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by pyre 5911 days ago
> Unlike the non-functioning spam-filters you speak of, the AppStore approval process actually has a flawless record of keeping it out.

Those non-functioning spam-filters also kept spam out when all you had to filter on were the words 'real estate,' 'viagra,' and 'cialis.' Lo and behold though, the world does not stagnate and those same filters are woefully inadequate today.

> Most likely, it's just as much or more because there's a paper trail from every app to its publisher

There are marketplaces out there where a person's entire identity (not just their credit card number) are bargained and traded. How closely does Apple monitor the information that is given to them? Does Apple continually pull credit reports on people to make sure that their information does not turn up stolen?

> a long with the fact that someone is at least going to make a cursory review of the app before giving it the 'OK'.

That cursory review means nothing. There are many apps which are nothing more than wrappers around websites. How long does it take to to build an app that is such, but waits for a trigger (at some point after the app is approved and has an installed base) to enabled its malicious features?

None of this even addresses possible zero-day exploits in apps that access external content (email worms, browser exploits, etc). If jail-breakers can run unsigned code on the iPhone, so can someone that exploits an app.

1 comments

Fact remains: no malware on AppStore.
Absence of malware does not prove that the AppStore model is superior. It just proves that there is currently no known malware. It is much easier to disprove something (i.e. find malware on the AppStore; therefore the model is flawed) than it is to prove something (i.e. there is no malware on the AppStore; therefore the model is perfect).
It also certainly doesn't prove that AppStore's malware filtering is broken. It suggests that it does work, very well.