| iOS jailbreak dev here. The way permissions work in iOS is like this: The app starts out completely sandboxed. No access to any hardware other than speakers and display (and even then, iOS has a layer on top of your canvas for the status bar and system dialogs). No access to the hard disk other than the app's local files. Instead of asking for permissions on app install, the app asks for permissions as you try to use them. For example if you installed Instagram, you could scroll through the news feed fine but if you wanted to take a picture it would ask you to access the camera as soon as you try to. If you tried to take a video, it'd ask for permission to use the mic. Similarly it would ask for access to your photos as soon as you try to select a picture to upload from your camera roll. If you try import your contacts to find people to follow, it would ask for permission to read your contacts list. If you try to tag your location in a picture it would ask for access to the GPS as soon as you click the check mark. If for some reason Instagram allowed people to make calls, as soon as it tries to make the call you get a pop-up asking to confirm if you want to place the call or not. > That said, there's also a few practical things the iOS walled-garden App Store could improve upon. First one being the $99 developer fee. Thankfully there's a huge market for jailbreaks now, so pretty much the latest version of iOS is jailbroken about half the time. (http://iphonedevwiki.net/index.php/Compiling_iOS_application...) It ends up being much easier than Android development. > Still, there is no malware in the repositories, at all. I admit I am a little bit vague on how this works too, perhaps I'm missing something obvious, but how do they do that? All of the code on Linux repositories are (is?) open source if I'm not mistaken. |