Though the bottom line of his company may have been the motivating force behind Apple CEO Tim Cook’s testimony in court on May 21, his voiced concerns about the risks of allowing third-party applications on the iPhone are not unfounded. Testifying in an antitrust suit brought against Apple by game developer Epic Games, Cook described the idea of putting third-party app stores on the iPhone “an experiment I wouldn’t want to run.”

In a May 26 article on Yahoo Finance, Dr. Justin Cappos confirms this risk, noting, “I think there’s a very clear line to draw to say that if you let basically people go and run their own effective app stores, even if they’re installing things like kind of within an app, the potential for malicious code and malicious behavior on the iPhone increases dramatically.” One reason third-party applications could be such a threat is that Android and Windows devices have been found to have more vulnerabilities than those created by Apple. The article cites Nokia’s Threat Intelligence Report 2020, which found that Windows PCs are responsible for 38.92% of all malware infections, and Android devices are the source of 26.64%. Meanwhile, Apple’s iPhone was responsible for just 1.72%. When asked what might account for this difference, Cappos suggested one factor could be the rate at which iOS devices are updated to the latest version of the operating system as compared to Android and Windows devices, which are typically behind the curve in using the latest software.

The complete article can be read here.