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FOSS app removed from the Play Store for linking to the project's website

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Re: FOSS app removed from the Play Store for linking to the project's website

#141

Post by visarga »

craftinator wrote: post #103
aboringusername wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it safer to assume it is until proven otherwise? A developer has their app removed, perhaps their livelihood, and Google can't be fucked to sign off who made the decision? If it was a human I expect to know who, and who I can write to so it can be reviewed, by another human. I want to know how I can contact a human for support and not some useless AI chat bot that seem to be all the rage these days (looking at…

How do you know you aren't an AI?

Ask yourself a tricky question, if you can answer you're an AI. AI's don't actually know when they don't know something. It's called the "softmax curse", causes them to have Dunning–Kruger.

Re: FOSS app removed from the Play Store for linking to the project's website

#142

Post by scrollaway »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #118
scrollaway wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us remember Lycos and AltaVista, you know. The alternative isn't necessarily "there's five competing high quality google search competitors".

I think the web felt a lot larger and more reachable in the Lycos and AltaVista days, I'd be happy to go back there over the nightmare we have now.

You're wearing so many layers of rose-tinted glasses that you're probably Redshift-compatible.

There were some nice unique things back then. It also sucked a lot. By the standards of back then we're living in pretty much a utopia. We have devices that Star Trek barely thought of. Seriously, I have a tablet that can speak to almost anyone anywhere in the world, instantaneously, translate into any language (imperfectly), look up any information, access to an encyclopedia tens of thousands of times larger than the most complete ones of just two decades ago, the ability to find free videos teaching me how to do anything, and that's all just the tip of the iceberg.

If I were to talk to someone in 2000 and list the shit we can do in just twenty years there is zero chance they would believe me. And it's not like the internet didn't exist back then. I was on it, as were many others on HN. Those who remember, remember that it mostly sucked.

What we have today sucks in different ways. But it's also accessible to billions of people, which is billions more than back then. That "nightmare" you're talking about is fixable, and it's certainly not fixable by "going back" to anything. You know there were also ads back then and they were just as awful as today, right? There were just less places where they could end up.

Re: FOSS app removed from the Play Store for linking to the project's website

#144

Post by banana_giraffe »

int_19h wrote: post #123
jcranberry wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's most likely this was done by someone lazy or not paying attention.

They had to follow through a bunch of not-so-prominent links on the website to discover the donation page. Whatever that is, I don't think it qualifies as "lazy".

The page they linked to, the main page of the website, has a large "Donate" link on the top of the page. It's kinda hard to not notice it.

Re: FOSS app removed from the Play Store for linking to the project's website

#145

Post by jlokier »

danuker wrote: post #132
foota wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play devil's advocate, competing app stores could just be a race to the bottom.

Excellent. The price for distributing software should be very small. My Linux distro gives me free gigabytes of updates every month.

I don't think they mean a race to the bottom _price_ as the problem.

More like race to the bottom quality, security, spyware, malware, shitty ripoff of other people's work promoted over the original, fake bank apps, fake WhatsApp when you wanted the real one, etc.

Your Linux distro is not in a race to the bottom on any of these things. It works in a completely different way from an app marketplace on a money-handling device. And you know you are running Linux, you know what you're getting.

We should have multiple app stores. But don't be under any illusion that it can only turn out like Linux distros. I would expect some terrible "stores" just like there are some really dodgy apps, some of them installed on users' devices without their knowledge.

Re: FOSS app removed from the Play Store for linking to the project's website

#146

Post by tomnipotent »

ribosometronome wrote: post #82
xtracto wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As they are, app stores are crap. They are a huge control mechanism to stiff competition. For those of you who are old enough: Imagine if in 2000, Microsoft released "Windows Me" with something similar (for PC) to what Apple or Google are doing in the current dominant computing device form factor (Mobile). It just would not have been tolerated. Adobe, Netscape, Autodesk, Corel and others having to pay Microsoft a 15%…

A Microsoft operating system was on 97% of all computing devices in the year 2000, even higher if you narrow the definition to something like "home computer".

Microsoft didn't a collect a tax on every dollar made from every business distributing on Windows.

Re: FOSS app removed from the Play Store for linking to the project's website

#147

Post by nbardy »

jonas21 wrote: post #35
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #3

This is outrageous. Google definitely lived long enough to become a villain. It is incredible how much goodwill they've lost in the past decade. When was the last time they did anything good ?

> When was the last time they did anything good? Oh I dunno... how about that time they solved protein folding? https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03348-4

Or the other reams of world class machine learning research and model weights they've released freely.

Re: FOSS app removed from the Play Store for linking to the project's website

#148

Post by intricatedetail »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #113

Just wait 5-10 years and it will probably be the same way on Windows and MacOS. They will argue that installing arbitrary, unvetted software through the web is dangerous, so it's only reasonable for Microsoft and Apple to make this very difficult and instead promote installing all software through their app stores (which they already start doing). Once software is primarily distributed via these stores they will also…

It's ironic that Apple asks developers to pay 30% which is effectively 30% tax on developer revenue, while at the same time they dodge taxes like there is no tomorrow...

Re: FOSS app removed from the Play Store for linking to the project's website

#149

Post by whocares2345 »

danuker wrote: post #132
foota wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play devil's advocate, competing app stores could just be a race to the bottom.

Excellent. The price for distributing software should be very small. My Linux distro gives me free gigabytes of updates every month.

Agreed, software developers should be paid minimum wage - they’re not really creating anything real right?……

Re: FOSS app removed from the Play Store for linking to the project's website

#150

Post by ranger207 »

ribosometronome wrote: post #74
legrande wrote: post #27

Just so people know, the two dominating app stores are under scrutiny because of the monopoly they have on the market: https://www.wsj.com/articles/app-store-competition-targeted-... https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/11/tech/apple-google-app-sto... https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/11/22620454/apple-google-app...

How can two app stores have a _mono_poly?

They have a monopoly in their markets, which is "on their OS". The exact definition of their markets, in particular if it's "on their OS" or "on phones in general", is one of the major points of contention in the case
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