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

Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

blog.pushbullet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

771–780 of 811 posts

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#771

Post by john-radio »

kire456 wrote: post #721
skrebbel wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or you might think, "Ah-ha, desktop apps!" But the OS vendor can casually destroy you there. Casually? The amount of effort and goodwill, say, Microsoft would need to spend to prevent me from installing $PROGRAM on my computer is significantly higher than the amount of non-effort a single extension reviewer would need to expend to click "no" arbitrarily because they are having a bad day. How would Microsoft do it?…

The OS vendor could "destroy" you by making changes to the OS that affect your app, right? The Old New Thing[0] is full of stories of apps that exploited undocumented implementation details of the OS, and were surprised that those aspects were in fact changed in a later OS version. To its credit (though not everyone agrees), MS has spent a lot of effort making compatibility shims, basically doing other people's work…

> The OS vendor could "destroy" you by making changes to the OS that affect your app, right?

You sound like someone who's made the mistake of supporting Apple

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#772

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #402
sushid wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just answered yourself. It's not a the only way to run your own code on your own phone. AFAIK that restriction is to prevent jailbreakers from easily sideloading paid apps as "their" apps on their phones.

But it effectively is! There is no way for me to make anything useful for myself if I have to connect my phone to a computer and reinstall the app every seven days. If I forget, the app suddenly won't open. If I go on vacation without a computer, the app won't open. The seven day thing is useful for testing, and nothing more. If the goal is to prevent piracy, well, as with other forms of DRM I as a paying customer do…

> If the goal is to prevent piracy

I don't think that's their goal.

I suspect that it's all about "brand reinforcement."

Apple is (arguably) the world's most valuable brand. Those don't come in Cracker Jack boxes.

They don't want some knucklehead running around, showing some crapplet that makes the brand look bad, and they certainly don't want them installing said crapplet on their friends' phones, so there's a bunch of folks running around, making them look bad.

This makes that a lot less likely. If they restrict it to paid accounts, then they have an assumption that the people writing the apps are "serious" about developing decent software.

I suspect that a big part of them buying up TestFlight was because they didn't want a company out there, making it easy to install un-vetted crapplets into a wide range of devices (which the old TestFlight allowed).

I have some experience with this. I used to work for a world-renowned corporation that made photographic equipment. Their brand is right up there, with Apple.

They would go nuts about sample photos getting out of the company. It was really difficult to report bugs, or even share test results, because the sample photos couldn't make our cameras look bad.

There's a great deal of controversy about Apple's iron-fisted control issues, but I do understand. I'm not always happy about it, but you can't argue with the results.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#773

Post by AlexFromOmaha »

wadkar wrote: post #757
mplanchard wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The money that Mozilla makes from Google comes primarily from setting Google as the default search engine in Firefox. You can see lots more details on this here (2016 numbers): https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2016/ I think stating that Google controls Firefox is vastly overstating the degree of influence.

Is it reasonable to assume that bing will be more than happy to become the default should google leave any space on the table?

Bing already pays for users, and once you give it time to build up a profile of you so it stops returning reptiles and vegetables when you're trying to search for Python libraries, it's equal in quality to Google. If having a high quality service literally give you things to use it doesn't break Google's stranglehold on search, what will?

I think the default for some time was DuckDuckGo, and that helped raise them out of complete obscurity, but it didn't reshape the internet landscape.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#774

Post by saurik »

enedil wrote: post #707
saurik wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I am in a position to install random shit into Firefox I am also in a position to just modify Firefox , so that doesn't accomplish anything at all except remove functionality from users.

Except most targets won't modify their Firefox.

I think I am not understanding your use of the word "target" here, as I would have expected that to be the person being targeted by the malware install, but that person isn't someone who by definition even knows what is going on: it is the attacker who is choosing to install something into Firefox without the express knowledge of the target, and so it is the attacker whom I am noting is able to choose to instead modify Firefox; if the target were making the decision to install the extension then clearly they should be allowed to do whatever they legitimately want to do with their software.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#775

Post by asdff »

kire456 wrote: post #721
skrebbel wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or you might think, "Ah-ha, desktop apps!" But the OS vendor can casually destroy you there. Casually? The amount of effort and goodwill, say, Microsoft would need to spend to prevent me from installing $PROGRAM on my computer is significantly higher than the amount of non-effort a single extension reviewer would need to expend to click "no" arbitrarily because they are having a bad day. How would Microsoft do it?…

The OS vendor could "destroy" you by making changes to the OS that affect your app, right? The Old New Thing[0] is full of stories of apps that exploited undocumented implementation details of the OS, and were surprised that those aspects were in fact changed in a later OS version. To its credit (though not everyone agrees), MS has spent a lot of effort making compatibility shims, basically doing other people's work…

That's a software problem for any language. Will the authors break compatibility? They sure can and do all the time. You are always at someone else's mercy in computer science.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#777

Post by sercand »

grishka wrote: post #728
jboydyhacker wrote: post #543

I think folks are drastically missing the forest for the trees here. This is just one minor example of the INSANE process that is now the Chrome Approval Process. I've seen extensions go for many months getting random rejections with no reason given. This forces developers to GUESS as to what is wrong. Want to try and develop according to a roadmap or timeline- forget about it. There is no "app store" approval proces…

Interestingly, the very same Google is somewhat different in Google Play. Whenever your app is rejected, they will specify why. Sometimes it's evident that there was a human involved — I once received one of my listing screenshots, with the part needing change circled. The thing is, sometimes those rejections are bogus. Then good luck getting to any humans to fix it if you don't know anyone from developer relations.

Most of the time they don't specify why an app is rejected. My app update rejected before I had no idea why. I disputed the rejection which I didn't know what it was and update approved later. Google play store app review is the opposite of Apple's review process.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#779

Post by cryptonector »

phire wrote: post #600
kevingadd wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://*/* being allowed at all without aggressive vetting is a big mistake. It's astonishing to me that they ever made it easy to do this.

The problem is that extension behaviour is very limited without the https://*/* permission. Say you have an extension that implements spelling check or grammar check. That need access to every single website to find the text fields it want to add functionality too. Same thing with a password manager extension, can't find the login boxes without the https://*/* permission. You want to read data off any page users are…

It should be possible to have an extension interface that allows a spellchecker/grammar checker to get a button on text input fields such that if you click it, then the extension is activated on that field at that time. That seems like a much better Least Privilege design to me than giving the extension access to... literally everything you do.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#780

Post by pembrook »

The lesson here:

Building a business off someone else’s platform is easier because it provides a built-in distribution channel.

However, when you don’t own your distribution, it means your business can be shut down by the decision of one person at X company.

It turns out, all decisions have trade-offs.

If you want to have a real business, don’t do the above, or only do the above while getting started.

Developers hate having to deal with distribution. Platforms exploit this by creating these fantasy worlds where developers don’t have to think about it.

This is a mirage. You have not created an “easier” business. You’ve simply sold your soul to the devil.

Post reply on HN