I was thinking about it yesterday as codex was debugging app live on my phone about what it all really means long term. Note, while I have technical knowledge, I am not a programmer by trade. Computing was always a little ephemeral, but now it may become even more so.
And they're annoying and often screw up the review process.
Google is always going to make money off any work they do. That's just business. They're not going to put more money towards better reviews without taking more money. And without the reviews, even as crappy as they are, a lot of really crappy software would be on the store. And a lot more would be actively malicious
And you were making like 7x as much as they were taking. Without them, you would even get noticed and you'd have made nothing.
We know this because almost nobody installs FDroid, and the other stores like Samsung make basically nothing for developers, even though they're preinstalled on so many devices.
It's not just business - it's basically a monopoly. Enough to extract rent while providing a minimal service.
Imagine if all streets were owned by two large companies who charged you enough to use them that you'd be paying as much in fees as you are in paying for gas. People would still use cars. The streets could be in horrible condition, the two companies would be making an insane amount of profit, but there would still be people out there saying that if it wasn't for those companies we wouldn't be getting anywhere and it's just business.
European countries shouldn't have to answer for what the USA has been up to the past half century. Your reflexive whataboutism doesn't change anything about the reality of why the West must do everything it can to reject Huawei, Xiaomi, ZTE etc.
Customer support has gotten so terrible. Now that all big companies have terrible support, none of them are punished for it. You can still occasionally find people who give a shit in small business, but that is it. Google is probably one of the worst offenders of all. I don't know what the solution is, it seems like the only way to get any satisfaction on an issue at a big corp anymore is a social medial call-out like this one.
If you are here, thank you for Conversations, Daniel, it has been my go-to for years for communicating with friends and family.
That's because you the user are not the customer of Google and such services. You are actually the product being sold to the customer, namely advertising companies, by Google.
The farmer take care of his pigs but only to the point they get slaughtered.
Google has captured what really is a public utility and should be either state-owned or heavily regulated.
(Long) distance communications, just like public roads, breathable air, potable drinking water and so on do not fit into a "free market economy" paradigm.
They simply don't fulfill the basic requirements that make the "market" idea work.
Specifically, a free market needs goods from different suppliers to be easily interchangeable. You cannot sensibly build multiple roads parallel to each other, or have multiple water pipes installed and you have only one airway to breath through.
> Tell me about the different OSes each of Samsung, Huawei, Tencent MyApp, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Honor etc. run then that we can choose from.
Other companies using Google's incredible R&D spend and selling phones that use it is not Google's failing.
And we're talking app stores. They all have app stores disconnected from Google's app store.
> It's like saying Windows doesn't have a monopoly in the PC space because HP, Dell, Lenovo, ASUS.
No, on two counts. One: - and it's the same with Android - Apple exists, and so there's definitely not a monopoly from a lowercase personal computing perspective. Two: the conversation is about app stores. There are many app stores. It's like saying Microsoft doesn't have a PC hardware monopoly because HP, Dell, Lenovo, ASUS.
it doesnt need to be a utility. they just need to crack down on every attempt google uses to kill the competition.
There should be an agency you can complain to for monopolies which has the power to dictate new rules to the monopolist with far reaching power to crack down on anything that smells like anti competitive behavior.
e.g.
- force banking apps that try to secure themselves with google play services to make that dependency optional.
- force google to stop blocking newpipe, aurora, etc.
- force google pay to make itself available on any platform that wants to integrate it.
- force google to allow alternative app stores to become first class citizens.
That never works in the US, the monopolist will just wait it out 4-8 years until there is a friendly administration. You have to break them up any time you have the chance, it’s the only effective remedy.
That's the legal paradigm that we used to stop the railroads from choking America. But the real killer of their power was the Interstate Highway System - i.e. government funded infrastructure. Prior to the IHS there wasn't really ANY nationally funded infra[0] of that scale, we'd outsourced building it to private industry instead. After that it's basically assumed that infrastructure was the government's job, to the point where even the most conservative among us would point to "roads" as a thing governments do well and should be empowered in doing.
So anyway, the US government should run an open-access, quad-track railroad and fiber backbone along every highway. Maximize the ROI on that ROW. Also they should nationalize Android and iOS.
