331–340 of 417 posts
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Oh, its not a mystery at all. Its just odd to come across people (in general, not you) who still think an advertising company would care all that much about their users (who are not their customers anyway). But yes, they're quite far from being the worst in this aspect.
They can care for selfish reasons. If android is completely riddled with bugs and is constantly compromised users will use a different phone system. Even outside security issues being able to roll out new features to people keep them from switching to iOS or Windows Phones.
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Just to play devil's advocate: Windows became the dominant platform when it had terrible security. Android became the dominant platform when it had terrible security. Maybe people don't care that much about security vs other features. At it's low point, Windows security was a lot worse than Android security. At one point, a fresh Windows XP machine plugged into the Internet would be compromised within a couple of min…
I don't really understand this metric at all. I've heard it colloquially, but I highly doubt anyone was scanning IP address ranges so often that you could be passively attacked on the internet without any interaction by two minutes in. Even more so, people are often behind NAT, which acts as a good firewall on its own. Maybe it's related to browsing habits? IE? I mean, you aren't going to get hit by a drive-by attack…
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So an OEM being allowed to build their own OS is a huge design flaw? Is Debian also responsible for Ubuntu's security flaws?
It isn't "their own OS". It's Google's OS, which is explicitly and directly controlled by Google's contracts, which you continue to pretend do not exist. It is a single platform, and it is by no means an open source one. If it was, it wouldn't require the explicit approval of a single corporate entry to distribute it or any updates to it.
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> you should have started on it years ago As somebody who has been following Android for a while, this statement is incredibly unfair. The Android ecosystem is huge and remarkably safe. For those actually interested in the details, the Android security team releases annual security reviews, and the report for 2016 was just released: https://security.googleblog.com/2017/03/diverse-protections-... The tldr: the number…
Wait a minute - users were requesting for years that Google change the permissions model of the Play Store from upfront to runtime permissions (like iOS does). Google constantly shot that down and said how it works (agree to everything before downloading) was intentional and expected behaviour. They have finally changed that model now, but in my opinion this was pretty inexcusable and reckless. I was unable to find t…
Maybe "lazy" is the best word, but moving from Android's classic "grant permissions on install" to "prompt for permission" is a major change that they spent a long time working on (I think Android 4 already had a lot of the backend for this?).
It's not like it was secretly granting permissions to apps, and you could always choose to not install something that took too many permissions.
You could say they made the wrong choice, but we're a long way from "this binary can do everything on your files" model of Unices/Windows
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That's hardly Google's fault.
Who's fault is it? Why doesn't Google allow it to be installed on all devices?
Chinese Government.
>Why doesn't Google allow it to be installed on all devices?
You can install it on devices (with varying difficulty depending on if you can unlock bootloader). It just doesn't come pre-installed on any device sold within China.
I'd just like to point out that Microsoft win either way: Says Forbes: Financially Microsoft is one of the biggest winners from the growth of Android as a platform, thanks to its wide range of patents. Samsung's royalty payment to Microsoft in 2013 was for over one billion dollars ($1,041,642,161 and fifty cents), roughly $3.41 per device.
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It kind of is Google's fault. Most people associate any version of Android with Google. Manufactures that don't update their phones causes harm to both the manufacture's image and Google image. Personally, I place all the blame on Google for not making the upgrades possible from their side. It should be easy to upgrade the core operating system as easy as updating Windows, OSX, and Linux.
> It kind of is Google's fault. Most people associate any version of Android with Google. Manufactures that don't update their phones causes harm to both the manufacture's image and Google image. This makes no sense. "People associate X with Y" is not the same as "Y is responsible for X". If I associate Android with Linux, is Linus now culpable for Android's security problems? > Personally, I place all the blame on G…
It should have been called a "platform", and, since Google has the ability to say so, they should have told each hardware maker to come up with an OS name "on Android". Tizen on Android. NexusOS on Android. So on.
OR, they should have gone Apple and said "you will have this OS, Android, and it will look as such, and it will be patched as such".
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Wait a minute - users were requesting for years that Google change the permissions model of the Play Store from upfront to runtime permissions (like iOS does). Google constantly shot that down and said how it works (agree to everything before downloading) was intentional and expected behaviour. They have finally changed that model now, but in my opinion this was pretty inexcusable and reckless. I was unable to find t…
I think "inexcusable" is very strong. Maybe "lazy" is the best word, but moving from Android's classic "grant permissions on install" to "prompt for permission" is a major change that they spent a long time working on (I think Android 4 already had a lot of the backend for this?). It's not like it was secretly granting permissions to apps, and you could always choose to not install something that took too many permis…
Perhaps they were working on it for a long time, but they were actively defending their stance for years after many people were requesting this, and after many incidents of Play Store apps intentionally doing more than expected (uploading contact lists, tracking location, etc...).
As someone who has developed and published Android apps, it was super frustrating to spend half your app description justifying each and every permission used, and still getting negative reviews simply because you had to request some scary looking permission for the most mundane feature addition.