271–280 of 354 posts
I'm partly to blame. I accidentally ran an illegal unregulated money transference service over Google Play. It let users cash out their Google Play Credits for real cash, which I automatically wired them. Someone then hacked in to a major bookstore chain, stole piles of Google Play Gift cards, activated them using their access, and used my app to get cash for them. Luckily, the whole thing blew up on me before I got…
With Signal, the biggest issue we have is that review times are extremely inconsistent. Sometimes it's 4 hours, sometimes it's 5 days, and there's no visibility as to why. Our working theory is that there's automated and manual queues, and occasionally, for whatever reason, we fall into the manual queue. But when you work on an app that has weekly updates, randomly getting hit with a review time of several days reall…
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And that’s how you prevent bake sales, lemonade stands, and more. You create a barrier to entry that gets raised little by little until only the biggest players can afford the game. Software liability would end all small open source projects.
Bake sales and lemonade stands are perfectly fine as long as people don't land on hospital urgency, due to careless work on preparing them with spoiled ingredients or lack of hygiene. Lets strive for quality in software.
Maybe I'm just incredibly lucky, but my reviews on Google Play take roughly an hour and appear to be entirely automated. My initial review was about a week, but everything after that has been 1hr. My Apple reviews are still around a day and my initial review was one month. The Google process is painless and is almost as easy as a web deploy, the Apple process feels much less certain that it will go smoothly and Apple…
Google just seems to fly through and fill out a bunch of forms (we had to include a condition where if the google tester credentials logs in, we switch the app to the staging API). And then it's live within the hour.
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What did you do with all the Google Play Credits?
When you "spend" Google Play Credits in an app, Google Play treats those credits the same as if you paid with real money: they took 30% (their take isn't so steep today), I took 10%, and then I sent the user/buyer the remaining 60% directly from my bank account (I used Dwolla back then). It was risky because I didn't actually receive any money from Google until about a month later.
I’m curious how you didn’t get into money laundering problems.
By the way, the same is happening for the Apple Store. Their review process is advocated as usually within 24 hours ( and heavily advertised by Apple as such, see https://developer.apple.com/distribute/app-review/ ) and it is taking now much longer. In the last month, I had to go through the review process twice, and twice I needed to contact them personally after waiting for 1 week of waiting. It did however helped,…
I have never seen Apple approving within 24 hours
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And what should we do about apps' getting hacked, sending out malicious updates that get auto-updated and thereby infecting tens of millions or billions of phones simultaneously? I'm not saying we have the perfect system but anything that slants the system towards "easier downloads" or "less gatekeeping" brings large, obvious risks. I don't see how regulation would address them.
We already had enough proof of vulnerabilities in the OS code and Manufacturers (eg. Samsung/Lenovo/etc privileged apps), there were enough reviewed apps that were used for fraud or access as bad actors. My banking works in my 'unprotected' computer browser. So I'd expect giving anyone equivalent freedom. I don't mind if there's a default for gate-keepers as long as they allow competition. but I would expect to have…
And like it or not, the Play Store approval process is a security feature. It limits the ability of bad actors to run code on your phone and access data or exploit vulnerabilities they wouldn't be able to otherwise. Some get through, but it makes their life harder, again, defense in depth. Something can be both an anticompetitive practice and a security feature.
As for banking in the browser, you can, but your bank probably doesn't like it. That's why they are pushing for browser attestation, or to force you to use the app. The banks would rather take that freedom away from everyone rather than giving it to everyone. And I suspect they do it for good (as in profitable) reasons, fraud costs them, it costs them more than what they would gain by being more open.
If we want security features and freedom (which is the harder option), we need competition. If Google and Apple are the only players besides an insignificant minority, it is easy to lock software to these platforms, screw that weird guy with his Linux distro. Legislation is another option if the first one fails.
I'm partly to blame. I accidentally ran an illegal unregulated money transference service over Google Play. It let users cash out their Google Play Credits for real cash, which I automatically wired them. Someone then hacked in to a major bookstore chain, stole piles of Google Play Gift cards, activated them using their access, and used my app to get cash for them. Luckily, the whole thing blew up on me before I got…
I really want to know what the intended design or use case was for this? This is why people usually only let you turn credits into in app balances right