You are shown that this is by no means as secure as they want you to believe.
Then you argue that "of course, with a market that big!"
So basically you are proving that Apple uses the excuse of security to hold a monopoly.
Suppose there were multiple app marketplaces for iOS. Then some of them could be extremely selective by finding a niche, and thereby be more trustworthy than any unified store that has to carry a million general purpose apps with only cursory evaluation from various publishers of little or unknown reputation.
Not the person you're replying to but isn't that the point?
Nah, that would mean that what really protects iOS users from malwares is just a good sandboxing mechanism and not the "human" control of the App Store. That would also mean that bypassing the App Store shouldn’t be a real security issue.
The question is whether there’s more malware on stores like f-droid, and the answer is yes, there is of course significantly more malware.
This even pollutes the official Play Store to some extent because of course google can’t put the foot down too hard when Facebook et al can simply “start their own app stores” to bypass review if they really want to. Malware rates are much higher on android in general.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/09/joker...
GNU/Linux repositories.
https://nitter.net/npm_malware has twenty postings in the last 19 hours, quite far from "without".
Probably OP was thinking about the deb and rpm repositories of the main distributions but yes, NPM and the likes are other examples of large repositories.
I agree there are linux-only repos that are ~1% of that size and contain little or no malware or abuse. That's true whether you measure size in updates per day or total count of packages, so 1% seems reachable without considerable malware problems.
Another plausible explanation is that pure FLOSS repos are free fron malware.
No, it's not even a Linux package repository. Think repositories for Debian, Fedora, Arch, etc.
I don't think either Debian, Fedora or Arch are anywhere close to a million packages or a thousand updates per day. Well below 10%, so they're GNUish and 100% linux, but really bad on the size axis.
The app store has at least two classes of problems that those three don't have, and have to handle the problems at much higher scale. "Those guys manage to handle a simpler problem at much smaller scale, so it's possible for the app store too" is hardly an argument.
As long as a FLOSS repo is small and has few uploaders, it'll be safe. Hardly a model for a big and busy repo like the app store, of couse.
The distinguishing feature of Linux distributions is the existence of maintainers. Human beings who put in effort into maintaining the quality and integrity of the packages and keeping them up to date. We Linux users generally trust those people, and they stand between us and all the software developers out there. To get to us, you gotta go through them. And they generally aren't in the habit of allowing obvious malware into the software repositories. That's why we trust them in the first place.
Contrast that to repositories like npm, pypi, rubygems, cargo which are all designed so that any random person can make an account and push up any package they want. There's no checking. Accounts might be compromised by or outright bought by malicious actors. Just like popular browser extensions which get bought and converted into malware.
Maybe the issue is being so big then. Which is exactly why the EU did this in the first place. So Apple has yet another lever to comply: reduce their size.
> But now, thanks to emails published as part of Apple's trial against Epic Games, we finally know how many iPhone users were impacted: 128 million in total, of which 18 million were in the US.
> "In total, 128M customers have downloaded the 2500+ apps that were affected LTD. Those customers drove 203M downloads of the 2500+ affected apps LTD," Dale Bagwell, who was Apple's manager of iTunes customer experience at the time, wrote in one of the emails.
> Apple also disclosed the apps that included the malicious code, some incredibly popular such as WeChat and the Chinese version of Angry Birds 2.
Still a huge deal, particularly in China, but considering all the virus really did was collect some device info (less information than most ad networks) (and maybe it was able to open URLs and popups on command)[1] and it was the biggest virus on the App Store ever (that I can find), maybe not as awful as you suggest.
The scams on the App Store, yeah that's pretty bad. Though, can you point me at a marketplace as big as the App Store without loads of scams?
[1]: https://www.lookout.com/blog/xcodeghost#what-does-it-do