I had the CamScanner app on my iPhone for quite some time, then uninstalled when I launched it and saw (IIRC) Chinese text appear. I'm assuming that ownership changed around that time, and if the Android and iOS apps have the same owner, I wouldn't trust it either.

An iOS trojan would have slightly more limited impact, but if (for example) you gave the app "Access to your Photos" in order to save something, the app would still be able to read all of your photos and potentially send them back to home base as it chooses.

I guess its time to disclose transfers and sales of mobile apps and browser extensions to end users.

It's not a non-issue: https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/Malware_for_iOS

The store rules and moderation is a bit stricter, do that may be one reason we hear less about iOS malware. But it's still out there.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the iOS sandbox also seems weaker - I've seen a few occasions in which calling undocumented functions can be all it takes to bypass protections significantly. I assume this is part of the reason Apple is so reliant on reviews.

I had camscanner and at some time it started trying to upload my pdfs to the cloud. It seems it was bought by tencent around that time.

At first the app store privacy policy was a broken link. Later they got it to work, and it basically used broken english to say: we can collect anything.

uninstall and never looked back.

One tip:

The iOS native Notes app can scan documents into a .pdf file.

I am curious too. I presume it is due to better sand boxing and a more transparent system to request resource access.

It is easier to run background processes in Android by starting new services with their own dedicated process.

And it's quite easy to run headless apps/processes.

Because 80+% of users are on the latest os version and the inverse is true of Android.

This doesn't use an exploit in Android and instead runs payloads with the permissions of the app. The same can happen on iOS and very likely does in many apps but is reported less often because there is no economic incentive (the App Store doesn't allow antivirus services). For an example, see how Xcodeghost went unnoticed by Apple.

So can you somehow load external (from a file or network, etc.) executable code into memory on iOS now? Last I checked, that was not possible, no way to even map executable pages in memory.

XcodeGhost was a compromised compiler suite. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XcodeGhost#Attack_vector

The code does not need to be native, JavaScript works just fine (which is exactly what was used in the click-fraud thingy from a few months ago)