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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Zen Dollar Round who wrote (204793)5/1/2019 2:52:51 PM
From: yofal1 Recommendation

Recommended By
Doren

  Respond to of 213181
 
I'm not sure Apple has a "win" here.

I'm assuming Apple determined that an ever-growing number of app developers were building apps using mdm to provide parental control features. It's hard not to look at the approach as anything other than a workaround for a missing API that some developers took advantage of. Not ideal. At some point Apple also realized that this could become a malware vector as these apps were running their own servers to provide these services.

So they had a choice: either create more rigorous hoops for mdm users to jump through, putting off their large group of corporate clients - or cut loose a smaller group of app developers. The 30 days notice probably was pointless, as many aspect of these apps can't be replicated without mdm. So Apple made a choice, duplicated a subset of the 3rd party functionality so users weren't left completely in the lurch - and here we are.

If Apple let them continue and the inevitable exploit appeared that gave baddies access to *children's devices* the fallout over the privacy brand would have been significant. Crisis level.

Ditto here for MacOS. As the mobile and desktop environments become more deeply integrated, the permutations for exploitation grow, and the desktop environment has never been locked down to the same extent as iOS. The list of legacy Macs running older OS is longer than on iOS.

I follow a number of long time MacOS developers and understand they have legitimate beefs - mostly with an Apple that hasn't kept up with opening up APIs for developers on the desktop, and complexity/cost in participating with the MacOS Appstore, that has led them to choose sideloading to continue to serve their legacy customers in order to provide features that the Appstore won't allow.

Apple really needs to do better here. Many developers have moved on in frustration, or only work with iOS because the user base is there. Lately we've seen a number of embarrassing security related issues with MacOS. Something has got to give.

Anecdotally, I spend 90% my support time dealing with issues arising on MacOS. Most of the time it's due to phishing attempts that sucker users into installing malware as an admin user, something that doesn't seem to happen on iOS.