No, what we need is the ability to modify the system software on our phones easily to stop this kind of thing. On a normal Unix system you would just run the app as a separate user (or worst case, sandbox it) but on android non of the interfaces (or really much of anything at all) can be controlled by the user.
That is simply not a solution that will work for more than 0.1% of the populace. While you meant nothing wrong, your "solution" repulses me because I don’t care about this sort of thing just for myself and other supernerds, but for my friends and family and countrymen as well.
Exactly. I don't get why there is no root account on most android phones. Why is "rooting" a hack that voids your warranty? Why can't we have our smartphones like our computers?
Because alternative mobile operating systems cannot compete in the same consumer space due to the duopoly of walled gardens where people expect all popular apps to be available (although I do believe that there is a niche market for a free software smartphone amongst developers).
If you treat a smartphone as a normal computer, you would expect to be able to use a service such as Uber by means of a modern web browser providing a sandbox for their web application, like you do on Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows. Installing someone's stand-alone software only to access an on-line service would probably seem invasive and absurd.
Broadly speaking, on a smartphone people probably accept this because of the trade-off. Apple and Google keep your mobile computer stable, fast, and free from viruses and malware by managing your operating system and vetting the software you can install through their app-stores. For a lot of people this trade-off seems preferable to an alternative.
