> The prohibition against dynamic code, lying about the reason that an app needs a certain permission, and all the trust and safety policies are all stuff an OS can't do.
It _is_ something a community of people empowered to control their devices can organize and achieve, but we were stripped of this capability when a small set of private concerns unilaterally locked us out. They just told us that they were the only ones they trusted to manage security, and everyone apparently believed them. The state of personal privacy has gotten unimaginably worse since. Not even the world's largest organizations can manage to fight, much less anticipate, the world's worth of bad actors.
It's not impossible according to the laws of physics or anything, but is there a real world example of a non-profit community run repository of software similar in scale to the App Store, with similar guarantees of quality and security that the App Store provides?
F-Droid [1] has a squeaky clean track record when it comes to malware [2]. Might be mostly just because the number of users is relatively low. Quality of course varies wildly, but that's to be expected.
[2] According to the Wikipedia article there were (are?) some old unmaintained apps using vulnerable native libraries but that's not intentional malware and every app store has apps with vulnerabilities of some sort.
It _is_ something a community of people empowered to control their devices can organize and achieve, but we were stripped of this capability when a small set of private concerns unilaterally locked us out. They just told us that they were the only ones they trusted to manage security, and everyone apparently believed them. The state of personal privacy has gotten unimaginably worse since. Not even the world's largest organizations can manage to fight, much less anticipate, the world's worth of bad actors.