[0] Because slavery. The South really, REALLY hated any government roads because it diminished the economic power of literally owning a lot of people. Hell, one of the stipulations of the Confederate Constitution was to strip the General Welfare clause out of the constitution.
I still think nationalizing is a bad idea. There is no legitimate competition between railroads whereas mobile ecosystems can compete.
Mobile app stores are more like banks - a big problem when there are not a lot but a problem that can be remedied by having the government compete (e.g. with a post office bank).
The government could set up a competing app store, that might not be a bad idea, actually. They could hardly do a worse job than google and apple at vetting app developers and it would put a firecracker up google and apples ass.
While I agree with where you're coming from, I think you're overstating it just a little. It seems like something that should be considered a public utility because Google has anticompetitively bundled what should be several different types of products together as one take-it-or-leave-it bunch. Android should not be tied to the Play Store App (think how MS was forced to include a browser choice screen in the EU). Likewise the Play Store Service should not be tied to the Play Store App (ie Aurora store etc should work and be fully supported by Play Store Service through the Service having a well-documented open API). Then Play Store Service would have to compete on its own merits, rather than anticompetitive tying with two instances of Metcalfe's law (Android users plus app developers).
> Google has captured what really is a public utility and should be either state-owned or heavily regulated.
I think part of what makes a utility a utility is that the nature of the service is naturally a monopoly. For example, you can only realistically have one set of waterways, so the company providing water as a service is a utility. Same with power lines, you can only realistically have one set, so the electricity-supplying company is a utility. With phone/internet service, I imagine they also share infrastructure.
Google doesn't fit in that paradigm. The nature of their services don't naturally require sharing resources to compete. They a monopoly simply because they amassed a ton a money to do things that other people can't, like drive on all roads on Earth with special cameras, or host however many videos there are on YouTube, serving those videos throughout the world, and even pay livable wages for the creation of such videos.
With such a perversion of definitions why not call the stock holders the true customers? Services can have multiple classes of users. Some YouTube users can be content creators. Some users can watch Shorts. Some can watch long term videos. Some can pay to run ad campaigns. This idea that there is only one true kind of "customer" is not how people think of these services.
I remember that once my flight was cancelled and I figured out that if I buy a bus ticket "right now" I'd be able to reach my destination in a sensible time. I quickly bought the ticket... for the wrong day.
I called the bus company, a native speaker of my language immediately picked up, rescheduled the ticket, and told me to pay €2 extra to the bus driver.
I was shocked that customer support could be so simple.
BTW I spent 6 hours total spread along 12 months calling an Indian customer service before I got my money back for the cancelled flight.
Some eight years ago I worked on a Chrome extension with monetization support. I could not get payment working using Google APIs, no matter what I tried it errored with obscure undocumented error messages. Finally I reached out to their customer support and got swift overly friendly response. Several messages later, I still got these overly friendly elaborated messages, but the issue did not proceed anywhere. I kept explaining my problem and they assured me that they are working on it. Eventually I got bounced to their Android support (my problem concerned Chrome store), which made me think either they were taking a piss or used this tactique on purpose. I eventually abandoned the whole idea.
Nowadays I would attribute their response to chatbots considering how elaborated and friendly, but yet totally useless their messages were, but this was before LLMs
> Nowadays I would attribute their response to chatbots considering how elaborated and friendly, but yet totally useless their messages were, but this was before LLMs
Isn’t because every single data point has shown in the last decade that people whine, but still use the services because of free/cheap/etc.? So you calculate retention, and how much investment in customer support will improve your numbers. In the end, you realize it only matters for customers who are paying the most, and that’s where the AMs come into the play.
Obviously not the same everywhere, but generally it’s true and holds up.
> but still use the services because of free/cheap/etc
it may be a crazy idea, but if they ever made a law that said 'free trial not withstanding, services must be payed for and not free' i wonder if that would fix the issue real fast...
(of course a side effect might be that half the economy implodes but thats besides the point ^^)
What exactly is the issue? Consumers complain about the bad parts of it, yet overwhelmingly use it. Sure, temporary dissatisfaction is there, but they still make it obvious with their choices that they want to use the offered product.
they overwhelmingly use it because its free, but if they even had to pay one cent i'd bet they'd loose half their customers and start shopping around on different metrics of quality
making things free causes a loss of price signal, so i'd say it would be a good idea to restore that...
