431–440 of 579 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what is stopping all apps from being “free with a donation”?
The same thing that stops random stores from being "free with a donation"? Laws, tax fraud, etc. .
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You think a breakup will change anything?
Yes — if there were real competition between multiple app stores, some of which provided better systems of vetting than others (both for users and for developers), then the kinds of stores that had these policies would die off.
All in all, that whole "break-up" argument is just political white-knighting by wanna-be elites (ie. Warren & co).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And a non-donation in-app payment isn't open for fraud?
If it was a normal in-app payment it would go through Google. Where it could be tracked, identified as fraud, and stopped.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not a lawyer, but aren't sales and donations quite different? For instance donations tend to have negative taxes...
Not unless your entity is 503(c) tax-exempt which is explicitly allowed by Google. These “donations” are more like tips, which are treated as taxable income. I don’t see the problem here. The outrage in this thread seems more about people wanting a different set of rules for OSS and possibly avoiding income tax than anything else. If there are a different set of rules for OSS, then that just makes it easier to abuse…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
so the App Mafia is supposed to host your app for free? provide the bandwidth to download it for free ? give visibility to your app thru search in the store for free ? at some point someone gonna pay for the datacenters, the wires and all these stuff needed for software distribution. Try running your own site on your own servers and paying for the data traffic and then do the math. 30% is ok
Ok, let's do the math: Say app has 10MiB, 100,000 downloads is ~1TiB, 1 have a 1GiB/20GiB VPS with that monthly bandwidth which I pay $1/month. So distributing 100,000 copies costs $1. I'll give Google $1 for distribution of 100000 copies of my app. Fair? Yeah, I'll give Google a bit more for payment processing, perhaps. But actual distribution costs nothing really, for most apps.
I remember that being a problem in the app store for windows phones. Lots of fake apps that used the VLC name and logo, for example.
Ugh, app stores! No one needs them for discovering new software. You go to the app store to get a specific piece of software you already know about and whose reputation you’ve already verified. No one needs them for code signing. If you want the real firefox.apk you can download it from https://firefox.com/ and notice a lack of SSL alarms going off. What’s the code signing for — to let me know that HTTPS works?! All…
>Ugh, app stores! >No one needs them for discovering new software I so badly wish I could agree with you :) Sadly, observing the non-tech folks around me, some of which don't even know what an app is, and some of which think the only apps they'll ever use on their phone is the ones it came loaded with ... it's not true. What is needed is an android app. store that is decentralized / distributed, where the "trust" of…