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Prisoners of Google Android development

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Re: Prisoners of Google Android development

#261

Post by pas »

jarm0 wrote: post #45
binkHN wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, as you noted, the game is rigged and you have to play within the sandbox provided. With that, and as you also noted, your testing simply needs to be better, especially since this is a customer-facing app and not an app that's solely used internally. As for dealing with the rollout when a serious bug is now in production, if you didn't roll out your app to 100% of the user base you could halt the roll o…

A-ha - good tip about roll-out, uninstall & install. Was not aware of that possibility. But yeah, it's still a hack and there should be a better way - just let me delete/cancel latest release even if roll-out is 100% for whatever reasons. About better testing - there's always room to improve testing, but no way it's going to happen with a legacy application where no active team is assigned. Only these irregular updat…

building a business on any big vendor (google, apple, amazon, microsoft, etc) without at least making sure these risks are shared with the client seems like a fast way to run into these costly overtime problems.

Re: Prisoners of Google Android development

#262

Post by omniglottal »

jarm0 wrote: post #27
pmontra wrote: post #26

> I'm not even sure why are we, as developers, allowing this to happen — there's usually not any good reason to develop mobile applications at all anymore. It's time to move back to open (web) standards and take control back into our own hands! In general yes, but if I look at the apps on my phone I have A mail client, K9, old UI. This clearly can't be replaced by a web app because I'm using it to look at my mail in…

Agree that not everything can be web-based and your list of apps seem to be non-typical if there exists a list of typical apps of course.

This list of apps is very typical for the class of user who chooses F-droid as a repo source.

Re: Prisoners of Google Android development

#263

Post by anders_p »

lawgimenez wrote: post #235
jarm0 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the OP and wanted to clarify in case you missed some points - it is a legacy application which does not have any active dev teams on it and needs only developers attention when Google says so and as mentioned by multiple other commenters here the first time I got that e-mail from Google, was at 18th of August. I would not agree that I have been lazy, but instead trying to solve this problem in the time-constraint…

This deadline had been sent around last year. I am not sure if you’re bullshitting your way out of this or something.

He clearly states in other comments that he wasn't involved a year ago.

But nice of you to assume he's lying. /s

Re: Prisoners of Google Android development

#264

Post by lawgimenez »

anders_p wrote: post #263
lawgimenez wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This deadline had been sent around last year. I am not sure if you’re bullshitting your way out of this or something.

He clearly states in other comments that he wasn't involved a year ago. But nice of you to assume he's lying. /s

Writing that blog post took too much longer than researching it online. Which if you Google it right now it is around 3rd or 4th search result.

Re: Prisoners of Google Android development

#265

Post by zeagle »

Am I correct in understanding that if you have an Android 11 device, you will still be able to use existing apps that are updated but not new applications?

Unfortunate for devices like boox ultra or the c version which were launched this year but unlikely to ever be upgraded to 12+ probably given SOCs.

Re: Prisoners of Google Android development

#266

Post by anders_p »

darklycan51 wrote: post #241

Oh yeah all my old apps got taken down by Google because apparently, they don't like that I don't update my apps for no reason whatsoever, even though they were offline games...

Times change.

Hackers and scammers get more advanced. Vulnerabilities are discovered with time.

Users expect more security today than 10 years ago.

For Google & device manufacturers to be able to guarantee that level of security, they need to keep their store updated. And the apps on there shouldn't be using outdated insecure APIs.

If you're not able to keep up with that, then you shouldn't have any expectation of getting new downloads on their platform.

Re: Prisoners of Google Android development

#267

Post by charcircuit »

cogman10 wrote: post #124
gumby wrote: post #25

This is a no-win situation. MS expends an inordinate amount of effort on back compatibility, and much kudos to them. But it vastly increases their attack surface. Likewise many of the worst things about the unfairly maligned C++ come from a hardcore position on back compatibility: as much as possible, old code, and even old C code, should continue to compile and work as expected, even to the point of linking old bina…

I just don't buy this as an excuse for google. The majority of applications deployed to android are targeting android's bytecode. They aren't natively compiled applications. The reason C++ presents insurmountable security problems is it's low level nature and the fact that once you have a native binary, you're done. But a bytecode for a language with memory safety? How would it be possible to not backport security fi…

>There's no reason ART and the Dalvik runtime couldn't be distributed via google play like the rest of the android ecosystem

This is already the case.

Re: Prisoners of Google Android development

#268

Post by anders_p »

moron4hire wrote: post #149
Filligree wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offline maps. Browsers tend to delete PWA data without asking the user first, which can be as threat to life and limb in this case.

You can save files and load them from disk. You'll just have to have the user pick the file.

That would be worse than an app.

Re: Prisoners of Google Android development

#269

Post by brokenbyclouds »

dan-0 wrote: post #111

There's plenty of reasons to complain about the things Google does, but this isn't one. This failure is purely on the author. 1. Google had been mentioning this change for a while 2. Target SDK update is a big deal, especially if you don't know what legacy stuff the app was built on, and surprise, can impact OS versions differently. 3. The emulator is not a good gauge of reality. I get this for a constrained team, bu…

100% rollout is the default for me when submitting an app. You're saying it's not for you?

Re: Prisoners of Google Android development

#270

Post by oaiey »

Real life: Assume you are critical infrastructure of the whole world (as in people are in risk short term and thousands literally die in the long term because of potential delays ... as part of your day to day operations without special external event) and you need to run apps with proprietary third party sensors on millions of end users devices. Right now you run it with provisioned Android devices but users obviously complain about the lack of byod and customers about the costs. There is no way to have a risk free way of providing this service on Apple or Google stores even with perfect own behavior.

App Stores and their procedures are a risk to public health. Period.

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