121–130 of 197 posts
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This is good . It will tie the fates of small time customers/users to the elites, so the situation gets fixed or the business collapses.
I agree. A process that's broken for everyone gets fixed. A process that can be worked around by everyone who has the power to get it changed can stay broken indefinitely.
This kind of incompetence makes me seriously doubt that Google is doing anything to more substantially review apps for deeper security issues, either statically or at runtime. The asymmetry of effort in this situation is profound: consider that you spend all your time and effort writing a, long, complex, thoughtful message by hand (the app), taking hundreds or thousands of hours, but then they respond with machine ge…
I think it's ok to do automated review for round 1, but I would like to see a human field appeals. Over time I would also think that will help find edge cases and cracks in the automation so that it can be further improved.
Edit: Based on other comments here, it sounds like that may be what Google is starting to do
I'm genuinely interested in hearing from people who believe that Apple and Google should have a monopoly on deciding what apps people can run on their phones. In case of Google's Android, one can still install third party App Stores, even they take away auto-updates and such. Apple is a much worse offender. In either case, why does anyone think that they should have a monopoly there and why is nothing being done to f…
> I'm genuinely interested in hearing from people who believe that Apple and Google should have a monopoly on deciding what apps people can run on their phones. It’s not so much that I prefer that Apple/Google can decide what I can install on my phone, it’s that I prefer that they decide for my mother and father who click on every ‘accept’ button without reading to just get it out of the way, or my aunt who forwards…
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> I'm genuinely interested in hearing from people who believe that Apple I'm old. I like that I can generally trust installing apps on my phone because Apple vets them. It is one less thing for me to think about. Likewise, I have young children. I also like that I can generally install an age appropriate app for them, because Apple's vetting process. Again one less thing for me to think about. On the flip side, I ban…
But the question is why you shouldn't be able to sideload an app at all. Having a curated store is pretty cool, and you can have that while also letting users install their own apps manually (even with barriers, making it as hard as they like).
If Apple allowed sideloading but went out of their way to make it obnoxious enough that everything which could be would still go through the app store, you'd just have all of the exact same complaints about how Apple is deliberately making things painful for users.
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The number of times I've heard of people only getting support from Google because they know someone on the inside is quite astonishing. If I were an Google employee looking to make a few extra bucks I'd definitely start offering to help "nudge" account issues for a few extra bucks under the table.
What is astonishing is that despite the scale at which they operate we rarely hear about the problems. False positives seem to be ridiculously low.
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What makes these platforms attractive to the end user is that they're the only things available for sale down at the phone store. And what makes the decision between the two available choices is what your friends have, or what you already have, or what's on sale, or about a trillion other things that are more likely to be "top of mind" for the average buyer. I bet not one user in 1000 gives any thought to "app curati…
I very much appreciate how freely I can install apps from the app store. I hear about, I install it, I try it out, no worries. Whereas without curation I'd spend twenty minutes making sure it was mentioned by multiple sites or people I trust and doing a set of web searches to check for reports of malicious behavior, and I'd still worry about it, especially about updates. Putting out a good, well-behaved app and then…
But why not have a setting deep in the menu to allow sideloading unapproved apps? If Joe Block is able to opt in to the uncurated minefield, does that harm you or take away from you ability to enjoy curation?
Another time, they suddenly decided that "No information is gathered from users whatsoever." is not a valid privacy policy for a Free Software application that does not gather any information (it was a simple game that couldn't even store highscores locally).
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This is good . It will tie the fates of small time customers/users to the elites, so the situation gets fixed or the business collapses.
Agreed. The current state is the most awful for the powerless. At least this change evens the playing field a bit so that when $HUGE_CORP gets burned they will raise enough hell to (hopefully) fix the process.
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I would allow fair competition and let the user choose. You don't need a monopoly to have curated storefronts. For example, GOG is curated and if I don't like their curation, I can look at Steam or a plethora of other stores. F-Droid has its own kind of curation, which I prefer to Google's curation; it gives me a decent guarantee that I'm looking at free software, and antifeatures are usually hilighted. However, I do…
Users are consistently choosing locked down Apple ecosystem over more open Android. How are you going to explain this? You also need to realise that you’re not an average user. You’re in 0.0001% of the population when it comes to use of technology and your preferences might not reflect the average Joe. Most phones would quickly fill up with apps doing malware, phishing, spam, crypto mining and DDoS attacks.
Anecdata, but of the couple dozen people I know well, 18 or so choose Apple, 1 does so because her husband is an iOS dev and it's the only thing she knows, and only 1 does so (at least he claims) because he likes the locked down nature of it. I usually point out that he doesn't really, because he uses his developer to account to sideload apps onto his device, but for some reason that argument gets nowhere with him. 6 or so of the others do so because that's what their company gave them (either now or in the past). Nearly all of them stay with Apple because they have a big investment now in apps and purchases that they lose if they move. And of course iOS is what they know, and most people stick with the devil you know over the devil you don't know.
But how do I explain this? I think it's a multi variable equation. No doubt Apple is known for quality and deserves this reputation (although the last few years they've been losing this on the software side). There's also no doubt a lot of people who view it as a status symbol. My son wants an iPhone so bad because he doesn't want to be a "green bubble" anymore. He's never even used one, it's purely social pressure. I doubt adults are immune to this stuff either. There's also a pool of people that truly prefer to be powerless over what they run on their device. I guess they are afraid that if sideloading is an option, they will decide to sideload apps from sketchy sources and get themselves infected with malware.
I have the same experience with the Google Play Store. For all the complaints people have about the Apple App Store, at least their reviewers are human and you can discuss things with them. And they block updates but don't remove the app without warning! My experience with the Google Play store: I get an email on a friday night after working hours stating that the app of my company was removed after a routine check a…
> And they block updates but don't remove the app without warning! Epic would like a word.