Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

KDE Connect removed from Google Play store for violating new policy on SMS

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 176 posts

Re: KDE Connect removed from Google Play store for violating new policy on SMS

#61

Post by kuschku »

Arnt wrote: post #58
Iolaum wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fdroid maintainers require shipped apk's to have 0 non-free components. The only way to ensure that is to build the apps themselves (so that they can verify code and control dependencies). This means that they can only use their own keys.

No it doesn't. They could check the developer's signature against an APK built from source. It's not that difficult. BTW. In my case the app they urged me to replace the stock keyboard with a version that had been built without support for Norwegian. Is the language data in Android non-free?

They can, and they offer that, if the developer supports reproducible builds.

Most apps aren’t possible to be built reproducibly, though, as the Android developer toolkit was never designed for reproducible builds and relies on stuff like filesystem ordering of files (which differs between machines).

Re: KDE Connect removed from Google Play store for violating new policy on SMS

#62

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

noobermin wrote: post #42

Remember this the next time you don't get that job at Google. Somehow the most selective and elite of tech institutions can't bother to do customer service.

Not surprising, all the money is in treating users as cattle, not as customers.

Re: KDE Connect removed from Google Play store for violating new policy on SMS

#63

Post by majewsky »

Conan_Kudo wrote: post #52
simonh wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really follow the argument. If you are a commercial company, the Play store is pretty much all that matters in terms of business viability. At a commercial level, the fact a few geeks can side-load apps is next to irrelevant. Who builds a business on side-loaded apps?

Epic Games, apparently.

And whatever the Amazon Fire devices use as an app store.

Re: KDE Connect removed from Google Play store for violating new policy on SMS

#64

Post by pedroaraujo »

It's kind of ridiculous that Google is very active in shutting down legitimate apps like KDE Connect but paid clones of open source apps, or apps that promise to upgrade Android the version [1], are still happily up for download.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/b1ske7/stupid_apps...

Re: KDE Connect removed from Google Play store for violating new policy on SMS

#65

Post by simonh »

ses1984 wrote: post #54
simonh wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really follow the argument. If you are a commercial company, the Play store is pretty much all that matters in terms of business viability. At a commercial level, the fact a few geeks can side-load apps is next to irrelevant. Who builds a business on side-loaded apps?

The alternative to google play would presumably be the apple app store which, if they ban you, there is no side channel. If your desire is to build a mobile app, you don't really have a lot of options.

True that. It's the blessing and curse of app stores. On iOS everyone complains there's only one App Store. On Android everyone complains the vendors and networks keep pre-loading their multifarious crappy app stores. People, eh?

Re: KDE Connect removed from Google Play store for violating new policy on SMS

#66

Post by Arnt »

ForHackernews wrote: post #55
Arnt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I trust the F-Droid maintainers more than J. Random app developer, honestly.

Care to elaborate? You're trusting the developer to write the source code and do all the debug builds, what's the problem with building the production build?

Re: KDE Connect removed from Google Play store for violating new policy on SMS

#67

Post by snthd »

enriquto wrote: post #4

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 can't do automatic updates without the "privileged extension" which basically needs a rooted phone.

https://gitlab.com/fdroid/privileged-extension

Re: KDE Connect removed from Google Play store for violating new policy on SMS

#68

Post by majewsky »

lallysingh wrote: post #41
tyfon wrote: post #2

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.

They'll just spin up more instances of support_agent.py

So that's what Google Duplex was for.

Re: KDE Connect removed from Google Play store for violating new policy on SMS

#69

Post by JustSomeNobody »

Why do people still get upset when you can't "talk" to Google. Do you deal with a human when you set up your services? Do you deal with a human when you get all setup to develop for the platform?

No, you don't. So why would you expect Google to treat you any differently when something goes wrong.

Google is about Google, not you.

Re: KDE Connect removed from Google Play store for violating new policy on SMS

#70

Post by snazz »

forgotmypw3 wrote: post #30

I don't bother with GP anymore, just look on F-Droid for anything I need. Better/faster app store app. Better warnings about undesirable app behavior. Better quality apps in the store. And no nag screen for billing info every time I download a free app. This seems to be a general trend in software, and perhaps life in general: an abusive, lower quality default option for those not "in the know", and better alternativ…

The app updating process in F-Droid is fairly buggy (I can’t tell if I’ve tapped the button or not from the upgrade page and sometimes it just doesn’t work), but in general it is a big improvement.

I’m guessing the “average” person wouldn’t be too happy about losing the Play Store since proprietary apps aren’t available in F-Droid (by design).

Post reply on HN