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AnkiDroid: Google Play no longer allowing Open Collective donation link

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Re: AnkiDroid: Google Play no longer allowing Open Collective donation link

#181
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We both agree that there is a speed limit and it needs to be adhered to, regardless of who it is. The problem with Google is that it may have started at 8 over the limit, but it advertised itself as sticking to the limit but always hovered slightly above it pushing the boundaries. This has skewed our perception into believing that Google's was acceptable and we have been gradually raising our threshold itself to a da…

Give it up. Stop defending your position when it's been pointed out that you are holding the two companies to two different standards. It's all right to admit you were wrong and learn something, even on the internet.

On the contrary, defending Google by bringing up Apple in this context is about as cut and dry as whataboutism gets. What Google is doing is wrong, full stop. Anything else is in addition to and also irrelevant.

Re: AnkiDroid: Google Play no longer allowing Open Collective donation link

#182
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a workaround if you want it enough. I noticed that reddit was setting a use_redesign (I might have the name slightly wrong) cookie when I explicitly visited the old.reddit domain, and this caused old reddit to persist. Since I do occasionally want to use the new site for image posts and the like, I set up a bookmarklet to set/unset that cookie on command. I've since found that setting this cookie bypasses the…

The simple workaround to most of these walls is to create an account with your email address and phone number.

The simple workaround is to not use services that engage in such tactics.

Re: AnkiDroid: Google Play no longer allowing Open Collective donation link

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are more and more apps on f-droid. On my end the experience was more pleasant on f-droid than on Google. On f-droid I had to manually push some things, in repositories. That I solved in a week or so. On Google end I had to verify my account. Which was not easy feat. - had to provide my ID several times, because it got rejected multiple times - I uploaded driving license - the verification process was st…

F-Droid is a nerd solution and will be used by 0.00001% of the total market. There are more people that will use Linux on desktop than will use F-Droid. We need governments to mandate both Apple and Google to allow web installs of apps. No requirement for Apple/Google pay, Apple/Google login, or Apple/Google services. Total freedom for users, for developers, and for competitors. This duopoly has fucked over America a…

> Technology can be sandboxed, permissioned, signed, fingerprinted, attested, scanned, and blacklisted.

Many of the things you're listing are the exact things the platforms would have to be banned from doing by the regulation you're proposing because they're the mechanisms used to exclude competitors.

If you put all apps in a sandbox then they can't perform certain operations (e.g. install other apps) which inherently means they can't compete in the market for doing those things. If apps have to be signed by the platform then the signing fee becomes the vig they charge to everyone even if they're using a competing store, and both that and scanning/fingerprinting provide a mechanism to revoke competing apps under arbitrary pretexts and otherwise grief their developers and users.

Attestation is the thing you would have to ban the most because it's not just subject to abuse, its very mechanism of operation is to prevent existing apps that use it from running on a competing new system at the point in time when the new system has too few users for all the apps to explicitly add support for it, thereby preventing the competitor from getting enough users for that to ever happen.

But attestation doesn't prevent grandma from getting scammed anyway. When the scammer calls pretending to be the grandchild who needs money for an emergency, they use the official signed bank app on the attestation-passing device to transfer money to the scammer. When the scammer is using a fake bank app to steal the user's credentials, the fake app doesn't require attestation.

The actual problem here is that you want to have someone vetting apps for grandma, but you don't want the platforms to be able to insist it be them rather than F-Droid or Aurora etc. Which the platforms will try to claim is chicken and egg (how do you know you can trust F-Droid?) while hoping you don't notice that they don't actually get you out of it -- how do you know you can trust Google?

Re: AnkiDroid: Google Play no longer allowing Open Collective donation link

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google's "escape hatch" is a trap door >> Wait 24 hours >> Pick "allow temporarily" (7 days) or "allow indefinitely Geez. I don't like what they're doing either but this fear-mongering is not helping your cause. So the "trap door" here is just that you can't buy a phone and immediately start loading apps from unverified developers onto it until 24h have passed? Of all the hills we could be dying on, that's the one…

> So the "trap door" here is just that you can't buy a phone and immediately start loading apps I'm sorry, I thought I owned the phone I bought, and had a right to decide what software I want on it whenever I want.

