| "No one signed up for that." Obviously nobody wants hackwerware. The question posed by the OP is systematic: people are willing to 'not pay' for things because the 'short term benefit' is 'less cost' while the longer term risk, ie 'hackerware' is more vaugue. A lot of things in life are like this. Back in the day, the fire Dept. were private, they didn't come unless you were paying them insurance. Given the common nature of 'fire' - and especially that it 'spreads to other homes' ... it makes too much sense for everyone to have it, and so we socialised it. We all pay for fire insurance via our homes. The argument being, is that if people paid for apps, devs wouldn't have to resort to as much trickery, and there would be less use of malware. Though it's not so clear. Given the excessive cost of iPhones and the significant rake on apps (~30%), Apple should cover this problem. They mostly do, but obviously not entirely. I wonder if there should be a 3rd party lib repo where the code has to be open sourced, and 'someone' has to pay for a review of some kind. And you have to stick to such repos if you want a certain kind of certification. It's an interesting problem in 2020, and looking back, it's almost amazing that in 1999 the web was so amazingly relatively safe, and that there wasn't so much existential angst over security. How naive we were! |