Nokia v Apple - the battle begins
Ralf Haller
October 2nd, 2007
Gizmodo has spotted an interesting advert in New York. It has to be said that in this case I certainly agree with Nokia. Apple’s desire to keep the iPhone free of third party apps seems bizarre given the fact that Apple Macs were successful mostly because of third party apps, but there do seem to be some reasons why this is the case
Reason one is that Apple seems to want to retain an excessive amount of control over the iPhone - this may be related to the network exclusive deals it has inked with AT&T, O2 etc.
Reason two is more serious. Basically Apple’s iPhone runs (almost?) all applications as the root user, as has been noted at metasploit amongst other places. Running applications as root (Administrator for Windows users) is a big security no no because it means that if the application that runs is a malicious one then it has complete control over the phone. This is generally considered “A BAD THING”.
I suspect 3rd party apps will only become available once the iPhone code creates a number of lower authority users. This is likely to be a tricky task and so we may have to wait until v2.0 of the code.
Nokia, in this case, would seem to be a far more secure smartphone, because although it is open it doesn’t have this really nasty security feature (as far as I can tell anyway).
Update: Another potential PR spin for Nokia. The “Bricking” of unlocked iPhones. Nokia’s brick is a nice reliable (if expensive) piece of hardware not a software “upgrade” that kills your nice expensive hardware.
