custom integration like VLC.

And every desktop OS has the potential for viruses and ransomware because of third party apps having access to system files and to what benefit?