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Comment by 1970-01-01 | Hacker News Reader

1970-01-01

I still don't understand how move and copy were allowed to be fundamentally broken for so many years. File management is a very, very basic OS task. I should never, ever need to Jailbreak a device to make backups of files.

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Because Apple is not selling an "OS", it's selling an iPhone. Their users are using "apps" and not "programs".

App and program are synonyms. And application.

You can choose whatever words you want for it, but there's a difference between the targeted polished UX of "there's an app for that", and a morass of software that may or may not serve your needs that kind of sort of works together if you hold it right.

Is that true? mv isn't an application. To me, the GNU toolchain is more like an application, but the individual parts like GNU ld, GAS, ar, GCC, etc. are just programs, not applications themselves. And even then, application feels like it implies GUI, maybe?

I'd say something like GNUCash is an application, but hledger feels more like a program. Brewtarget is an application, but bc isn't.

Certainly app and application are synonyms.

For the same reasons Android just actively broke it. Sandboxing is a matter of user security, if you let apps violate sandboxing then you can't have a meaningful permissions system.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/more-than-1000-android-apps...

https://www.xda-developers.com/android-permissions-bypass-pl...

You can allow certain common kinds of sandboxing crossover - apps that want to touch the camera roll, apps that want to touch wireless/location data (which are one and the same), ones that want to use the contacts, etc. But at the end of the day if you don't fall into one of these buckets you're going to have an awkward experience going into the OS and approving moving stuff into/out of the sandbox.

It'd be nice if you could allow complete crossover for certain apps - so, VLC can touch all of the podcast app files, or whatever. But I can understand why they don't even want to cross that rubicon.

>matter of user security, if you let apps..

You've gone and conflated user and application permissions. I was talking about owner permissions. The device owner should always have the ability to backup any file on the system. Only Apple controls the entire system. They can and should give this control to the owner.

When I was in school people would only know how to open or rename files from the corresponding program and this is well before the iPhone or tablet.

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