Do even 0.1% of Android users use Tasker? 100% of them are at risk from malware and spyware which would directly access your data and other apps if not sandboxed. This could be somewhat addressed with different sandbox policies for well-audited applications but we've seen a long history of those lines being pushed as far as possible (e.g. Uber trying to use geo-fencing to evade reviewers).

As an aside, I'm curious what makes killing an app so critical vs. only shutting down background processes. That seems like an edge case on an edge case?

> Do even 0.1% of Android users use Tasker?

This thread is about power users, not average users.

If I sold you a Linux PC, and gave you root access, but it was sandboxed and you couldn't kill apps from the command line, would you say the PC I gave you is fine for "power users"?

You have to think about how these capabilities are abused for something with as much personal data as a phone: if that capability is there it will be abused by malware, abusive partners, unscrupulous app vendors, snooping governments, etc. to impact orders of magnitude more people than believe they need these features. People will be trained to click approve the next time they install spyware or bogus optimization / cleanup utilities and many of the people most likely to be exploited will be the loudest about saying they're power users who need this access and won't make mistakes (see past decades of Windows usage).

Your comments seems to agree with me: That Android is not good for power users.

To a power user, this isn't a phone that is smart. It is a computer that is running Linux. It's totally fine to put in measures that enhance security on an unrooted phone, and it's also fine to make users go through hoops to root the phone and give them more power. But simply disallowing basic things with root privileges is hostile to power users.

Take something as trivial as backup, for example. I need a rooted app to do it (and thankfully, it works). But if you step back and realize an unrooted user cannot easily back up the contents of some of their simple apps without using a 3rd party cloud, and realizing that even that doesn't work well, then you can't reasonably view an Android device as something you truly own. I paid hundreds of dollars for a device where it's nontrivial to get access to my own data on the device.

> You have to think about how these capabilities are abused for something with as much personal data as a phone

The computer has more personal data than the phone does, often by huge margins.

For power users maybe, but I honestly doubt that most people keep more personal data on computers than they do their phones.

My mother is terrified of computers. But she stores all her documents and old email archives on the computer, not on the phone.

Do you think there are more people like that than there are people who use their phone as their only device, not to mention the difference between a computer which often turned off or not physically present versus a device which is almost always on and near its owner?

Among people with documents, I think there are many more who store them on a computer than who store them exclusively on a phone.

And I'm pretty sure the total amount of personal information contained in the documents of people with documents vastly exceeds the total amount of personal information contained in the phones of people with phones.

Counting number of people, there probably are a lot more who use the phone as their only device, but those people aren't generating as much in the way of personal information.

Going back upthread, we have this claim:

> I honestly doubt that most people keep more personal data on computers than they do their phones.

which was in response to this claim of mine:

> The computer has more personal data than the phone does, often by huge margins.

Two different questions have been raised:

1. Are there people who have phones, but don't have computers?

2. How much personal information is on someone's computer -- assuming they have one -- compared to their phone?

#2 is the relevant question if we're talking about "something with as much personal data as a phone". The answer is "several orders of magnitude more", and that is unaffected by the existence of people who don't have a computer.

Sand boxing is a power user thing, non power users don't understand it, don't even look at permissions let alone understand them, they just learn to click yes to everything to make stuff happen.

It's a solution created by power users, only usable by power users that gets in the way of power users.