On iOS, as you run native code, you could theoretically do direct device access in assembly and the OS has far less control over that. But the hardware access

On iOS, as you run native code, you could theoretically do direct device access in assembly and the OS has far less control over that. But the hardware access protection ensures user code doesn't access anything it's not supposed to. And its up to device drivers to manage devices and ensure that access to them by user code is done properly. Static inspection of Java bytecode can allow you to verify the safety of some things and so do fewer checks at runtime; but to my understanding, native code has all the same protections in the end as code running in a VM.