eli5: Why do computer operating systems have lots of viruses and phone operating systems don’t?
In: 5085
Windows gets a lot of viruses because historically it was a single user operating system and the single user was allowed to do anything. Then Microsoft sort of bolted on the type of user controls and permissions that Linux and Unix have had from the beginning.
Linux, Unix, BSD, OS X, etc… Were designed from the start to have multiple users and not allow every user to do everything.
The phone operating systems are based on BSD (iPhone) and Linux (Android) and take security a step further by sandboxing every application and strictly controlling how that application can interact with the operating system. On top of that all the apps come from the centralized app store or they can be scanned and examined by Google or Apple.
Windows is still the worst, but compared to how it was 20 years ago it’s many orders of magnitude more secure. It’s really not that bad even still being technically the worst.
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