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Sure totally! With sideloading allowed, an application/appstore that is actually a trojan horse could request permissions once to "download X" where X is innoc

Sure totally! With sideloading allowed, an application/appstore that is actually a trojan horse could request permissions once to "download X" where X is innocuous. Later the trojan auto-downloads other applications to your phone to mine bitcoin, run a bot net, etc. Basically selling your hardware, bandwidth and battery life to the highest bidder. With sideloading, alternate APIs could be scraped together into a "new std lib". These APIs would just be some C/asm lib that is a part of any application and accesses hardware without any permission management. At that point every possible bad thing can happen. "Sandbox it!" sure... but that is what Apple is currently doing... its just also auditing source code to ensure no one is maliciously trying to break out of the sandbox. With enough time, people will break the sandbox or people will complain the sandbox is too limiting and not "true sideloading". All this said, is Apple's auditing system a 100% guarantee? No. But at least I know once the bug/issue is found Apple will close the hole. Meanwhile, its in a company like FB or GOOG's best interest to force ever more tracking onto users, and they know people will continue to use their services regardless of the complaints (like what happens today). You might argue, "this is where government should step in". I agree! The problem is that the government isn't doing a good enough job protecting users from digital abuse (arguably might make it worse with weaker encryption). So in the meanwhile, I'm happy that at least Apple currently is trying to protect users.

simion314 6y ago
Apple is not reviewing the source code, they probably looking at what system calls you use and maybe they do what anti-virus software do on Windows, check for signatures or something like that. From my limited knowledge you can have your executable very obfuscated and make it impossible for someone to easily understand what is happening. The thing is nobody would force the normal users to side load things, the number of applications for Android that are not in the store is small and I think only Fortnite was one with popularity and the number of people sideloading it was not that big.

simion314 6y ago

Apple is not reviewing the source code, they probably looking at what system calls you use and maybe they do what anti-virus software do on Windows, check for signatures or something like that. From my limited knowledge you can have your executable very obfuscated and make it impossible for someone to easily understand what is happening. The thing is nobody would force the normal users to side load things, the number of applications for Android that are not in the store is small and I think only Fortnite was one with popularity and the number of people sideloading it was not that big.