There's no reason for malware to do this, though. It's like putting reinforcing your back door so people can't kick it in while leaving the front door with a pickable lock.

Except the front door doesn’t have a pickable lock, and this is just one of many overlapping security mechanisms. It’s like installing a metal back door and front door, bolting them, and also locking your windows.

Just because the windows can be broken more easily by an invader doesn’t mean there isn’t also value in the other steps you took.

> It’s like installing a metal back door and front door, bolting them, and also locking your windows.

Except Apple hasn't done that, they have just reinforced the back door and left the front door (which has periodically been picked) open. As it stands now it mostly just exists to annoy jailbreakers.

iOS has probably the best security record of any widespread consumer operating system in history. Certainly better than Windows and Android.

Apple Software is not secure either. Apple has just marketed themselves as being more secure.

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-very-deep-d...

No platform is perfectly secure and every single piece of software is potentially vulnerable to zero-day exploits. The important question, as the previous commenter said, is what is the security record of each platform? And iOS is miles ahead of everyone else:

Among smartphones, Android™ devices are the most commonly targeted by malware. In mobile networks, Android devices were responsible for 47.15% of the observed malware infections, Windows©/ PCs for 35.82%, IoT for 16.17% and iPhones© for less than 1%.

Source: Nokia's latest threat intelligence whitepaper (https://onestore.nokia.com/asset/205835)

Apple also has a much better track record when it comes to providing long term security updates for the devices it sells.

While I agree that iPhones are more secure, one should also take into account that they represent around 20% of deployed phone devices across the world.

Fair enough, but that doesn't really explain the difference. (5x as many devices but 47x as many malware incidents.)

I wouldnt assume install base is linear to malware incidence. I'd expect something supralinear as you observe here, after all, this type of dev in particular is after cost vs benefit ratio, so to first order only the largest ecosystem is worth your effort.