Prisoners of Google Android development

There's nothing "unexpected" about a process that takes 2 years to enforce restrictions and has been communicated and has been in place for years.

Kudos to that user reporting the issue, sometimes when I report issues I am 90% no one read those.

> There's nothing we as developers can do to speed up the reviewal process nor contact Google support in any way. There are no possible workarounds and we just have to wait. Wait until we're excused to put our fixes to production.

A couple years ago, and out of self-learning process, I decided to develop an Android app, never did any smartphone app development, Flutter was new so got excited to try it out, long story short, I submitted the app to play store, and it remained “under review” for 40 days! Just like OP, Next day I was checking the dashboard, silly me thinking the process is smooth, after 3 days I stopped checking and later forgot about it until they sent an email after 40 days, I pulled the app later and decided never to touch anything again with smartphones app development, and that was play store, supposedly the easier one after reading some horror stories of the App store.

"First idea was to roll back to the older working version in the Google Play Store so that only users who were running latest Android and had the latest version of the app would be affected and then deal with that problem in a proper way at the next day. For my surprise I found out that this is not possible - there is no way using Android eco-system to pull back or cancel latest release."

Perhaps this is an example of "anti-rollback technology".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37218265

"I personally have been against developing mobile apps for years now for the exact same reasons described in here and other similar articles - as soon as you decide to develop mobile apps then you give control of your product/service away to a third party, which you can't replace when problems happen."

What is an "app store". Computer owner cannot install any software they want on their own computer. Computer owner must select from pre-approved list provided by third party. The word "store" is misleading. 95%+ of the programs in the "store" are free. If the figure 95%+ is incorrect I apologise; I can get the exact figure. This has been publicly disclosed in litigation.

These concepts can seem outrageous to anyone who has watched computer and internet use go from uncommon to common. There are HN commenters who want to pretend they are totally organic and perfectly fine. Hypernormalisation. Beyond question. Right.

Maybe for those who were born into a world where computers and the internet are being dominated by a handful of online advertising services companies calling themselves "tech" companies, ideas like

(a) "you cannot use a previous version of this software that you got for free or paid for; an advertising company will protect your privacy" and

(b) "you must select from the following software chosen by an advertising company to run on your computer"

are an easy sell.

Those born into this hypernormalised environment are actually a minority of the population in the USA. For example, 66% were born before 1999.

https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/2020/...

We can change this "anti-rollback" and "app store" BS. (All falsely justified in the name of "security" and/or, ironically, "convenience", two mutually exclusive concepts.)

The personal computer belongs to the person who bought it. They can use any software they like, any version they like, and they can write their own software to run on their own computer, without any payment to a third party. This was once where things were before the so-called "tech" companies threw a monyewrench into the wheels of progress.

PiP, the one feature of youtube that I did not want (in the majority of cases) but got anyway.

edit: Sorry for the snark. I think that maps are probably doable with pointer events (https://caniuse.com/?search=pointer) and Android is doing pretty well in terms of Web Bluetooth https://github.com/WebBluetoothCG/web-bluetooth/blob/main/im...

Who is on 31