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Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse

voys.co.za

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Re: Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse

#61

Post by secretsatan »

asdff wrote: post #46
secretsatan wrote: post #40

I kinda sorta see google’s side. There are just too many shady operators out there who will swear blind they’re completely honest, and maybe they are, but they also employed a third party to write code or maybe just imported a 3rd party lib (i am in no way saying this is the case) As to, why don’t they look at the code? bugger that being standard practise, i’m not handing over my code to google or apple. Even if they…

At the same time, why not just release at least one phone that is developer friendly? People can handle it. All these issues are present on computers that are able to run unsigned code, have sensitive personal info stored on them, etc. Yet the sky is not falling with all this going on with everyone's computer on earth, like how people fear the sky will fall if we opened up the mobile phone.

Depends what you mean by “sky falling on heads” They’re definitely aren’t concerted efforts in companies to not just open any email attachments

No data breaches occur to insecure passwords

Phishing, let alone spear phishing isn’t a thing

No popular app has ever found to be doing naughty things

We’ll not to the oss crowd anyway, if it does happen, it’s coz they aren’t using open source and checking every line of code

Re: Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse

#62

Post by j45 »

With Rust and WA emerging it will be interesting to see how long it takes to get a voip client as a PWA that just runs in the browser.

WebOS when with Palm was ahead of it's time from a software perspective and couldn't get the hardware out. The ability for all apps to be JS/HTML only with WebOS would be super interesting.

Re: Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse

#63

Post by yieldcrv »

tsimionescu wrote: post #58
secretsatan wrote: post #40

I kinda sorta see google’s side. There are just too many shady operators out there who will swear blind they’re completely honest, and maybe they are, but they also employed a third party to write code or maybe just imported a 3rd party lib (i am in no way saying this is the case) As to, why don’t they look at the code? bugger that being standard practise, i’m not handing over my code to google or apple. Even if they…

Not to mention, given their cookie policy, they claim that they are "very privacy conscious" is dubious at best (no button to directly reject all non-necessary cookies, navigation to a different page to configure cookie preferences, claiming that analytics cookies are required). I'm going to go ahead and say that probably they are misrepresenting what is happening.

I noticed that too

Re: Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse

#64

Post by scarface74 »

londons_explore wrote: post #32
thebeardisred wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't doubt that you never give apps access to your contacts, how many apps do you use as _dialers_?

iOS doesn't even let you change the dialer.

Third party dialing apps integrate with contacts, the dialer, your call history etc.

Re: Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse

#66

Post by Nifty3929 »

At the risk of stating the obvious, developers are not the customers. Android has millions of customers who benefit from Google's attempt to prevent misuse and abuse. It is far from perfect - but a bias toward protecting the end-user and their data is the correct choice.

In this case, there is a "false positive" where Google thinks something bad is happening when it isn't. They see that contacts are being touched, but they don't know what is being done with that data and assume the worst (as they should).

It would be nice if the accuracy could be dialed-up by inspecting code or other manual processes, but this is labor intensive and therefore expensive for society as a whole, regardless of who pays the price (devs, Google, or users).

Question for Voys: If there was a service where for $10k/yr you had a white-glove app-approval service from Google/Android/Play where they do actually inspect your code, would you pay for it? Maybe you would, and maybe there's a good market there. I don't know.

Re: Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse

#67

Post by godshatter »

Can they put it on f-droid and point their users there? Downside is that users don't know what f-droid is and have to install it, upside is they find a new "app store" that has some new techy things on it. Not sure if f-droid gets around having to tell your phone it can run third-party apps, but if it does that would be a win as well.

I didn't see in the post if they sell this or give it away.

Re: Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse

#68

Post by veeti »

secretsatan wrote: post #40

I kinda sorta see google’s side. There are just too many shady operators out there who will swear blind they’re completely honest, and maybe they are, but they also employed a third party to write code or maybe just imported a 3rd party lib (i am in no way saying this is the case) As to, why don’t they look at the code? bugger that being standard practise, i’m not handing over my code to google or apple. Even if they…

This line of reasoning can be used to reject and remove access to literally any app or API. Why offer a contacts API if you're not allowed to use it? Who is trustworthy enough to have this privilege?

They should just remove all third party API's to access any user data. Then we can be certain of privacy, with only non-shady actors like Google, Samsung, Facebook, etc. accessing saved contacts.

Re: Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse

#69

Post by mixedCase »

naikrovek wrote: post #39
turminal wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, good luck with that. Nearly nobody installs apps from outside Google Play.

that's not exactly true, though of course I don't have numbers. maybe that is something you just don't see a lot, but that happens often?

Look up the Epic/Fortnite situation and the only conclusion from its development and Epic's decisions is that it almost never happens and unless your market is exclusively techies you'd be foolish to consider it viable as your sole release channel.

Re: Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse

#70

Post by TillE »

nemothekid wrote: post #56
asdff wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the same time, why not just release at least one phone that is developer friendly? People can handle it. All these issues are present on computers that are able to run unsigned code, have sensitive personal info stored on them, etc. Yet the sky is not falling with all this going on with everyone's computer on earth, like how people fear the sky will fall if we opened up the mobile phone.

> Yet the sky is not falling with all this going on with everyone's computer on earth, like how people fear the sky will fall if we opened up the mobile phone. This is because everything was moved to the web and users were beaten over the head with a hammer to never install anything on their computers. The sky was falling and subsequently the desktop software platform hardly exists today.

I expect Microsoft's built-in antivirus helped a lot too, but yeah, the Windows XP era (c. 2001-2010 probably) was an absolute disaster of malware.
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