521–530 of 607 posts
The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it. My company has a half dozen stories like this about Google in the last year alone. Know what Google is doing to its AdSense partners on a massive scale? They wait until your site has just under the earnings when they have to write you a check, then they terminate your AdSense account for “polic…
The timing is pretty brutal and outrageous but other than that, unless there are indeed no violations of the policies, I have no issues with an app getting kicked out. It is hard to have any opinion on the accuracy of these strikes though, since almost all the times devs believe that whatever they do is legit.
It's pretty easy for the developer to believe "whatever they do is legit" when they aren't shown an example of how they violated the policy. Could you imagine a world where a traffic cop pulled you over, issued you a ticket, and when you asked what you did wrong they said "You violated the policies regarding safe driving and expected behaviors". Your license is now revoked. All the information required has been provi…
My understanding is that at first the number of apps where the violation is unclear was so low that it was not worth it.
IIRC Google has announced that they are going to provide more info in the future on what the issues are.
however
the link in the article is pretty clear : https://play.google.com/about/privacy-security-deception/dec...
(even though it does not mention which part of the app exactly violates these rules)
And I disagree on the fact that the TOS are unreadable : https://play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy/#!?mo...
Google could improve devs relationships for sure, but these are pretty clear.
FWIW, I had several strikes as well, because of a permission used by an unpublished app on a beta channel :/. The whole process of getting the account reinstated was pretty easy in that case.
I am kinda curious to scrape the op app and look at what might have got them in trouble, I might give it a go if I have enough time.
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Can we keep the discussion in good faith?
How do you manage battery life when multiple apps need to keep its own persistent connections open to its own home server for push notifications? How do you explain this to end users, when even tech-savvy people assume bad-faith when it's pointed out that many APIs are cloud-backed, forgetting the most obvious example of a cloud-backed API that is provided? Or, how does the mobile OS vendor perform any kind of spam p…
Apple already has extensive experience in this area with macOS.
> Or, how does the mobile OS vendor perform any kind of spam protection at all on push notifications if they have to open their notification gateways to absolutely anyone
Do they? They could just as easily require that apps outside the App Store provide their own push notification infrastructure.
You act like these things are impossible to overcome.
And you pretend like Apple isn't already earning money from this. Apple is already charging people for the iPhone. People keep saying they are a hardware company. Are they really?
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I'd rather have all software sandboxed by default. It's a much better solution than walled gardens or "blessed" packages.
I don't know how workable this is in reality. Most software needs some kind of interoperability to be useful. - Network access - Direct hardware access (such as games accessing the GPU) - Sharing data to other software - Consuming data from other software - etc. As we've seen, we wind up needing to turn a bunch of these on for most software, and while it's certainly better than giving them carte blanche over the enti…
Most software does not "need" network access, it just ends up being used for telemetry, serving ads, and checking for updates you probably don't need anyway.
> Direct hardware access (such as games accessing the GPU)
"Direct", meaning they need a context handle and some shared memory to get composited by the OS. Still, I'm honestly not sure why this isn't a solved problem today. Why are GPUs not virtualizable the way CPUs are?
> - Sharing data to other software > - Consuming data from other software
Software can be grouped together and allowed to talk among eachother within a certain context without giving any given piece of it the ability to burn the world down.
You'll have a hard time convincing me that taking control away from users is a better solution.
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Fine. You don't have to. Android trivially lets you sideload apps downloaded from anywhere on the internet you wish. Apple not so much, but that's Apple. The vast majority of customers want an app store with tighter controls, and both Google and Apple provide it. There are a hell of a lot more complaints about these app stores not being locked down enough than those in your camp saying that they don't want it locked…
>The vast majority of customers want an app store with tighter controls, Most people I've talked to don't even realize you can allow apps to be sideloaded on android. Most people don't even really look at their settings menu other than to change backgrounds and stuff. I mean, at least on the latest phone I bought, I had to go to the build number, tap on it a bunch of times to get to the developer options, scroll down…
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Your ideal state of Internet / Tech companies is definitely in the minority contrasted to overall expectations the broader population has put on these devices and services. Yeah, we get it, you're smart. I'm smart. Most people here are smart. But protections still matter. What you're saying is I don't want to wear a seatbelt when driving my car. Sure that is your choice - but I think it is a very foolish one.
That’s a wrong analogy. If you want to stay with cars, it’s like Google saying when you buy their car, you are only allowed to go to 6 pre determined destinations in their vehicles. Some people find comfort in the lack of choice, since they know the drive won’t be “dangerous”, but for the rest of us, we want to make the choice of destination ourselves. We simply want the choice to open our options without these compa…
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I'd rather have all software sandboxed by default. It's a much better solution than walled gardens or "blessed" packages.
The problem with this is that you'll always have exceptions, and eventually you have enough of them that users become accustomed to blindly hitting "Accept" to any permission dialogs.
If people don't get the opportunity to fuck up, you arrest their development. Stupid software users then becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Users will become dumber than they ever were before, and therefore more and more reliant on software developers to do/make everything for them. In my cynical moments, I suspect this is all intentional... Imagine if the fast food industry were throwing their weight around to promote the idea that children should be kept out of kitchens.
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I don't know how workable this is in reality. Most software needs some kind of interoperability to be useful. - Network access - Direct hardware access (such as games accessing the GPU) - Sharing data to other software - Consuming data from other software - etc. As we've seen, we wind up needing to turn a bunch of these on for most software, and while it's certainly better than giving them carte blanche over the enti…
> - Network access Most software does not "need" network access, it just ends up being used for telemetry, serving ads, and checking for updates you probably don't need anyway. > Direct hardware access (such as games accessing the GPU) "Direct", meaning they need a context handle and some shared memory to get composited by the OS. Still, I'm honestly not sure why this isn't a solved problem today. Why are GPUs not vi…
Obviously Good stuff: Firefighting, EMTs..
working on cancer research, Doctors without Borders..
NASA, Nat'l Park Service..
EFF, Mozilla..
the electric company
$genericStartup, $genericFortune500
drone programs
Google (?)
telemarketing
patent trolling
being Chapo's IT guy (voluntarily)
running phone scams targeting old folks
Obviously Bad stuff: running ransomware on hospitals
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Touche, wrong word choice ("supplement") on my part. Taking GP at their word, whatever it was was FDA approved. If the FDA doesn't approve supplements, then whatever GP represented couldn't have been a supplement, which gets back to my original question: Why is "FDA approved" being treated here as a boogeyman by the parent?
> Why is "FDA approved" being treated here as a boogeyman by the parent? Only because they assume that the original commenter said something untrue. The original commenter never said anything about supplements.