Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

Post by bjowen » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 10:17 PM UTC

bb88 wrote: post #512

dollar wrote: post #3

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 easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers... Incorrect. The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to identify the number of competitors in that space. Google has at least one meaningful competitor to Android -- Apple -- so it can't be a monopoly. Anticompetitive behavior would be illegal, except this isn't anticompetitive, since there is a meaningful competitor…

Post by mleonhard » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 10:46 PM UTC

abrookewood wrote: post #44

Hey Google! Want to know why your cloud service is trailing behind AWS & Azure? This is why ... When you erode trust in your consumer and developer services, don't expect us to sign up for your enterprise services.

Post by aurbano » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 11:15 PM UTC

hombre_fatal wrote: post #520

basscomm wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure there is, but most people don't bother for a few reasons: -Slapping some ad network's code into your site is comparatively easy, and monetizing almost every other way is hard (i.e. "I just want to create awesome content and get paid for it, I don't want to be my own sales department, too, that's boring") -Even if you do monetize other ways, slapping some ad network's code into your site is, effectively, 'free mo…

You're forgetting a major one: there's a whole gulf of things that people just aren't willing to actually take their wallet out for. People even scoff paying $8/mo to Netflix while spending hours watching it daily. Good luck taking payments for your little project. For all sorts of reasons, too: we have been conditioned to think ads = free, none of your competitors ask for money (they use ads, so they're "free"), the…

Post by JohnBooty » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 11:55 PM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #524

JohnBooty wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Post by RussianCow » Fri, Aug 30, 2019, 12:12 AM UTC

liability wrote: post #527

RussianCow wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 you keep a child out of the kitchen because the stove is hot, you'll protect them burning themselves, but you'll also prevent them from learning how to cook. 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/…