341–350 of 357 posts
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Apple has some “trust” for vetting things, and with the wave of slop-apps it fine with a slight delay so the App Store doesn’t become riddled with slop like the android store.
Review speed and slopness are related but not exclusive to each other.
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And e.g. browsers cracked down on it, removed toolbar support and powerful add-on support AND enforced signing meaning everything goes through their gatekept extension store and these problems still persist (e.g. addons changing the search provider, new tab page or homepage). Locking everything down does not help.
> does not help Is that true - do you not see significantly fewer of those installs on random PCs now than you did years ago? And that's even with the current situation not being what I'd call fully locked down.
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And e.g. browsers cracked down on it, removed toolbar support and powerful add-on support AND enforced signing meaning everything goes through their gatekept extension store and these problems still persist (e.g. addons changing the search provider, new tab page or homepage). Locking everything down does not help.
More a problem of those stores still not being properly validated rather a dumping ground for extensions, than anything else.
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We use Roborazzi[0], which is an excellent screenshot library, but: * We target minSdk 24 * We're still using XML views * We target a large variety of form factors * We have a lot of screens, and these have a lot of configuration options. I really wish it was "point an agent at it, and walk away", but many screens ended up being hours of iteration with Fable driving my phone/an emulator to produce an acceptable outco…
A tangent, but a big thank you (to you, and all other developers) for supporting older API levels from someone with devices ranging from Android 8.1 (BlackBerry Key2LE, at minSdk 27) to Android 16 (BlackBerry "Q25", at minSdk 36.1) <3
E-waste is awful, as is cutting off old devices. We still backport security fixes to minSdk 21.
To Google's credit, post-21 is a much more pleasant experience and requires very little developer time. API desugaring[0] has worked perfectly, their compatibility classes[1] handle most of the common cases, and there's often very little to actually code[2].
[0] https://developer.android.com/studio/write/java8-support-tab...
[1] https://developer.android.com/jetpack/androidx/releases/appc...
[2] https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/blob/main/compat/s...
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The push to involve the legal system and the government is ironic. It's partly lawsuits that are pushing Google to do this in the first place - because people download shady apps and get scammed or hacked. The more regulation we get, the more it's going to push towards central app stores that are inaccessible to small devs.
Haha, oh the poor mega tech companies?! As if. Google sees a market, it wants to capture it. Same as Apple did.
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Do people not remember the days of viruses destroying computers? They were a massive issue before, and now they're barely a thought for most people. These review processes have been good for the general population.
> They were a massive issue before, and now they're barely a thought for most people. Even on desktops... where there are no such review processes. Apparently we've found other mechanisms to reduce those issues, without app stores everywhere.
Anecdotally, at least once a month for the past several years, I notice a youtube channel in my feed get hacked. Their usual content gets replaced with crypto, Roblox, or Elon/SpaceX spam. Big channels, small channels, it happens to them all.
There's usually a post-mortem when they manage to regain control. Every time the infection happened through a virus attached to an email or by following a link on their discord.
This kind of attack simply cannot happen on mobile (unless your phone is rooted and you have disabled all warnings).
I've published hundreds of apps over the past 6 years and Google's review times had a similar spike during covid. It took a very long time to recover but now it's back to being bad, I can confirm that. I wrote about it a while ago, might be time to upsate that post. https://webtoapp.design/blog/time-to-publish-apps
Hang on. You've published hundreds of apps? As in the same thing slightly modified several times?
I wish regulators across the world did something about this, but even Europe shy attempts aren't moving the market in a better direction.
It's depressing to see a company that thrived from the open internet becoming such an evil piece of cyberpunk lore. I mean... Nobody really expected Apple to care about anything else than its bottom line. But I'm not alone to have had hopes about Google.
When I die, I think not fighting Google when it was still time will be one of the regrets I'll drag into my grave.
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I didn't know what a "money transference service" was, and certainly didn't know this service that I didn't know about was highly regulated. I only created it because I had Google Play Credits that were gifted to me. I built an app to "convert" them to cash for myself. I had never built an app before. I was proud of it and tried to make it pretty and professional and useful for others, and used it as a learning exper…
Right but... You've used gift cards before right? The whole point is that you can't convert them to cash. Not only that but Google/Apple gift cards are notorious for being used in fraud. I guess if you're young...
The process is just not obvious and usually not accessible to everyone.
My tool is used by 1 million people a day https://www.photopea.com This is the reason I never made a mobile version and all mobile users use it in a browser. The biggest problem (bug) with this approach is that iOS limits the RAM usage to 2 GB per website. I have to tell many of my users to ditch their $1000 iPads and get a used $150 Macbook for better experience. I think Apple does it on purpose https://bugs.webkit.…
In fairness is that really a bug? All apps are deliberately limited to a couple of GB on Android (depending on how much total RAM you have). It would be pretty annoying if a random website can just DoS your phone by using all your RAM.