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Dumb question: Why is it seemingly so hard to just run a development environment on an Android smartphone? Why does Google try so hard to keep it from being use
by 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
Dumb question: Why is it seemingly so hard to just run a development environment on an Android smartphone? Why does Google try so hard to keep it from being used as a general computing device?
It's like there's a nuclear energy plant in my pocket and I'm only allowed to power a string of christmas lights. Maybe if we could use them like general computers, whole swaths of the tech economy would collapse, the way the energy sector would collapse if we all had personal nuke engines.
- chasil 5y agoAll those extra tools present attack surfaces. What Android allows is already leaps and bounds beyond (non-jailbroken) iOS. Android's great weakness is the (non-updatable) kernel and its drivers. Any constraints that can be applied to protect them, must. A towelroot-class vulnerability isn't just a user tool, it can also be exploited by malicious apps. SELinux is far more intrusive in Android than on CentOS. Nobody would put up with these restrictive permissions in a desktop OS.
- pjmlp 5y agoSecurity, it is also the reason why typical CVE friendly languages from the NDK are constrained to very specific cases, and Linux syscalls aren't part of Android public APIs. The Linux community just keeps pretending Android is a traditional Linux distribution and then run against all sorts of issues.
- 0xbadcafebee 5y agoSo, giving up liberty for security? I think there's a government model like that...