I’m confused though. Customers, overwhelmingly, want the free service with crappy issues. So an intervention would just be anti-consumer? We’d optimize the quality, but people wouldn’t use it.
maybe? but you are paying for it with you data and usage, you just don't realize it (in addition ro being subsequently manipulated by it); that could also probably considered anti-consumer imho...
> but people wouldn’t use it.
yep, thats right. thats why i think having a price signal where the actual cost is upfront; now you don't discover later your data is being used against you as a "cost" but consider upfront 'do i really wanna pay for this or do something else' etc
said in another way, i feel like giving the customer upfront knowledge about what something actually costs is more pro-consumer because now we can make informed choices
> you are paying for it with you data and usage, you just don't realize it
I don't think this (people not realizing it) is true. We've heard this argument since early 2010s, and the general attitude of population is "ok, cool, so what?". Even people like me, who know that I'm paying it with my data, still overwhelmingly prefer using such services.
For every scandal about data leakage, 3rd party access and etc., the social media websites are still top used apps. People don't want their privacy/secrets/photos to be available to people they know, or might know. They don't really care about "giant faceless company"/government, even though they say they do.
Receiving 1000 euros without having any real work or accountability is the epitome of free profit. No wonder these platform gatekeepers are fighting so hard to maintain it (at the cost of you, the consumer).
And yet people (in general) just dont care, because they don't truly feel the pain until it's too late - issues like privacy and such are like that.
It's the arrogance. "You wouldn't have made 10 euros if I didn't give you the storefront and the one click install". Unfortunately they are right about this too. Why would they then also provide customer support that costs them money. They have enough "happy" customers as it is. Literally millions of apps are there.
"Fortunately, I’m no longer economically dependent on Google Play Store revenue. Google doesn’t deserve me and my money anymore. I’m done. Fuck the gatekeepers."
Yeah that "there is no way to talk to a human at Google" is one of the reasons I never recommend a Google solution at current workplace... Or to family.
it's actually Google being parasitic on all the apps' infra. I paid for the app store infra when I bought my phone, and every time I open it and see ads, and with my tracking data for the NSA. They don't need to be allowed to quadruple dip.
I think it bothers OP less that they take a 15% tax than the fact that google provides terrible support for their own play store. If they would take that tax and provide good feedback and speedy version reviews, nobody would ever complain - it is expected to pay something since the play store doesn't run on good thoughts and prayers.
But because they're a monopoly (or a duopoly if you count apple, which is a different platform altogether) they can afford to act this way.
Of course people would complain, it's unrealistic to expect everyone to have the same expectation of what a fair fee is that somehow exactly matches the current fee (even if the service is great)
Author here: Indeed, 15% is fine. They do provide some services. They provide the CDN for downloading the APK. They handle sales taxes in the various countries, which would be a PITA to handle yourself. Similar-ish services like Patreon charge a fee too. The 30% they charged a couple of years back was bad. But I could live with 15% if the support were anything other than zero.
Apple recently submitted in court filings that you'd have to pay ~8% for off-the-shelf solutions like Stripe or Paddle to be Merchant of Record anyway so 15% isn't really bad but Google should be doing something for that extra 7%.
It's a level of service above their payment processing, where they also collect and remit certain taxes which I believe is built-in to that ~8%. This is the same service that Google and Apple provide for in-app payments.
> Stripe and Paddle are leading full-service, turnkey payment processing, and merchant-of-record providers handling all the services necessary for link-out, including payment processing, tax compliance, fraud detection, and customer service. Across the top apps, the mean implied processing and merchant-of-record fee based on Stripe’s and Paddle’s rack rates (which few, if any, large developers actually pay because they negotiate discounts or provision in-house) is 8.1% using Stripe rates, or 7.8% using Paddle rates.
So, Google take 10x what payment providers charge to take the payments because some companies will charge you 5x what it costs and handle your taxes and accounting?
> it bothers OP less that they take a 15% tax than the fact that google provides terrible support for their own play store.
The terrible support is really deeper than support. You literally stopped doing business here, because the lack of a feedback channel that allows Google to improve their business (i.e. realize they need a way to quickly correct stupid automated decisions) been Google's worst enemy and best friend. By ignoring support & feedback, the friction for internal decision making is low (no pesky customer demands, the product manager is king, management gets their way), but it leads to I think a lot of Google's products failing because they do not really understand their users, and the why behind the what they use.
