41–50 of 176 posts
And google is supposed to launch a gaming console today that streams from the cloud. It's bound to generate a ton of support cases, I wonder how they will handle that. I also wonder how they deal with the countries that require a publicly listed phone number and address to be able to contact them.
Google have completely messed up this SMS policy. Someone senior needs to step in and fix this, it's utterly toxic for developer relations. The process is unreliable and doesn't work, and bluntly this sort of whitelisting of APIs for people "we think really need it" is a bad idea in the first place. Anything that is behind such a whitelist should be a userland permission, approved (or not) by the end user, not Google…
You’re assuming that Google’s desire here is to protect the user. I don’t think that’s the case: I think that their desire is to control the user. Cf. how Android presents the user with a warning if he installs his own trusted HTTPS certificate (and how newer version of Android simply ignore his trusted certificate): Google claim that they are simply concerned about naïve users, but my contention is that they are motivated by a desire to prevent users from viewing the traffic of Google apps.
I find it extremely scary to make business with Google. Their robot would get your account banned, all cloud, play and every other thing with it. Every hour it is banned would be lost money and lost customers. This is not my problem, really. It is Google's public image as I seen it soulless support for last 10 years, and stories like this pop up time to time. Too sad they pretty much locked in Android app market, and…
A couple weeks ago Google removed one of my apps for the same violation. I rebuilt the same application with the SMS feature removed and the Play Store Developer Console was very unclear and buggy on how to resolve the issue and get my app out of the rejected status. I spent the better part of 2 hours just to get everything up and running again and it's frustrating to know that you cannot easily contact anyone @ Goog…
"I rebuilt the same application with the SMS feature removed and the Play Store Developer Console was very unclear and buggy on how to resolve the issue and get my app out of the rejected status." Holy cow I had the same issue. Ended up having to just make a brand new one with a new name. It was a horrible experience. A version on a beta channel had SMS permissions requested, but there was no way to get rid of it. Yo…
I ended up fixing it eventually by somehow clearing all versions in alpha/beta channels and uploading a new fixed version without the SMS permission with increased version number multiple times, and then bubbling that up to production.
For reference, we only used READ SMS permission in this app to improve the phone number validation process so it was easy to remove, with the downside that now it is harder for our users (mostly over 45) because they have to switch to the SMS app and back to complete the validation. Our helpdesk has seen an increase in support calls about the validation process since then.
My current phone has been falling apart for a while and I've already replaced the back 3 times and the camera. With the battery going out and the back starting to crack again under the case, I decided I'm getting sick of Android. My next device needs to be something I can easily run Plasma on. Maybe I'll pre-order a Purism phone. I want a real open source phone, similar to running a Linux distro on my PC in the late…
Sadly I think the Purism phone just was pushed back wasn't it?
I was in the same boat as the grandparent. I ended up getting a cheap phone that I could put lineageOS on, I installed F-Droid, and I didn't install any of Googles Apps. Its working out very well actually.
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It's on every android device by default; to use any other repository you have to 1) know it exists and 2) know how to get it. Even if 2) does not require rooting your device or voiding warranty it's 1) that damps on the spread of the alternatives, because people in general don't know they have a choice; because they don't look for the alternative as the problem of "how do I get the apps?" is solved for them right at…
> it’s on every android device by default Amazon tablets do not have the Google Play store.
That being said, Amazon Fire tablets are good cheap devices if you want to experiment with custom ROMs and truly Free app stores like F-Droid without spending a lot of money or sacrificing your main device. Just don't trust FireOS to be any less privacy invasive than Google's Android.
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This is KDE Connect, not Snapchat. Joe Linuxonthedesktop has definitely heard of F-Droid.
Speaking as a KDE Connect user who's heard of F-Droid, I installed F-Droid, then deinstalled it. It was too noisy and intrusive. When I told it I didn't want to replace an app with its version it kept asking again and again, every day at least. Since then I've head that the F-Droid operators insist on signing all apps themselves, instead of the developers' signature. That's as bad as the TLS inteceptors that insist o…
F-Droid can't replace a version installed form GPlay with it's own version as they are (except a handful) signed with a different key.
It also won't even show you these versions anymore unless you enable an expert settings options.
Why do people still use the "play store" when other repositories like f-droid are arguably better and perfectly available? This is beyond me. The terms of service of the google play store are callous and unacceptable.
f-droid isn't strictly better. It isn't really an alternative as a store for a ton of apps, as it will only accept open source apps as a matter of policy. Which is certainly their prerogative and might be good enough for some people. But I use some apps that are non-free and are perfectly fine with those apps being non-free and want to use these apps anyway. So f-droid will never be a full replacement for me.
Afaik there's no readily available payment system. It's not impossible to build one and integrate it with F-Droid though I think.
Google doesn't have support even if you pay them (other than for Google Ads, Google Ads has an actually existing support), pretty much that, everything is done by robots which will tell you everything is fine.
I personally decided that it is easier to integrate a Google competitor to Flutter than to actually contact a human at Google, but I’ve nightmares about Google acquiring whichever advertising provider I integrate.