Unless people have specific evidence, the overwhelming majority of the time, these perceptions turn out to be illusory. Other commenters having different views than one's own does not constitute specific evidence (or rather, it's evidence merely that a topic is divisive). Plenty of past explanation here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
You buy the concept, and caring about the expensive details is a nice signal of affluence and self-esteem (I deserve this much security & privacy).
On the iphone, if I buy a used phone and a scammer has popped a cheapo battery in to show no battery life slow down - apple alerts me (also unpopular on HN BTW).
If I buy an android phone from most carriers, their "security" involved pre-loading it with unremovable adware and tracking apps. This is more secure - are you serious?
The google play store has less malware? The permissions process for android apps has been terrible.
With apple, I can now give apps access to specific photos in my camera roll, it works great. It alerts me to folks doing background tracking and makes it easy to turn off (even after I said yes earlier).
What's nuts is that developers don't understand why consumers benefit or like this and want the DOJ to blow open this little bubble of sanity so they can push their crapware through or their auto-billing app stores through.
App permissioning has nothing to do with the App Store and it's hostile policies towards developers. You can set the same permissioning rules on rival devices as well.
The false narrative that the App Store exists to protect you needs to be dispelled forever. The trust consumers have to install any App in the App Store is far more terrifying.
The app store, as the method that pricing, refunds, subscriptions etc are handled, is part of this story of trust or lack of trust.
And yes - apple does review use of permission by developers upon submission. Want to use a touch bar api, they may ask you to show how that feature is used in app (third party libs would use these features to help fingerprint machines etc). The irony - we've had people here complaining about how unfair it was their app was rejected (often because they link without knowing to some scam monetization library that abuses or tries to abuse apis).
What is incredible is that developers on HN seem to have no clue why people actually like what apple does. For example, when they notified you that you had a non-genuine battery - that was met with HN outrage. When they did things that made replacing certain key security sensitive parts harder (finger print sensor for unlock etc) - again outrage, and apparently they figured out a way to make it easier without losing security.
The name of the game these days is trust. Do you trust you telecom to ship a bloat free phone? Apple? The folks who have that trust are going to be able to charge a premium and gain more control.
The desire to have consumers installing any app from anywhere on the web that you can browse to using the web browser is FAR FAR more terrifying - but is what HN comments push over and over. Reality - when it comes time to buy their kids a phone, these same outraged HN folks - buy their kids an iphone :)
There's no need to pretend to be naive, PII does in fact go beyond telemetric touchbar behavior or your fingerprint sensor. The rest of what you said continues to have nothing to do with App Store review processes.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair.
You can see this when they go off on some security tangent while the App Store is in fact host to thousands of malware in disguise. They trust that Apple is manually reviewing each and every App for security holes, that's why the App Store exists in the first place and totally why there's a 30% toll. I'm starting to imagine it's not really about security but about the illusion of security for a lot of people.