I'm not saying it's right to respond by simply locking everything down, but let's not downplay the blast radius of basically every attack that involves telling the user to do things.
I think the impulse for an OS vendor to try to make such mistakes impossible is about as wrong as selling knives dull so people can't hurt themselves. A knife that can't cut its user is useless as a knife.
Too far towards trying to make mistakes impossible (which is easy for corporations to talk themselves into because it also makes them money and moat) and you make devices useless. Too far towards full user control and you get difficulties in support and security issues (which are tractable if you’re an enthusiast, but not so much if you’re a normie on a corporate-maintained device).
Truthseeking here is further complicated by ordinary end users’ dislikes and usability issues not always overlapping.
The phrase "the user doesn't have to know if this is on his computer or the cloud" has done a lot of harm to the software ecosystem.
This kind of comment is frequently made on HN and elsewhere. However, more than a few "elderly parents" are as computer-sophisticated as their grown children. A safe bet it's not rare to be exchanging ideas with an elderly person sophisticated enough to make comments on HN.
AFAIK there's no shortage of careless, uninformed, non-elderly individuals who get scammed into doing stupid things. Age is only one possible factor out of many contributing to scam vulnerability. And let us not forget that youthful, well-trained professional IT workers, developers and software engineers are not immune to scams via misunderstanding elements of the systems or processes they supervise.
"Ageism" is a word as ugly as what it signifies.
Stop trying to flatten the human experience, Harrison Bergeron style.
Of course this isn’t true, the play store, and yes even the apple App Store to a lesser extent, is riddled with malware.
But what this demonstrates is that, clearly, Google doesn’t care too much about security or safety. It’s a pretense, not a goal. If it was a goal, they’d dump money into fixing the play store, but they won’t and they don’t.
So, we should be highly skeptical when they say something is for “safety” and “security”. At this point, it’s a lot like saying something is for “national security”.
I'm sure you meant "wary". How amazing, education really does work. There is such a thing as overabundance of caution. But it's possible further education could encourage users to apply more balanced caution policies.
That radius would be negligible should the things that must remain secret remain offline.
But no, that's a luddite thing to even think about in an all-connected ever-online world where even wiping one's ass is done via of a swarm of dedicated apps.
On the other hand, there has always been a way to extract secrets from a granny via a mere voice call, so no amount of dumbing it down would really help.
Have you ever worked with someone who barely knows how to use a mobile phone? They will hand their phone over to someone they barely even know to do something they don't understand. They will follow instructions from a stranger over the phone, without understanding what the phone is warning them about.
I have worked with such a person. They did have someone walk them through a dubious process. Thankfully they realized what was going on before the process was complete, but who knows how much damage was done by the initial steps.
There are legitimate security reasons here. Whether there are reasons beyond that is an open question.
“Large numbers of people will uncritically follow sketchy instructions and get hacked” doesn’t in any way lead to “and therefore they cannot be trusted with devices”.
“People keep dying in auto accidents” doesn’t imply “ban cars” on the first order, it implies “seat belts and airbags”.
People seem to be ok with needing a license to operate a motor vehicle and those are far less dangerous.
Which incidentally is often just a pretense for other motives?
If computers have suddenly become so dangerous for normal people, and they want smartphones nonetheless, add to them a dumb-mode encouraged at the initial setup, and requiring some third party assistance to turn it off once enabled..! (and forbid apps to change their behavior if it's not enabled)
Here's my article about that from 2021. It's for the devices sold in Russia, but this issue is worldwide: https://habr.com/ru/articles/575626/
And here's more detailed research of two particular devices: https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/trojan-digma/
Nothing is stopping the guy at Walmart or Tmobile from selling them dumbphones, or are you implying they are forced to?
Here is the first iPhone ad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Bvfs4ai5XU
The ad depicts it as a mere phone instead of a potentially hostile Turing machine. There is equivalent messaging in the android ecosystem but its advertising is not so ubiquitous.
We could also imagine a 24h delay to get Play Store access with a modal to make them understand the risks.