You should really read this Usenix paper - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usenix.org&#x2F;system&#x2F;files&#x2F;conference&#x2F;usenixsecurity13&#x2F;sec13-paper_wang-updated-8-23-13.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usenix.org&#x2F;system&#x2F;files&#x2F;conference&#x2F;usenixsecurit...</a> .<p>What you are not understanding or ignoring is that iOS apps (over 250) that were App Store approved were able to retrieve personal user data including email addresses by reverse engineering the names of the private APIs and using message passing. Android sure has private APIs and you can access those but you&#x27;re still restricted to the permissions you asked for. For example you need to declare android.permission.GET_ACCOUNTS permission to get the user&#x27;s primary email. Not on iOS apparently where they rely on manual review to ensure you are not calling the Private API - which fails as can be seen in the Chinese AD SDK fiasco I posted.<p>So no Android runtime isn&#x27;t a security risk as much as iOS private APIs are - your app gets a broad set of permissions on iOS by default and you can do clever trickery to call private APIs to collect personal info and who knows what else without the user knowing. Android needs your app to ask for that permission first (and at runtime on M)- you aren&#x27;t calling a private method on Android without declaring the necessary permission to get what you want without user interaction.