271–280 of 419 posts
Their handling of this situation was not great, and I'm sorry for the author, but I was pleasantly surprised to see them explicitly point out exactly which rules where violated. What a stark contrast with the usual HN posts about apps being removed from the Play Store for vague reasons with little to no explanation. Google has a lot to learn.
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I don't understand how unions would help here. Closed platforms are in the interest of developers. Devs make a good amount of money on closed platforms like iOS. Closed platforms are not in the interest of users.
Developers are also users.
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Yes, but only if you're foolish enough to install the apps. With Android, an individual app may or may not be a worse actor than it would be on an iOS device. But, it hardly matters since Google is primarily doing all the invasive tracking on an Android device, and you have zero control over this.
>Yes, but only if you're foolish enough to install the apps If you won't install any apps why bother with a smartphone then?
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Your bias is showing, as is your blinkered view of what's possible on an iPad. For many, many people, the iPad absolutely DOES replace having a traditional computer. The prediction came true. I rarely bother traveling with a laptop anymore unless I need to present or run demos. My iPad pro + the fancy keyboard case gives me insane portability and battery life plus access to all my files (via Dropbox), native Office,…
Ironically, it's Apple themselves with the M1 laptops that make the iPad case much less appealing. The laptop can do everything that the iPad can do except being a touchscreen device.
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Apple has always been like this. Better hope they dont decide to throttle down your current hardware when they release a thinner one next year and deem yours obsolete.
This only started with the iPhone. Apple has been around much longer and was a regular computer company before which treated their users like adults.
You can see it in the back and forth dance on the Mac. Will Apple ruin it by closing down too much? Time will tell.
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Yes, Google is using Gmail specifically for this purpose. Once you use Gmail on an Android device, it installs a Google account with all its consequences like getting the list of all your contacts, tracking you in Google apps and so on. For that reason I tried several alternative apps that don't involve adding a Google account to my device, but they were less comfortable to use - specifically, the search function was…
If you use 3rd part clients for Google services - YT, Gmail, Calendar, etc. and run non-Chrome browser (Firefox is very good on Android, and supports many extensions) you can largely avoid Google. However, Play and Location sharing are much harder to block.
The mobile landscape presents a very difficult choice. Choose Android, get actual access to your device and install what you want but have your privacy completely trampled upon by Google Choose Apple, get marginally better privacy but no ownership of your phone and no possibility to install what you want. I wish we had a reasonable alternative, it's so frustrating to have to choose between two bad alternatives and th…
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Re: Android, I tried to log out of YouTube on my phone yesterday. It said "Sure, as long as you don't mind logging out of GMail too." I was taken aback by this -- I didn't realise this was a hostage situation.
The other solution is to stop using Gmail and switch to something like Fastmail.
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For anyone that remember the 90s it is utterly bizarre to hear Microsoft talked about as some type of potential savior that was unfairly muscled out of the market. I don't disagree that having a third player in the space would improve things, but it is just weird how the perception of some companies change.
Yeah. Their contribution to Linux over the last few years always has me either giggling or suspicious. I realize that they have concrete reasons to support it considering how dominant Linux instances are on Azure, but considering the "open source is cancer" or "Linux users are communist thieves" comments from the late 90's or early 00's, it's hard to believe.
Half of the magic of Linux is being able to run it on bare metal. Microsoft is acting against that.