101–110 of 176 posts
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"Android device" as in devices marketed as Android devices. Context is not hard people. Don't nit because you can.
I believe you’re picking nits over the description of a commercial OS used by Google and Amazon and countless other device makers.
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The app updating process in F-Droid is fairly buggy (I can’t tell if I’ve tapped the button or not from the upgrade page and sometimes it just doesn’t work), but in general it is a big improvement. I’m guessing the “average” person wouldn’t be too happy about losing the Play Store since proprietary apps aren’t available in F-Droid (by design).
An average person doesn't need to remove Play Store to install F-droid. But if that average person want to remove Play Store (and Play Services blobs) completely from his devices, he still can use and update the most of his apps using Yalp. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.yeriomin.yalpstor...
I have been making it a "soft transition", where I don't waste my time trying to remove PS, just look in FD for anything I need.
This will help.
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An average person doesn't need to remove Play Store to install F-droid. But if that average person want to remove Play Store (and Play Services blobs) completely from his devices, he still can use and update the most of his apps using Yalp. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.yeriomin.yalpstor...
I had forgotten about Yalp. Wouldn’t you still encounter compatibility issues with apps that require Play Services functionality?
Works fine for me.
When publishing a new release on the Google Play Console, you need to create a video showing how the permissions are granted as well as the functionality that uses the permissions, making it clear that this functionality is a part of the core functionality of the app. After that, they approved it pretty quickly.
You have to take into account that the Google reps that approve or reject the apps don't spend much time checking if the app is compliant, so if they don't see this evidence in the video, the app won't be approved.
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I don't really follow the argument. If you are a commercial company, the Play store is pretty much all that matters in terms of business viability. At a commercial level, the fact a few geeks can side-load apps is next to irrelevant. Who builds a business on side-loaded apps?
Epic Games, apparently.
Remember this the next time you don't get that job at Google. Somehow the most selective and elite of tech institutions can't bother to do customer service.
It's one of the reasons I'm convinced that Google et al don't hire the best engineers/programmers, but really just the best interviewers.
Also, after 20+ years in business, google engineers are still highly respected and sought after by every company for their tech expertise. If google didn't hire the best, that luster would have faded a long time ago.
Google has always been great at tech and poor at customer service. Though that seems to be a industry wide problem, rather than a google specific one.
KDE Connect is one of my top five favourite / essential apps. Sure, I'm on KDE desktop (have been since the late 1990's) so I'm aware I'm in the (tiny) minority, but the functionality is hard, perhaps impossible, to beat. This kind of craziness isn't helping anyone.
I don't use KDE as a desktop environment, but KDEConnect works just fine outside of KDE in my experience.
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The alternative to google play would presumably be the apple app store which, if they ban you, there is no side channel. If your desire is to build a mobile app, you don't really have a lot of options.
True that. It's the blessing and curse of app stores. On iOS everyone complains there's only one App Store. On Android everyone complains the vendors and networks keep pre-loading their multifarious crappy app stores. People, eh?
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The alternative to google play would presumably be the apple app store which, if they ban you, there is no side channel. If your desire is to build a mobile app, you don't really have a lot of options.
True that. It's the blessing and curse of app stores. On iOS everyone complains there's only one App Store. On Android everyone complains the vendors and networks keep pre-loading their multifarious crappy app stores. People, eh?
An app store is really many things. It's client software for installing apps, it's a service for verifying apps, it's a hosting service for apps, it's a payment processor.
If you want to replace any piece of it you currently have to replace the whole thing, and do so all at once. Even if you create a good alternative app store, it has few apps in it, which matters if it's a separate client/interface than the main one. And you have to replicate every piece of it well for it to be any good.
So what's needed is better modularity. You don't have an "Amazon app store app", you just have a "software installer" app that shows all apps from enabled providers and then lists individual apps as "verified by Google", "verified by Amazon", etc. in the same software. When you buy one you get a list of enabled payment processors and choose "pay with Google" or "pay with Paypal" or "pay with Visa" etc. (the list being all the ones that the app developer accepts).
Then you can put your app in Google Play and let them do everything, or you can host it yourself and pay a verification service that charges a one time fee rather than a percentage and accept five different payment services but only the ones that charge less than a 5% commission, and either way it's not a significantly different experience for the user.
And whether or not Google would join in on something like that, at least Amazon/Samsung/F-Droid could do it with each other (and anyone else who shows up).
Remember this the next time you don't get that job at Google. Somehow the most selective and elite of tech institutions can't bother to do customer service.
> Somehow the most selective and elite of tech institutions can't bother to do customer service. I'm not at all surprised that an organization that prides itself on elite engineering above all else falls down hard in other areas and doesn't even recognize how much of a problem it is. (Though, to be fair, Google Express, IME, has had superlative customer service, so it's not that Google can't do customer service.)
They author of this post didn't take his app and make it Apple exclusive. He removed the feature that was flagged and re-uploaded it. How much money did Google lose on that ("I'm going to buy an iPhone to protest this!")? $0. So again, spending $0 on support seems about right.
If it were an app that mattered, I'm sure they'd find someone to reply. But the app doesn't matter, at least at the scale Google cares about.