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The one thing that has come of this is that products that do this have 0.5% less friction (they can auto-update quicker), achieved this faster and with less eng
by georgelyon 4y ago
The one thing that has come of this is that products that do this have 0.5% less friction (they can auto-update quicker), achieved this faster and with less engineering effort (no need for a clever workaround, just use the biggest hammer), and have 0.5% less customer support burden (since everyone is on the latest version all the time). As a result, this can help a product dominate their competition the way Zoom has. I say this as a security conscious person who wishes this type of app would just go away, but has worked in the industry long enough to understand the economic realities.
Honestly, this is the number 1 confounding factor for me in terms of the “app stores should be more open” argument. Sure, Apple is stifling innovation in phone applications by disallowing this type of thing, but also the Zoom app is much better behaved on iPhone because it has to be. Personally I am happy trading off some convenience for security, but I am unsure if there is a “correct” answer here. My personal hope is that VMs will become useful enough that it will become viable to have a crude per-shitty-application sandbox for folks that are security conscious. I already have done this with tools like docker from time to time, which admittedly isn’t a great experience.