Comment by charcircuit
13 hours ago
Android is not UNIX, and that's a good thing. The root account was a historical mistake and not having access to it doesn't mean you don't own your device. That mindset is just trying to project how things worked with a half century old operating system with how modern operating systems work.
Let me guess - you like Apple?
I think they build good products and their operating systems are ahead of their competitors in the space.
What a disgusting take. It's actually so depressing to see anyone say this, presumably sincerely. It's how all the modern operating systems I use work.
It's what makes computers so wonderful and powerful, you can just have it do whatever you want. Turning that into "whatever google decides i should be allowed to do" is not gonna lead us to a bright future.
With Turing completeness you can do whatever computation you want. If you want to go outside of Turing completeness and starting interacting with the real world or other apps that is when security models need to exist. There isn't a reason to allow a program to act however it wants. Why should we allow for programs to secretly spy on a user's mic with no visual indication. It's okay to bound what is possible with a device. This already happens in practice with other operating systems. Redhat can still be useful even if you don't have permission to write new CPU instructions (only Intel and Amd have they signing keys to add new instructions). Sure Intel may be limiting what you can do, but it still is a useful machine without it that many people successfully use and gain value from every day. Even as a smaller example root on Linux has limits on how it can interact with the kernel. It may be root, but there are still limits on what it can do without loading a kernel module to modify things. If you want a less secure operating system where things are less secure like allowing the user to be spied on you can make your own, but the average person wants to have a secure device.
Yeah and security models are fine. Having root on my device isn't the same as running everything as root. e.x. I want to access my files on my device over SSH so i don't have to keep plugging my phone in, sadly turing completeness doesn't get me there when I can't give my SSH daemon access to the filesystem. These are all solved problems, we're just CHOOSING not to expose the solutions to the end user under the guise of security in order to retain control.
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