Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Prisoners of Google Android development

solutional.ee

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 318 posts

Re: Prisoners of Google Android development

#271

Post by chaboud »

david_allison wrote: post #160
cogman10 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were paying google hosting fees, that'd be $700. I'm guessing the cost to them is far lower than that, though. ($0.01 per GiB) That also equates to over 5 million downloads. I'm guessing this app is likely pulling in a lot more than $700 for google. https://cloud.google.com/vpc/network-pricing

FOSS app. No IAPs/subscriptions. Google's taking the hit on this one 10MM+ downloads on the Play Store (Unsure if Google gives us actual figures on the dashboard)

The cost of having a thorough inventory of apps that being in monetization is vending apps that have none. It's part and parcel of keeping users inside the walled garden.

Google takes a hit on some apps to sell and advertise with others. What's hurting Google in this case is the release of an app update that is bad for customers and bad for the business. While it's just one papercut, the "huh, my iPhone version works just fine" razzing will ring just a bit more true for customers who got bit by the update. Do it enough, and they'll get tired of the hassle and jump.

It's a rough balance, building something scalable that also holds high quality, and separate policy decisions can sometimes lead to truly Kafkaesque journeys for developers and users. It's at least instructive for others. Making and evolving APIs and ecosystems is hard. Think very carefully about the holistic impacts of decisions.

Re: Prisoners of Google Android development

#272

Post by david_allison »

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #225

This is actually ironic because one of Google's SRE principles is that "rollbacks are normal". https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/reliable-releases... "At Google, our philosophy is that “rollbacks are normal.” When an error is found or reasonably suspected in a new release, the releasing team rolls back first and investigates the problem second. A request for a rollback is not interpreted as an attack on the…

As of last year, due to a mix of Google Play policies and Android updates, if you're distributing an app on the Play Store, the only way to rollback is an uninstall + wipe user data.

----

* You cannot downgrade to a lower `versionCode` & `versionCode` is defined by the developer

* Android 11 prohibits writing to 'permanent' storage of the phone, with the exception of media, or using the `DocumentFile` API, which treats a local folder as cloud storage. `DocumentFile` is unusable for many use cases

* A developer can set `hasFragileUserData`, which should ask a user if they want to wipe their data on uninstall. There are Google/Android bugs which mean this dialog may not be shown

* If an app is uninstalled and the user doesn't delete data, Android blocks a downgrade to a lower `versionCode`

* You can use a regular java.io.File if you request `MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STRORAGE`

* Google Play only grants `MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STRORAGE` in exceptional circumstances

Re: Prisoners of Google Android development

#273

Post by sirius87 »

izacus wrote: post #201
sirius87 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many companies, institutions, public bodies hire external contractors to do a one-time development of a limited-scope app. I bet a bunch of them have their Google Play Console dev account email read by people in some engineering infrastructure function who know nothing about Android development. Updating their apps now means an internal scramble and unexpected project costs. Not saying its wrong or that we shouldn't…

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.

Unexpected in the sense that at the time of commissioning the project years ago, they did not anticipate this event down the line.

Re: Prisoners of Google Android development

#275

Post by SquidJack »

The one and only reason I switched to web dev is the google they suspended my 4 years old play console account with 3 apps total download around 1.5 million they say I was Associated with an another account and they didn't provide any details about the other account I worked as a freelancer for almost 20+ app products it's hard to left android development and get In to web dev but I did I don't want someone to destroy all my 4 years Of work one email without any reason

Re: Prisoners of Google Android development

#276

Post by withinboredom »

scarface_74 wrote: post #204
withinboredom wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not with a deadline (aka Windows). I usually work on the backend and/or front end (Web). This is a pretty new world for me.

And you have also never had a security vulnerability in one of your dependencies causing you to update your software? A new database version? A new version of whatever runtime you were using?

I guess that’s the difference between a free marketplace and whatever this is; because this IS NOT a free market.

In a free market, you set the deadlines. If your publisher reaches out to you about a security issue you don’t have to fix it and they aren’t obligated to pull your product. In fact, you might make it into a feature or simply reconfigure a WAF.

Probably the closest thing to this would be in the early/late 00’s when some idiot would buy an ad in the paper/magazines. You’d have a fire under your ass for that. Even then, it was self-inflicted.

So the answer is no. I’ve never dealt with a publisher that had you by the balls, imposing random deadlines. There’s always been a human on the other end who has their own agenda, but also respected ours.

Re: Prisoners of Google Android development

#277

Post by izacus »

sirius87 wrote: post #273
izacus wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unexpected in the sense that at the time of commissioning the project years ago, they did not anticipate this event down the line.

This process has been in place for literal years and every professional Android developer part of such commissioning would know about it. Just like every iOS developer would know that apps need to be maintained for new iOS releases.

This is just incompetent planning.

Re: Prisoners of Google Android development

#278

Post by kaba0 »

callalex wrote: post #168
jarm0 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually nowadays it's not that bad anymore. Android browser itself offers installable PWA and there is an event called beforeinstallprompt event ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/befo... ), which can be used to perform PWA installation on user interaction. Of course it's not supported in every browser. iOS is more difficult since user needs to understand that "saving to home screen" is same a…

In iOS it’s also buried deep in the “share” menu which makes absolutely no sense as you are not sharing the website with anybody.

The share menu is used for everything on ios, I had to get used to it at my first apple device’s case.

One notably stupid usage of the Share option was (I believe it is no longer how it’s done) adding an image to a hidden folder — that’s something you definitely don’t want to share, yet quite easy to accidentally send to someone during this process.

Re: Prisoners of Google Android development

#279

Post by sofixa »

scarface_74 wrote: post #199
sofixa wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you search for "$town_name transit app" Do people really search for entirely temporary/short-term/single-use use apps, like for a resort town's transit or a restaurant? For me it's a last resort thing, if there's no website or it's unusable.

Yes and people still watch TV even though you “haven’t owned one in 10 years”. Or do you think places are making apps that no one uses?

> Or do you think places are making apps that no one uses?

Of course, because apps are "modern". You've never seen an app that should have been a website? I know of multiple places that had shitty apps built for extremely narrow use cases that had close to zero use outside of the team that ordered it (while it was meant for a wider audience).

And yes, I'm genuinely baffled people will bother downloading an app for a very limited use, like the transit of a place they'll visit once for a few days at most (especially considering there's Google/Apple Maps, Citymapper Transit; unless you can buy tickets through the app it's a waste on top of a waste). Has it been ingrained to such an extent that phone == app? Or is that an iOS thing, or maybe an American thing?

Re: Prisoners of Google Android development

#280

Post by dep_b »

kramerger wrote: post #166
dep_b wrote: post #14

I had the same thing happening to a bunch of apps based upon a framework I built. The newer API version had problems with existing dependencies, really a shit ton of work to get back to exactly the same place I was already. I really respect Microsoft a lot more, where stuff from the 90's has less issues running on the latest Windows version that mobile apps I wrote four years ago on Android.

Unless the framework you used came from Google that is an unfair statement. You don't blame Microsoft for Adobe Flash not working on Windows 11 store, do you?

If Google breaks the framework I built, I still blame Google.
Post reply on HN