alt Hacker NewsSure; but technical features can certainly make security better.
Like, iOS makes most unsafe actions incredibly clear. Apple pay always requires the user to double tap the power button. The OS makes it impossible for an application to charge you money through apple pay without an explicit user action.
Phone apps also can't take control of my entire device, or steal my cookies or cryptolocker my hard drive. Any program you download and run from the internet on a desktop computer can do all of this stuff and more. We shouldn't allow that stuff by default on desktop computers either.
Phones have the right idea. I just don't want Apple and Google to be the only ones who can modify the system at the OS level.
Double taping to pay is actually making things worse for tech illiterate users. There's a lot of scam games on the appstore and it's way to easy to fall into it if they aren't too careful.
And then no, it's not clear for me (even as a developer!) how data transfer between apps work, how the advertising id works and how much data Apple and Google really have that they shouldn't. If it's not clear to me as a software engineer, it certainly isn't for your average user.
The browser is just a much easier mental model, especially that I can install an ad blocker on it to make them safer, which I can't on mobile apps.
> Phone apps also can't take control of my entire device, or steal my cookies or cryptolocker my hard drive.
It never happened once with my parents in 15 years of running Ubuntu. Even if that stuff somehow existed, I don't think they would have the tech knowledge to mark the downloaded virus as executable anyways.