261–270 of 319 posts
Or we could just stop using app stores. Honestly, I've yet to find an argument for the existence of an app store that holds water. Let people install what they want. Provide reasonable paths to update and upgrade and cut out the middle layer. The layer of control that Google and Apple exert over people is anti-competitive. But the answer isn't competing app stores. I don't need someone to tell me what I can or can't…
Or we could just stop using app stores. Honestly, I've yet to find an argument for the existence of an app store that holds water. Let people install what they want. Provide reasonable paths to update and upgrade and cut out the middle layer. The layer of control that Google and Apple exert over people is anti-competitive. But the answer isn't competing app stores. I don't need someone to tell me what I can or can't…
all you need to do is look at the windows ecosystem vs the linux one to realize how important a software hub is. windows is a place where people download random one off pieces of software that may or may not be safe, will likely never be updated, and will sit and rot on your computer until the end of time, and are entirely unvetted whereas linux maintains all of your software for you, keeps it frequently up to date,…
We should tell all the people who have been using Windows for two decades about this.
> whereas linux maintains all of your software for you, keeps it frequently up to date, manages dependencies and does at least SOME level of vetting.
First of all, what vetting? Anyone can become a package maintainer. They then do a package update, but nobody is verifying that they did it correctly. Anyone can sneak a backdoor into a new release of a package. And any hacker can backdoor the source code before it gets packaged. This has happened many times.
Also, the distro often does not keep it up to date. Debian has probably been the worst offender here. Its software is often so ridiculously out of date that you have to use some crappy bleeding-edge release to get a recent version of some software. Or users end up piping an http get into a bash shell as root, which is a super idea.
Finally: dep management? Really? The one thing everyone on Linux bitches about and is always creating some new hokey package manager to solve?
> there definitely are problems with current implementations of app stores in phones, but the idea in general has been a huge boon for security and maintainability.
"This week Google removed 17 Android applications from the official Play Store. According to Viral Gandhi, a security researcher from Zscaler, all 17 applications were infected with Joker (aka Bread). Malware on the Play Store is a common phenomenon and it is a collective duty of both Google and users to deal with them." https://www.gizchina.com/2020/11/02/malware-found-in-the-goo...
Google Play Store: The main source of malware (https://www.androidguys.com/promoted-news/google-play-store-...)
Dangerous Android Malware Returns To Beat Google Play Store Protection (https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/07/09/ldangerou...)
Two-thirds of Android malware comes through Google Play (https://www.tomsguide.com/news/android-malware-google-play)
> if you think that android would be better off without google play you are insane. people would be running insecure nonsense that would be doing stuff like stealing their bank information and all sorts of stuff.
Good thing that never happens on Android, as long as people have the Google Play Store.
Newly Found Malware can steal bank details on Android phones (https://www.hackread.com/malware-can-steal-bank-details-andr...) - "Flash player does not come from the protected Google Play Store but rather from bogus websites and messages which trick the users into installing them in their devices. Websites that the malware usually exists on include adobeplayerdownload.com, adobeflashplaayer.com, and flashplayeerupdate.com."
I think this is a really really bad idea. No more app stores. As a developer, app stores have always seem totally stupid to me. I remember when computers were actually things that you felt like you owned completely. Now, your computer is owned by people that run app stores. Github still seems like it's a company that understands its role as an intermediary. It hasn't yet tried to take over the world like everyone els…
YOU felt like you owned your computer because you're a tech nerd, software developer, or similar. That is not the feeling a "Wild West" environment gives to 99% of people using these devices. It is much closer to Russian Roulette than anything else. Killing app stores would paradoxically dramatically shrink the market for software and cause massive consolidation on the developer side. The big players with big budgets…
You're making it sound like app stores have fixed something but I'm failing to see what. Maybe on iOS it gives some exposure/discoverability to new apps. But I don't see that as an overwhelming feature for end users. This used to exist outside of app stores as web based directories and that worked better in my opinion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have developed a rekindled hatred for M$ in the past few weeks trying to install firefox on a fresh installation of windows 10. I counted 5 seperate scare tactics employed by M$ to keep you using Edge. I thought they were successfully sued for monopolistically coupling Internet Explorer to Windows and had a flow in their installation menu's for installing competing browsers. I was surprised that this is now totally…
Blame Libre installer then?
There are perhaps better anecdotes for reasons to dislike windows...
> They already host source code of millions of apps. Release integration should be trivial to implement. Release integration is trivial for anyone. It's the easiest and most irrelevant part of the app stores. > Unlike Google they actually listen to their users. They were awesome during youtube-dl debacle. And controversial on others, like shutting down Popcorn Time's repository. As any other, they'll listen if there'…
Perhaps they could integrate github and winget/snap (for the linux side).
Like, here your Github release page, just one extra click and you can automatically publish to winget (for Windows) and to snap (for Linux).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but because there isn't a real incentive for developers or users to use it Not true. It solves app distribution, install, and updates. We used it for an education app a couple of years ago and it was great. Before that we used Electron with Squirrel and it was horrible for our users. For some reason the app wasn't installed in the start menu and if they deleted the desktop shortcut it was impossible for them to fin…
Sidebar: It's incredible that Microsoft itself now uses Electron with Squirrel for apps like GitHub Desktop and Microsoft Teams: It violates every notion of how Windows apps are supposed to be installed, wrecks havoc with enterprise application security policies, and is just the sort of aggressively irritating silent updating garbage that makes Microsoft's primary users, businesses, irritated as heck.
Teams is a competitor of Slack, so going windows only would be stupid.
And among all other options, right now using electron is the most popular for cross platform apps. moreover, it also allows teams to have a single version for web and desktop