[YO EDINBURGH!] Microsoft Open-Sources It's Toolkit For Making iOS Apps Run On Win 10

[Mark Waddingham]

> I have seen this, but it isn't because iOS devices are necessarily 
> better
> for businesses, but it's more of a perception of security and control.
> Apple does a great job of marketing this.  My experience with Android 
> has
> never involved malware infections, and any that have shown up in the 
> media
> have been blown way out of proportion.  Bad security practices of the 
> user
> are usually at fault on any mobile or desktop platform.

I think the media always blows security issues out of proportion - but 
then it does that with anything, so its perhaps not saying much :)

It is probably only partly perception of security and control that means 
many large organizations do tend to go Apple rather than Android. There 
are other reasons I'm sure. The build quality for Apple devices is 
consistently very high for example (it should be as they are very 
expensive relatively speaking). That's a real concern if you are rolling 
100's devices out in an organization - after all you don't want to have 
to be continually replacing individuals devices due to them not being 
robust enough for the job. I suspect there is also an element of 'oh 
look we use Apple devices' - after all Apple have (whether or not it is 
justified) gained a considerable reputation for producing high quality, 
well engineered premium devices - so there is probably a fair amount of 
'how the company looks to the outside world' in the decisions which are 
made when choosing what hardware to adopt.

However, that being said, it is a fact that iOS is significantly more 
locked down than Android. e.g. It is much easier to connect an Android 
device to a computer and prod around inside it just by enabling a single 
setting on the device itself. With iOS devices this isn't quite so easy 
- although possible. All access mechanisms used for development (which 
by their nature require slightly more general access than end-user use) 
are completely private in the iOS world - any tools which are not 
Xcode/iTunes which give any access to iOS devices exist because various 
private frameworks and protocols have been reversed engineered (a 
practice which puts any company in a very grey area legally if they then 
attempt to use such things).

Android has also long had the problem that individual vendors are 
allowed to customize Android significantly as long as they agree to 
conform to certain 'compatibility requirements'. This means that the 
roll out of critical security updates has long been quite poor (as far 
as I understand it). There are several layers typically between updates 
to the core platform and the device vendors who must then integrate, 
update and deploy the updates to their users. This means that security 
updates can be very slow to come to many Android devices, with many 
not-that-old ones being left vulnerable in the water.

Of course, the latter looks like it is set to change significantly. A 
couple of the most recent somewhat heinous attacks and flaws against 
Android seem to have prompted a all the major Android vendors committing 
to monthly security updates - leading on from Google's announcement. 
This might well start to change the iOS-secure vs Android-insecure meme 
which has been around for a long time.

Mark.

-- 
Mark Waddingham ~ mark at livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Everyone can create apps