Please, I did not specifically say this person was jealous of Android's popularity. I simply stated that the impetus for people who denigrate Android are generally people that are jealous of the platform's success and try to knock it down a few notches. Also, Android apps are sandboxed and each app is isolated in its own directory. Additionally, could you please cite how these "questionable apps have direct access to the entire kernel system call interface"? If Android apps want to access system functionality then I believe they have to go through a layer of Android framework services which in turn have access to the real kernel system calls.
As for the size of the attack surface being a factor - I agree, but with the exception of QNX and its microkernel (which has issues of its own) pretty much every other monolithic kernel based OS also has a large attack surface so I'm not exactly sure what point you're trying to make other than the obvious.
>Personally, I'm not so much upset because Android is uncommonly bad (it's like any other system that gives untrusted users non-root access to Linux: you can probably get away with it, but eh), but because CrOS is uncommonly good."
Chrome does have great sandboxing, but don't disparage Android just because it works like 99% of the other OS's out there. And I wouldn't be surprised if Android inherits some of Chrome's sandboxing tech when the two merge because I think it's pretty much inevitable that it will.
As for the size of the attack surface being a factor - I agree, but with the exception of QNX and its microkernel (which has issues of its own) pretty much every other monolithic kernel based OS also has a large attack surface so I'm not exactly sure what point you're trying to make other than the obvious.
>Personally, I'm not so much upset because Android is uncommonly bad (it's like any other system that gives untrusted users non-root access to Linux: you can probably get away with it, but eh), but because CrOS is uncommonly good."
Chrome does have great sandboxing, but don't disparage Android just because it works like 99% of the other OS's out there. And I wouldn't be surprised if Android inherits some of Chrome's sandboxing tech when the two merge because I think it's pretty much inevitable that it will.