Having "side loading" -- also known as regular app installation on non-phone platforms -- hasn't caused chaos on desktop platforms or android. No reason to think it will on iOS either.
I beg to differ. How many windows machines were infected in the early 2000's? Would bot-nets exist if Windows had a strict app store back then?
Now: I will agree that freedom to install any software on desktops has been wonderful, and I hope it remains, but I wouldn't say it hasn't caused chaos.
> How many windows machines were infected in the early 2000's?
Great Scott. If you haven't looked at a calendar recently, its not 2001 anymore. The industry has spent the past 23 years improving the security of basically everything. Isolation is better. Filesystem security is better. Anti-virus is better. Browsers are more secure. Everything is more secure. Malware is still around. Its harder and harder for it to cause real damage, unless the user clicks past thirty five warnings.
Because it’s the only way their argument holds any water. In 2023, the security problems inherent to allowing app installations outside operating system stores have been almost completely mitigated.
> How many windows machines were infected in the early 2000's?
Yeah, that's a very bad analogy, it wasn't about side loading, even assuming that MS was able to vet every application out there, which nobody was technologically or had the resources to or wanted to, the infrastructure wasn't there, the OS security was worse than today and based on different assumptions entirely, the responsibility is still in the hands of the user, and, most of all, with good reason users pushed back on the all TPM/Trusted Computing thing.
So they did not want that feature and voted with their money, until they could not vote anymore, because smartphone ruined it for everyone except Google and Apple.
edit:
besides (obviously) RMS [1] being right and opposing to TC/TPM, this BBC article from 2005 [2] summarizes what even users there were not particularly tech savy thought about the topic
A couple of significant quotes
computing base is also used to make digital rights management systems more secure, this will give content providers a lot more control over what we can do with music, movies and books that we have bought from them
We need to ensure that trusted computing remains under the control of the users and is not used to take away the freedoms we enjoy today
Windows had absolutely ZERO security at the time though, appstore or not you could just go into the System32 directory and delete everything. I don't see how any appstore would have solved that, malware would have spread equally with such a poor security model.
because they were not integrated in the operating system [1] and/or the OS were not sandboxed.
Also, app stores did not exist, app stores do scan software for malwares, they are actually antiviruses on the cloud.
but it's an opaque anti virus, not under the user's control, apps could be rejected for whatever reason, so today chaos is only hidden under the rug, but it's actually worse then it was before.
Nobody back then said: "my grandfather should not use the computer, he's in danger", also because if someone owned a computer back then they probably knew how to operate it, today that's not true anymore by a large margin.
My comment was a bit ironic and maybe low quality in that sense.
They wouldn't be needed if there weren't malware chaos in the first hand.
So people were willing to pay for removing malware and keeping their computers safe because the threat was real and common.
It is true that there is still a big chaos, but it is hidden under the rug.
Well, my first computer was a Commodore PET, so I was there before, during, and after. Don't you think iOS with "side loading" would be more like MacOS in 2023 than Windows 98?
On the other hand, you can install 3rd party firewalls, virus scanners and more on windows. That also means you can install programs to know what microsoft is doing with your comptuer, and protect yourself.
Currently there is no way on ios to know what an app is really doing, and what it is sending where.
What people are suggesting is giving an entire new unsupervised point of entry and one with a lot of permissions is opening up unsuspecting users to these kinds of problems.
And iOS could by an iMessage [0]. OS bugs are OS bugs. On Windows, non-administrator accounts and GPO restrictions are the way to go, in an enterprise environment.
I doubt it, most people I know rarely use laptops except for work related purposes... keep in mind we are talking about people not in tech (yes I know hard to imagine that is most people on the planet)
If you look at traffic stats by OS, remember they don't show that most traffic comes disproportionately from a minority of tech users and bots.
