system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why don't we have full control over the apps we install on Windows unlike Android?

We can see and restrict the permissions an app has on Android. On Windows, the apps we install only ask for administrator permissions. Why can't we have the same as on Android. Are there any tools to do so?
gpt
"Full control" is an exceedingly generous label for the extremely vague and generalized bundles of permissions in the android ecosystem. But anyway...

Part of the reason is historic. Computers were originally designed for a very simply use case. You feed it a program and some data, wait a while and it gives you back some output data. When every program is "bring your own data" and there's only ever one program on the system you don't need permissions. The permission system is some guy behind a desk telling you whether you're allowed to run your program.

From that computers developed into terminal servers where there were multiple programs but "permissions" was question of which employees were allowed to do what. Programs were often tailor made for the company for shittons of money or bought from a relatively small selection of companies for slightly less obscene amounts.

From this computers developed into personal computers where a maximum flexibility was desired. You can buy a ludicrous number of possible hardware combinations and were supposed to be able to run pretty much any program someone has written from the PC platform. This meant the system needed to impose a few restrictions as possible with the understanding that you, the owner will only buy and install what you deemed necessary and prudent.

This "inversion of permissions" only really became a thing with free apps. As long as people paid for the software they used it was understood that the software was working for whoever bought the program. These days we generally don't. So the software you run on your phone, runs there on behalf of some company and they are going to make it worth their while. At roughly the same time our lives also became much more interconnected and technology advanced to a point where unprecedented amounts of data could be collected through these devices. From a data privacy point of view this is an absolute nightmare.

Another part of the reason is that with Android (and probably the others too) the respective companies did something very rare: they broke with backwards compatibility. For most of PC history computers and programs evolved together usually allowing you to move from older systems to newer systems using the same or largely the same programs or program lines. Because that was the cheapest solution. Nobody wants to throw away millions in old hardware to run one new program or throw away years of programming effort to support one new system. Not if it can be avoided. 

It took a more or less new field like mobile computing for a company to decide: "since we're going to kinda start over from scratch anyway with these new possibilities, we might as well change how we think about software and how we allow software to be written." Also because it was possible to essentially unilaterally dictate these new systems they were able to "centralize" your data and define interactions for it. On PC you don't have "contacts", you have *Outlook* or *Thunderbird* with completely separate data pools. But on Android Google was able to say: if you want to do phonebook-things you need to put your data in this phonebook and these are the things you can do with it. Don't like it? Tough cookies.

If you wanted to create the same ecosystem for the PC you'd need to create a similar platform ontop of windows/linux/macos and *hope* people will start to use it. But you wouldn't have the stranglehold goolge has over Android. Developers could just as easily write their own address book as they could use yours.