[JulianMorrison]

I'm guessing, from Apple's perspective, things that overlay the whole screen and alter the appearance of other people's apps (such as applying a colour cast), are essentially "white hat phishing". It makes security sense to hide this capability in the OS and not in apps.

[AdmiralAsshat]

You can see, I trust, how this could lead down a monopolistic slippery slope. For instance, virus-scanning is a dangerous enterprise, given that it exposes a greater attack surface if the antivirus program is poorly written. Should Apple and Microsoft remove the ability for third-party antivirus apps to exist? How about third-party firewalls?

[JulianMorrison]

I don't see that, actually, I think that's a false equivalence.

Security premise: when you are looking at Facebook, you are looking at Facebook. You are not looking at a third party app drawing over Facebook and pretending to be Facebook.

I do not see the above as a slippery slope. Phishing is a capability apps should not have. Even if they have the best of intentions.

[cwyers]

> Should Apple and Microsoft remove the ability for third-party antivirus apps to exist?

Please?

...pretty please?

[angry_octet]

Well, yes. Unless the AV is designed in a way that shows it doesn't increase the risk, it's just snake oil.

If MS had taken a harder line then at least hundreds of millions of people would have had faster computers... And arguably safer ones. But it would be hypocrisy for MS, given they gave us IE, ActiveX, DLLs, VB macros, etc.

Most third party firewalls are just GUIs using the OS API for filtering, not parsers written in C running in the kernel.

[richardwhiuk]

There aren't third-party anti-virus on iOS....