- First, I disagree that every program an average consumer might want or need is available on an app store.
- Second, I strongly disagree that app stores provide security, trust, and accountability.
App store security is really bad. At best, we have Debian repos, which are clean-ish mostly because nobody cares about writing malware for desktop Linux so the moderation is much easier. At worst, we have Windows store and Android. These platforms are not effective at screening out malware, because content moderation doesn't scale to these levels, and blocking malware is just another form of content moderation.
Telling people to trust app stores and not downloaded binaries is like telling them to trust Amazon and not Ebay. You're right, there is technically a difference, but the difference is not big enough to matter. If you download random things from any source, you will mess up your computer. It'll just happen faster with downloaded executables.
There is (unfortunately) no shortcut to get around teaching people about security. At some point, native platforms will catch up to where the web was 10 years ago and start doing a better job of sandboxing executables, and then the job of educating users will be easier. We're just unfortunately living in the world where that hasn't happened yet.
"Get rid of unofficial software" is counterproductive to what we actually need to do -- to update our native permissions and security models to match modern users' requirements. But even though mass-moderation is a band-aide fix that doesn't even work well right now, it's heavily promoted by companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft because under the guise of security it gives them a new stranglehold over the common-user software market, which was traditionally un-monetizable by them.
Originally on Windows the app store was coupled to the sandboxed application model, on the theory that users would learn to associate installation from Store with safety and reliability-over-time. For better or worse, they were gradually decoupled over time and now Store accepts unsandboxed Win32 apps and sandboxed UWP apps can be installed from the web or otherwise outside the Microsoft store.
Maybe so, but it's still significantly better than native binaries.
> Telling people to trust app stores and not downloaded binaries is like telling them to trust Amazon and not Ebay. You're right, there is technically a difference, but the difference is not big enough to matter. If you download random things from any source, you will mess up your computer. It'll just happen faster with downloaded executables.
The difference very much does matter. I suspect many people on this website have had the same experience as me: I had to do frequent "maintenance" on my parents computers because they get filled up with IE toolbars and whatever other BS they could find to screw up their computers. After the switch to phones and app stores, this doesn't happen any more.
People without family members capable of fixing that sort of old problem are both (probably unconsciously) grateful for the app store takeover, and vastly more numerous than indie software developers grouching about not being able to run any code they like on anyone's computer anymore.
I do tech support for multiple family members, and I have a policy about this. If I trust someone enough to hand them an Android app store, I also trust them enough not to download malware from the open web. On the other hand, if I don't trust someone to download software off the Internet, I also don't trust them with an app store.
There's a fair amount of anecdotal evidence there, I can't give you hard stats to back that up. But I suspect a lot of the "app stores improved security" anecdotes people have are actually due both to family members just slowly getting better about security in general, and (to a greater extent) the fact that phones are doing a better job than Windows/Mac of embracing the web model of sandboxing applications.
> because they get filled up with IE toolbars
This example in particular makes me smile, because I have family members on Firefox today, and they still end up with random malware/adware extensions, they just install them from the official store. It does nothing to help -- I've asked them how they got installed, and they don't know where they came from. Websites just asked them to click somewhere, and they did.
Firefox has gone through all this trouble to make sure everything has to be signed and vetted, and it has made no difference at all to my family members :). What they should do is move the extension locking capabilities from the Enterprise version to the regular version, so I can set up Firefox with a few extensions and then freeze it so that nothing can be installed, even from the official store.
Chrome's app store isn't any better[0]. Anecdotally I have roughly two options when I set up someone's computer. Either teach them about security and harden the platform itself, or make it hard for them to install any software from anywhere (usually by moving them to something like Linux and manually handling all of their setup). I haven't personally seen any evidence in my tech support stories that official app stores are helping my family members.
Yes, the frequency will go down. But this is an area where the gains have to be more drastic to be worthwhile. The support frequency only matters for trivial malware like adware and crypto-miners. It doesn't matter for stuff like ransomware, password theft, or phishing attacks. And the gains today are probably about as good as they are ever going to get. Universally, moderation gets worse as systems scale. Android has more malware because it's a bigger platform. NPM gets more malware because its the biggest package manager. I very firmly believe that app stores don't scale, because we can look at app stores today and see that they're not scaling well. It's a security dead end.
- First, I disagree that every program an average consumer might want or need is available on an app store.
- Second, I strongly disagree that app stores provide security, trust, and accountability.
App store security is really bad. At best, we have Debian repos, which are clean-ish mostly because nobody cares about writing malware for desktop Linux so the moderation is much easier. At worst, we have Windows store and Android. These platforms are not effective at screening out malware, because content moderation doesn't scale to these levels, and blocking malware is just another form of content moderation.
Telling people to trust app stores and not downloaded binaries is like telling them to trust Amazon and not Ebay. You're right, there is technically a difference, but the difference is not big enough to matter. If you download random things from any source, you will mess up your computer. It'll just happen faster with downloaded executables.
There is (unfortunately) no shortcut to get around teaching people about security. At some point, native platforms will catch up to where the web was 10 years ago and start doing a better job of sandboxing executables, and then the job of educating users will be easier. We're just unfortunately living in the world where that hasn't happened yet.
"Get rid of unofficial software" is counterproductive to what we actually need to do -- to update our native permissions and security models to match modern users' requirements. But even though mass-moderation is a band-aide fix that doesn't even work well right now, it's heavily promoted by companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft because under the guise of security it gives them a new stranglehold over the common-user software market, which was traditionally un-monetizable by them.