I agree wholeheartedly, but you can already unlock and root your phone and install whatever you want. This is not that battle. Mind you, I don't like either of these, but they're very different in nature.

Re: AnkiDroid: Google Play no longer allowing Open Collective donation link

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

F-Droid is a nerd solution and will be used by 0.00001% of the total market. There are more people that will use Linux on desktop than will use F-Droid. We need governments to mandate both Apple and Google to allow web installs of apps. No requirement for Apple/Google pay, Apple/Google login, or Apple/Google services. Total freedom for users, for developers, and for competitors. This duopoly has fucked over America a…

The government is not going to regulate them, any more than they are going to fix the countless other cartels that operate with impunity.

Defeatism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Re: AnkiDroid: Google Play no longer allowing Open Collective donation link

#186
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just should not be the top comment here. HN being HN, it's way, way too bent out of shape about the company name attached to the app store and not the minutiae of tax policy, which is what this is really about. The app in question declares itself this way: AnkiDroid is a free, open-source flashcard app for Android with over 10 million installs, used worldwide for various purposes, primarily in medical education…

The 501(c)(6) in question is Open Source Collective, which is a “business league or industry association” dedicated to providing financial and administrative assistance to Open Source projects. Anki does not have lawyers, Open Source Collective does. https://oscollective.org This is an interesting rabbit hole if you bother to go down it, I encourage you to do some more research.

Since you seem to have done the research, can you link some other iOS or Android apps that have been allowed to solicit donations for the Open Source Collective? Thanks.

I mean, come on. Just read their page. They're not a charity, at all. They're a "fiscal host" (which is a weird term right out of the gate) designed to solicit donations on behalf of other projects. They're literally a payment processor in competition with Google and Apple, and taking a cut of their own.

I mean, fine. They can do that. But that's not charity.

Re: AnkiDroid: Google Play no longer allowing Open Collective donation link

#187
post #101
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When do we stop this instinctive response of "well you can still do it in an only slightly convoluted way" everytime a corporate does something bad. Windows added ads - well you can disable them, if you don't like it. Chrome brought up mv3 - well you can still use mv2, it is only optional. Reddit locking subreddits behind login wall - well there's always old.reddit Android moving everything to playstore - there's alw…

The amount of time I've spend to turn off news and ads in Windows is absurd. Just to be turned on in a new update. And the menacing messages of installed something from F-Droid. My mother would never do it. Even my programmers colleagues usually don't do it.

I actually think the menacing messages are on point but should apply to play store apps as well. Most of the people I know are incredibly cavalier about running mystery software from unfamiliar developers on by far the most sensitive device that they own.

Re: AnkiDroid: Google Play no longer allowing Open Collective donation link

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

F-Droid is a nerd solution and will be used by 0.00001% of the total market. There are more people that will use Linux on desktop than will use F-Droid. We need governments to mandate both Apple and Google to allow web installs of apps. No requirement for Apple/Google pay, Apple/Google login, or Apple/Google services. Total freedom for users, for developers, and for competitors. This duopoly has fucked over America a…

Google already allows web installs on Android, no regulation required. But yes, iOS allowing that would be excellent.

Behind eight menu settings, a scare wall, and unfriendly UX with additional constant scares.

Oh, and also they're rolling it back by adding additional hurdles. Directionally, they're starting to remove it.

Re: AnkiDroid: Google Play no longer allowing Open Collective donation link

#189
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your reasoning shows why it's so much harder to fix a duopoly than to fix a monopoly. If there was no Apple then Google would get its comeuppance. If there was no Google then Apple would get its comeuppance. But because we have both Google and Apple, we can't punish either. The mathematician in me wants to solve the problem of the duopoly by first reducing it to a monopoly, which we have known solutions for.

oligopolies are just as bad.

They're worse. See above.

Re: AnkiDroid: Google Play no longer allowing Open Collective donation link

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if i had a commercial app that i wanted to distribute off the play store, what are the options?

Put an APK file download on your website, but it won't help discoverability.

You can also publish your own f-droid repository, like Threema did. (And ask users to buy a license.)
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