[fuckyouriotshit]

> ideological position that they should be able to do anything with the device

While there are people who make this argument purely on ideological grounds (similar to arguments you hear about individual freedoms vs collective rights), it's essential to recognize that _completely_ removing the ability of independent developers to write and run software if the manufacturer has decided they don't like that developer will slowly destroy the competition, creativity and freedom that created most of the technologies that are used today.

It's reasonable to make the argument that the manufacturer needs to secure the devices that they sell, even for users with low technical literacy.

Advocating for the manufacturers to be given total control over everything that every user can do with their device won't guarantee increased security, but it certainly would result in manufacturers being able to disable any software they chose to, regardless of legitimacy, without reason or recourse.

That's a prospect that is (IMO) far more terrifying than what it could prevent (some users falling for certain types of phishing attacks that install spyware).

[acdha]

> That's a prospect that is (IMO) far more terrifying than what it could prevent (some users falling for certain types of phishing attacks that install spyware).

I disagree with that conclusion (the latter scenario happens frequently and has lead to significant consequences, including death) but completely agree that it's not a good situation that the alternative is giving a couple of companies control over who gets to ship software. That's why I described it as a market failure — as a user you're left picking which set of drawbacks is less of a problem for you.

What I'd like is basically opening up the App Store walls: allow users to enable third-party stores but everyone runs their apps inside the same sandbox, and the OS vendor retains some global kill switch for malware but with some level of public oversight.

One edge case for this would be the apps which need special permissions: for example, some cell carriers have special entitlements on iOS which allow their apps to talk to their networks in ways which normally are blocked. Reconciling edge cases like that with multiple stores would require care.

[realusername]

> It's reasonable to make the argument that the manufacturer needs to secure the devices that they sell, even for users with low technical literacy.

We've been in this argument before and the most secure platform today is still the web, an open platform where the code is designed to run on demand.

There's a reason everybody asks to install their native app, there's much more data to gather there than in the web.

[fuckyouriotshit]

I think we're actually in agreement.

I'm not suggesting that the manufacturer should be creating closed platforms to "secure" things for the user; I'm saying that closed platforms can't guarantee an increase in security but will guarantee the slow erosion of openness in all other platforms.

I'm well aware of how native apps are heavily marketed over their web-app equivalents because companies want to gather more data, get access to push notifications (on iOS at least), etc.