Hacker News Reader

> This is another case of Apple being held to a higher standard than competitors in the market

Sure. But also, I'd say it's been written by a die-hard Apple fan who goes to Apple because they think they care. I was deeply skeptical of the article until I got some way into it.

You know you're the market leader when you don't get compared to other, shittier alternatives, you're getting compared to platonic ideals.

> This article reminds me of the time when the iOS alarm clock app had a bug that caused the alarm to go off one hour later on some random Sunday and it made headlines in all the tech press.

Android alarm going off one hour earlier in Brazil also got some press attention today. https://androidcommunity.com/brazils-dst-change-inadvertentl...

>This is another case of Apple being held to a higher standard than competitors in the market.

My phone cost $300

> Compared to the accepted norm that malware apps are almost routinely found in the public Google Play store.

To add to the author's list of things that iPhone users don't know that Apple keeps hidden, several orders of magnitude more iPhone users have been infected with malware than Google Play Store users despite the Play Store having several orders of magnitude more users.

https://www.macrumors.com/2015/09/20/xcodeghost-chinese-malw...

Given that it is reported on a very well known Apple blog and Apple released a statement on the issue I don’t think you can say they are hiding it.

So a quick google for xcodegohst brings up a Wikipedia page and widespread main steam news coverage (including BBC), with quotes from Apple - literally not hidden at all.

Apple underreported the number of affected apps by two orders of magnitude, reported that only on its Chinese website (even though millions of users outside of China were affected), took down even that report shortly after (it now loads a marketing page), and left the apps on users' phones. https://www.fireeye.com/blog/executive-perspective/2015/09/p...

I consider anything that Apple says to be an ephemeral marketing gimmick.

That is flat-out untrue. There are several orders of magnitude more Android users that have been infected with malware than iPhone users. In fact, there have even been Android phones that were compromised within the supply chain and released into the wild. You're either being disingenuous or you're using a very narrow definition of "infected".

Prove it. I showed half a billion infected iOS users. Show me anywhere close to as many infected Google Play users.

I don't really need to prove it since you're claiming that 500 million "potential" installs somehow equates to "half a billion infected iOS users". They got the 500 million number from the number of users of WeChat in China. Unless every single WeChat user in China and every user of those apps downloaded that update (which was pulled in less than 48 hours), that 500 million is a maximum number. Additionally, because iOS apps are sandboxed, uninstalling or updating the app removed the malware completely from those devices.

Now let's compare that with Android and Google Play. According to Nokia's Security Intelligence lab, 74 percent of malware attacks are on Android devices. In 2017 alone, the largest confirmed Android malware attack was for 40 million users. That's verified installs. (http://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-and-science/technology/no...) If 40 million users were hit off of one app and there are 8.5 million infected installers on the Google Play store (https://www.sophos.com/en-us/medialibrary/PDFs/technical-pap...), it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that you're quickly getting past the 1 billion active malware installs that would double the single incident you cited (which, again, assumed that the worst case happened).

Additionally, you're completely ignoring the fact that the vector for the attack was the developers of those apps themselves who downloaded Xcode from a random site on the internet. They issued an update and the malware was removed. On Android, on the other hand, the only action taken was the removal of those apps from the Google Play store which means that the apps remained installed on all the devices they had infected.

The rarity of attacks on the iOS front alone makes your statements both misleading and disingenuous. Android is also installed on far more phones than iOS is so we're only even dealing with the malware that's been confirmed and discovered. There's likely an order of magnitude more malware installs out there that are silently doing their thing.

It's not potential: that's the reporting granulariy provided by the App Store. So you got orders of magnitude fewer users infected on Google Play devices (both your links are for non Google Play Chinese phones). Those half billion infected users were infected for a long time before Apple was finally notified and removed the apps from the store (but not from users' phones) in 48 hours.

Since we're talking orders of magnitude...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_pr...

Yes, Apple marketing does put out a lot of bullshit, but as I have shown, any thinking person can see right through it without much effort.

>XcodeGhost potentially affects more than 500 million iOS users

That's cited directly from the article you posted. You're full of it and you know it.

Check the username. I’m on your side. Don’t waste your time trying to refute this bullshit POV.

That article got that number from what the App Store reports, just as I said. This is the exact same way you would get estimates of affected users on Google Play devices, which is so much less that you haven't even found one article for Google Play infected users. (My guess is that you have found them but didn't bother to post because of the multiple orders of magnitude difference.)

Let's do the worst case analysis of my claim. Let's pretend that the users of all the iOS malware are a strict subset of iOS WeChat users. Let's pretend also that the users affected by each Google Play malware are disjoint. Compare the cardinalities of the resulting sets, and I'll still have orders of magnitude to spare.

> Apple literally revolutionised the smartphone market with the simple usability of the iPhone.

How long ago? Should they sit on their laurels and do nothing? Or what if they have made progressively worse and worse decisions with regards to UX?

What they did a decade ago doesn't matter if what they currently produce isn't that simple usability.