Userland Containers for Mobile Systems
Isaac Ahlgren, Victor Rakotondranoro, Yasin N. Silva, Eric Chan‐Tin, George K. Thiruvathukal, Neil Klingensmith · 2023
Mobile platforms are not rising to their potential as ubiquitous computers, in large part because of the constraints we impose on their apps in the name of security. Mobile operating systems have long struggled with the challenge of isolating untrusted apps. In pursuit of a secure runtime environment, Android and iOS isolate apps inside a gulag of platform-imposed programming languages and runtime libraries, leaving few design decisions to the application developers. These thick layers of custom software eschew app portability and maintainability, as development teams must continually tweak their apps to support modifications to the OS's runtime libraries. Nonstandard and ever-changing interfaces to those APIs invite bugs in the operating system and apps alike.