In a properly virtualized environment it doesn't matter since all resources are decoupled from the environment the software runs in.

This gives all the control back to the user. Nobody should be bullied into just accepting all permissions the developer wants. The developer should be forced to gracefully degrade their UX when their dependencies are denied without preventing access to the core service and should be sued into oblivion when they violate this basic promise under accessibility laws.

From a developer perspective virtualization would also make accomplishing this much easier since they no longer have to be limited to crappy APIs that are not just sometimes vulnerable and incompatible but restricted on purpose under bogus pretense.

That's the dream. But while the browser is now sandboxed well enough to stand up to the wide open internet, it can't compete with native on performance. And native can't (yet) be sandboxed as well as the browser without giving up its performance. Power-constrained mobile environments will likely be the last to fall on that one. I look forward to it, though!

> The level of friction that establishes that the owner knows what's going on and actually intends to execute particular code with particular privileges is not small.

That level of friction is $99 :-)

But the owner is able to bundle any arbitrary code into an app and run it locally on their own phone for 7 days.

Then it auto-deletes and there's nothing you can do about it.

The only class of malware that the currently-mandated friction is preventing is the kind that appears benevolent for 7 days then strikes on day 8.

The time limit prevents this from becoming a normal distribution channel for legitimate apps, which would condition users to click mindlessly through it. It an attacker wants to try, most people will think it’s weird and scary. But developers only need to do basic developer things (cut builds) to get around it. Pretty clever if you ask me.

There are child safety locks, and it is ok to have them as a default on computers as well, but there should be a way to turn it off and lose warranty. (And they should probably be renamed to something less inflammatory)

For me it is just a terrible feeling to not really own a device I bought, so I avoid them wherever I can. Annoyingly, this is getting increasingly more difficult.

As a potentially interesting aside, today lack of programmability seems to be a sign of a maturing market. I recently researched e-cigarettes that I can program to time me, those that have a computer in them basically all allow for writing your own programs. Same with the smart watch market, although Apple is trying its best to ruin that as well.