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Comment by martythemaniak | Hacker News Reader

In addition to my iPhone, I have an Android device. None of the applications on the market are approved. Before this, I had a blackberry(pre app world), and none of the applications on that were approved either, and prior to that the Palm Treo apps didn't have any special permissions either.

I'm sorry, but for a supposedly smart group, most of HN seems to forget about critical thinking when it comes to anything Apple or Jobs says. Programmatically, the iPhone is the most restrictive SMARTPHONE out there and it was the one that introduced the sad "innovation" of restricting a smartphone.

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Not to mention that none of the apps on my desktop have been "approved" by anybody (apart from myself).

This is true, and a fairly good point, but then again, you don't have nearly the precise control that you do on your desktop.

How so? I've only heard of one instance of a trojan compromising a smartphone, yet I've heard millions of instances of trojans, virus' and other malware, spyware, adware infecting computers and costing people thousands of dollars.

So how do we have less control on a smartphone? All you need to do is format the system, which IIRC the iPhone actually has and can be done remotely (like any iPod can) through iTunes. Similarly the Pre and any phone can have its data storage 'formatted' and be reset to factory defaults.

Aside from taking my computer back to the medieval ages (IE full format) I have little beyond anti-virus programs that truly protect my OS from anything. Every phone's OS is on read-only memory that can be reset at any time by the push of a button. IMO that gives me a lot more control over my phone than my desktop.

The fact that formatting your computer brings it back to "the medieval ages" shows how important third-party software is.

A full-format/reinstall of your desktop OS is almost identical to resetting your phone. It wipes everything, and restores the machine back to "factory defaults". It's exactly the same level of control, only you lose all of that valuable software and customization.

The problem of trojans and malware is orthogonal, since virtually all that nastiness seems to be confined to a single platform. That's not a "computer" problem, it's a Windows problem.

I have almost no mobile app development experience, so take this with a grain of salt, but it seems to me like the reason you wouldn't have to worry about an Android app wrecking havoc on your smartphone is because it runs in a JVM-ish sandbox, whereas iPhone apps have unfettered access with Obj-C. The Android technical environment is self-regulatory, whereas Apple has to bolt-on a bureaucratic process to ensure quality.

The iPhone OS also runs a sandbox, but it's much less restrictive than it should be. Often public API's will just use a private API or write to an SQLite database directly; this behind-the-curtain behaviour could be replaced by background daemons wired up to the public API's.

Just because an application is native doesn't mean the kernel doesn't protect the OS from rogue processes; desktop/server OS's have been doing this for ages.

I don't know if that's how I'd describe it but, but one thing Android has is that each app needs to assert the capabilities it needs to run (can make phone calls, can keep the phone from sleeping, can access GPS info, can read anything on the sd card, will store data on the sd card, etc), and will not be able to do things it doesn't assert it needs in the manifest (this was actually a minor problem early on because the string for GPS access was unknown/documented wrong). And at least at install time, users can see these permissions so they can be aware of what they are getting into.

Exactly, and not one of the other devices you've mentioned have had nearly the success that Apple has had. They've made it easy and SAFE. I have very few apps on my Blackberry, mostly because I'm concerned that I have no idea where they come from.

On my desktop computer I have un-approved apps, but I have virus scanner, firewall, and registry monitor so I am defended against attackers. On the Blackberry, I've got nothing like that, but I have sensitive emails, so no, I don't install as many apps on the Blackberry as I would on the iPhone.

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