> I'm sorry, security?

He might be referring to:

- iOS's track record on vulnerabilities in comparison to Android.

- Apple's track record of virtually no malware appearing in the App Store.

- How hard it's been for the community to devise a series of exploits to jailbreak iOS with each new release.

- iOS's nice privacy controls that are lacking on Android (App Ops is not official, convenient, or even present in the latest Android releases. And sure there's third party things, but those are 3rd party, and half of them are from China). Privacy controls in Android counter Google's bottom line.

- iOS's app permissions model in comparison to the awful current capabilities and culture around broad app permissions in Android (although Google is reacting to this well with improvements in the pipeline). For an awakening view of this, watch what information of yours the Facebook app can get ahold of in Android as opposed to on iOS.

App Ops is virtually the same as the privacy controls for iOS. It was pulled early from the Kit Kat release because it was breaking so many apps.

It was never intended for end user use, according to Google:

http://www.pocketables.com/2013/12/google-clears-app-ops-con...

For now, yes. Like most things (e.g. Chromecast SDK) they don't speculate until the release is complete.

>The current UI is definitely not something that is appropriate for end users; it is mostly for platform engineers (a tool for examining, debugging, and testing the state of that part of the system), maybe some day for third party developers. In what form these features might be available in the regular UI I couldn’t really speculate about.

Look, spin it however you want. The point is. it's not there today.

And as far as Google is confirming, it won't be available any time in the near future.

Absolutely. Presumably you're just reacting to the gotofail media flap. A little googling would clarify things for you.

There are multiple million+ node android botnets, most devices are vulnerable to year old exploits, and there is a thriving market for remote control malware. Basically the same situation that existed on Windows in the bad old days.

iOS (well, software and hardware) security model blows Android out of the water in design; in implementation, it tends to be much more bug free as well. It's the one area where you can clearly say iOS is superior to Android; openness is the one area where Android is unambiguously better than iOS.

Unfortunately Android is unambiguously not open.

If you want to make an Android device, you must sign up to a restrictive contract with Google.

There is an open source subset of Android called AOSP, which you can use as a basis for your OS, but Google prohibits these from being called Android.

No Android system is open.

It's entirely better than iOS for openness. As an app developer, it's dramatically more open -- you can override the core functionality of the OS if you want (browser, mail, etc.); you can't on iOS.

I'm willing to tolerate the closed nature of iOS for better security and (personally) an interface/hardware I prefer. But stuff like blocking Bitcoin apps is making me question this.

This point is true, although I hesitate to use the word 'open' to describe that.

Android certainly gives apps more control over the user's device. Whether this is 'better' remains to be seen.

As an owner of a small quantity of bitcoin, I am personally irritated by the blocking of bitcoin apps, but I'd rather that than have my phone be part of a botnet.

What? I thought that only applied if you wanted google services on the device. Android itself is FOSS.

Nope. If you want to make an Android device, you must sign up for Google's service.

You are free to fork AOSP for your own projects which must not be called Android, but that is the extent of the 'openness'.

Could you kindly link me to this? As far as I can tell, AOSP itself is under the Apache license, and terms like the ones you mention are incompatible with that license.

I'm sorry, did you actually have something meaningful to add besides snark?