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Comment by monkeyfacebag | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this is missing the forest for the trees. What is the value of a curated app ecosystem like Apple's to the consumer if they cannot prevent malware from winding up on consumers' devices?

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"The value a curated app ecosystem" is that Apple's app reviewers greatly, greatly reduce the chance of malware or crapware winding up on consumers' devices.

Few processes in practice are 100% effective. One, or a even few, failures does not indict the idea of curation, but rather, in my mind at least, reinforces its value.

Of course, as others have mentioned, software protections of the Address Book would be nice, and are coming (though I'm not sure they would have stopped this app from doing its thing).

Clearly the only two options are perfect curation or none.

No. Perfect curation is impossible and therefore not one of the options.

That’s a false dichotomy. Preventing absolutely every piece of malware would be great, but merely preventing very nearly every piece of malware is also nice. You only have to compare Google’s and Apple’s stores to see that Apple’s approach is more effective (not much), though clearly not perfect. (Apple had the ability to remotely pull malware right from the beginning, clearly showing that they never believed the review process to be perfect in preventing malware.)

Whether that trade-off is worth it is a completely different question (I think it is not – Apple should allow users to install whatever they want, they can even make enabling that needlessly complicated, but they should allow it.) but if you are immediately jumping to the conclusion that Apple’s curated approach is devoid of value because one piece of malware made it through your analysis of the situation is lacking and populist.

This is a good rebuttal, but it remains to be seen whether Apple can actually prevent "nearly every piece of malware" from getting through. To be quite honest, I'm not even the slightest bit familiar with their review and approval process, but I have difficulty believing it can continue to scale without introducing security holes.

How long has the App Store been around what nearly 4 years ago ?

It seems to be 'scaling' just fine.

With so many apps some may slip through the review process, but they can be remote wiped, unlike side loaded apps.

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