Apple's Craig Federighi told the Epic trial that the level of Mac malware is unacceptable.
The antitrust case between Apple and Epic continued today, and it brought Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, to the stand. Federighi’s mission was pretty clear from the outset: to extol the security benefits that come with iOS’s walled-off ecosystem and warn of the dangers that would come with breaking the App Store model.
“If you took Mac security techniques and applied them to the iOS ecosystem, with all those devices, all that value, it would get run over to a degree dramatically worse than is already happening on the Mac,” Federighi said in the testimony. “And as I say, today, we have a level of malware on the Mac that we don’t find acceptable and is much worse than iOS.”
Federighi made the claim as part of a broader argument for why iOS could not adopt the same software model as macOS, which allows for alternate software sources like the Epic Games Store. But in making the case for iOS security, the software chief ended up painting a bleak picture of security on the desktop platform. The full exchange is presented in context below:
Judge Rogers: There are multiple stores on the Mac. So, if that can happen on the Mac, why should we not allow the same stores to exist on the phone?
