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Google I/O 2021 and Uncomfortable Questions

commonsware.com

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Re: Google I/O 2021 and Uncomfortable Questions

#91

Post by encryptluks2 »

Krssst wrote: post #89
enriquto wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sounds like a good feature to me

If you want to update all your F-Droid apps at once on a non-rooted Android, you need to go through all of them one by one. Basically: click upgrade, click "Install", wait for Android to do its stuff, do the same for the next app. It is extremely impractical and most of the apps I installed from F-Droid are severely out of date because of this Android restriction. Fortunately F-Droid has an "Upgrade all" button which…

Not that this is perfect either but if you know how to grab the APKs and developer mode is enabled, you can script the installs using adb from a computer. I agree there is room for improvement to help make this process more seamless, but it still much more flexible than what is being offered by Apple.

Re: Google I/O 2021 and Uncomfortable Questions

#92

Post by DelightOne »

est31 wrote: post #6

App bundles allow smaller apk sizes [0]: > Google Play uses your app bundle to generate and serve optimized APKs for each device configuration, so only the code and resources that are needed for a specific device are downloaded to run your app. You no longer have to build, sign, and manage multiple APKs to optimize support for different devices, and users get smaller, more-optimized downloads. But as all this logic s…

They could add DRM-features on the fly.

Re: Google I/O 2021 and Uncomfortable Questions

#93

Post by luckylion »

sircastor wrote: post #45
ethbr0 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome adding features is spray and pray monopoly. I.e. once you pass a certain market share and have a larger dev team, wasting your competitor's time by maintaining a high feature addition pace I'm not saying they aren't good and useful features... to someone. But the net result is that if Google adds more features, quickly, and they're adopted on the web, competitors have to spend more money keeping up, and Chrome…

I don’t think it’s so malicious. I think they just see a feature they’d like in the browser, and add it. Google appears to be built on the idea of creating a feature or a service, sharing it, making some excitement, and then moving on to the next thing. I think a lot of these concepts are just engineers making things because they can get sign off on it.

> I think they just see a feature they’d like in the browser, and add it.

I'm not sure. Their official policy is that almost everything should be an add-on. Even things like "don't let random sites install search engines into my browser" should not be a setting, but should be a plugin that works around the browser to make it happen.

Re: Google I/O 2021 and Uncomfortable Questions

#94

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

izacus wrote: post #87
heavyset_go wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that would introduce a lot of complexity for Google Oh well, they're imposing it upon everyone else. Google controls what apps are distributed and run on over 40% phones and tablets in the US. Users deserve the right to know if what they're downloading and installing is what they're supposed to be getting. Developers deserve the right to know that what's shipping to their customers is what they intended. Billions o…

Users, right now, are quite happy trusting Apple (paragon of privacy and security) and F-Droid (the main opensource store) with signing their apps for them, so there doesn't seem much reason for Google to waste extra effort not following them. What's the business reason for Google to not follow Apple in this respect?

Trust is matter based on reputation, and that is why users generally trust F-Droid. Can we trust Google, based on their reputation?

Re: Google I/O 2021 and Uncomfortable Questions

#96

Post by andrekandre »

kjeetgill wrote: post #27
JollyMerchant wrote: post #7

Apple and Google, the Rockefeller and Standard Oil of our era.

In response to a now deleted comment about if they constitute monopolies: Hm, I'm sympathetic to where people are coming from. Treating Apple Apps as a distinct market from Android Apps doesn't feel technically true, but I think it's more then true enough. More generally I think people have a sense of what fair play is and how large companies shouldn't be as free to throw their weight around, laws be dammed. And that…

i think the word people are maybe looking for is oligopoly...

Re: Google I/O 2021 and Uncomfortable Questions

#98

Post by grishka »

est31 wrote: post #6

App bundles allow smaller apk sizes [0]: > Google Play uses your app bundle to generate and serve optimized APKs for each device configuration, so only the code and resources that are needed for a specific device are downloaded to run your app. You no longer have to build, sign, and manage multiple APKs to optimize support for different devices, and users get smaller, more-optimized downloads. But as all this logic s…

Also what is this "device configuration" thing exactly? Vector drawables help avoid the issue of having unneeded resources in an apk entirely. You definitely should be using them for icons if you aren't yet. Other resource types, like strings in languages you don't speak or layouts for tablets, are small enough that their impact on the apk size is usually negligible.

Re: Google I/O 2021 and Uncomfortable Questions

#99

Post by iudqnolq »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #90

The article linked from this one is worth a read: https://commonsware.com/blog/2020/09/23/uncomfortable-questi... They claim that because Google strips the developer signature and signs it themselves, they can modify the app and re-sign it. They suggest that an authoritarian regime could coerce Google into serving modified versions of eg. E2E encrypted messaging apps to people of that regime’s choice as a condition o…

It's silly, because if you control the OS you control the app. They can push an OS or trusted app update that reads/writes the app's private data, or changes the shared libraries the app depends on, or with a little more work reads/writes the app's memory. Anyone claiming to provide protection from Google on a phone Google has remote root access to is selling a theatrical experience.

Re: Google I/O 2021 and Uncomfortable Questions

#100

Post by grishka »

toast0 wrote: post #32
est31 wrote: post #6

App bundles allow smaller apk sizes [0]: > Google Play uses your app bundle to generate and serve optimized APKs for each device configuration, so only the code and resources that are needed for a specific device are downloaded to run your app. You no longer have to build, sign, and manage multiple APKs to optimize support for different devices, and users get smaller, more-optimized downloads. But as all this logic s…

Smaller apks are great, but throwing away the security model to get smaller apks really isn't. :( Has Google come out with a way to compress string localization information yet? That would make a big difference for apps that support lots of languages, and last I checked (which was a few years ago, so happy to be wrong), Google didn't have a good solution there.

Apks are zip archives. So, naturally, everything they contain is already compressed.
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