The Apple developer fee has little effect on malicious submissions, what it effectively does is preventing free (open source) software. You aren’t significantly safer, you are merely paying for software that would otherwise be available for free. Note that Google also has a developer fee for the Chrome Web Store, far more moderate however.
What helps is consistent human review, like Mozilla used to have it. But Google established that automated review should be enough, so there you are.
Peer review is the ultimate system here. Agreed so much.
Whats just so frigging sad is that Google rewrote the rules of extensions to require very static capabilities- they broke all the user scripting systems & broke so many interesting systems- because they said they want to secure the users. But the oversight & review has never been that great.
And ultimately, they are just not able to function as both an app store and a critical in depth reviewer. The roles conflict. They can't both make available and tell the truth. It's really the role of peers to really help surface & explain the depths of what extensions do.
The Apple developer fee has little effect on malicious submissions, what it effectively does is preventing free (open source) software. You aren’t significantly safer, you are merely paying for software that would otherwise be available for free. Note that Google also has a developer fee for the Chrome Web Store, far more moderate however.
What helps is consistent human review, like Mozilla used to have it. But Google established that automated review should be enough, so there you are.