I'm not sure being a monopoly alone explains Google's behavior here, but it could be as simple as that: who cares about one small customer... it's not like they have a viable alternative.
> the friction for internal decision making is low (no pesky customer demands, the product manager is king, management gets their way)
I'd like to support that this goes "both" ways for companies who destroy their customer service. Not only do they not know what their customers want/problems they're having, but they don't know what their customers wouldn't want/problems they're not having. Like you say, it "lowers the friction," so some dumb, destructive idea that somebody has gets implemented based on title and force of personality.
But that's a monopoly. Nothing they do is destructive, other than putting any more work in than is necessary. If the store went down for weeks at a time, they might have a problem. The problem would result from this personally irritating and inconveniencing a regulator/politician, judge, or major stockholder/owner.
Being a monopoly alone does not explain Google's behavior here. Google has a long history of not providing support.
The company's philosophy on the issue seems to be rooted in the hacker ethos of not giving repetitive work to humans if a machine could do it. When a machine can't do it, Google's thinking is to improve the machine. If the systems are good enough, nobody will need support.
The systems are not good enough, and that has been true for a long enough time that a reasonable company would have realized that a good support team is necessary until some far-future time.
> The company's philosophy on the issue seems to be rooted in the hacker ethos of not giving repetitive work to humans if a machine could do it. When a machine can't do it, Google's thinking is to improve the machine. If the systems are good enough, nobody will need support.
I have not worked at Google, but rather at 4 different companies that built automation machinery (ie multi discipline execution between mechanical, electrical, and software engineers). In none of those cases was it ever “the hacker ethos”. It was mid to upper level management whose incentive loops tended to be associated more with either shareholder perception or HR head counts. All of the engineers were usually begging the company to do a better job (allocate resources) to last mile customer support. Engineers build things, and are usually more satisfied if the products they build are well received because of the “last mile” bit where someone helps a customer appreciate their creation.
GP is not wrong, though. Google is well and publicly known for this approach. One of the most prominent example is their formulation of the role of SRE, which is now considered standard in the industry.
Yeah, I spend my free time making it accessible to bike in my area. Some of that is providing google with free street view data and other stuff. The amount of broken stuff and lack of support, when I'm literally giving them free work, is insane. I hate to do it, but the good outweighs the bad imo (I also provide it to open alternatives like OSM, Mapillary etc).
Like, their pipeline has been broken for months. No way to contact them. There is a support page for the api, but they close all issues as "the api is working". Well, sure, you accept the street view so the api is technically working, but haven't processed any for months.. It's probably a different team, but no way they would bother talking to each other..
It's sad, but I'd estimate 99.9% of the use of the images I've taken is through google street view, not alternatives. It's what people reach for when they're curious about conditions somewhere.
> OpenStreetMap is open data, licensed under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL) by the OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF). In summary:
>
> You are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt our data, as long as you credit OpenStreetMap and its contributors. If you alter or build upon our data, you may distribute the result only under the same license.
Yup, but at least my uploads to Mapillary are creative commons licensed, so it's currently the best way of distributing the terrabytes of images I've taken of paths. Unfortunately no Panoramax instance that accepts contributions from my area.
Thank you for being a great example of how to handle this kind of situation and taking the time to explain your reasoning.
You could have very easily chosen to be bitter, complain in an opaque manner, and do nothing, much like the siblings of this reply. You instead recognize that constructive action along with clear communication is the way.
> I'm not sure being a monopoly alone explains Google's behavior here, but it could be as simple as that: who cares about one small customer... it's not like they have a viable alternative.
The last line contradicts the first line. Being a monopoly means they don’t have to care. If Apple and Google were required to allow competing app stores as first-class citizens then they would have to provide better service or no one would use their stores and they’d lose out on all of the taxes they’re collecting from app developers.
Thanks for writing this out. I'd seen a lot of arguments for why we need multiple app stores, but I think this might be the first time I've seen someone crystallize the fact that an app store itself is a competitive business model that could provide better/cheaper services with competition.
Say we do what you're suggesting. There's now three stores on Android devices when you take them out of the box: Google Play, Crumbt, and Dipple. Crumbt quickly gains a reputation for hosting sketchy software, with some diamonds in the rough, but users also regularly report getting malware on their phones. That said everything is free, which makes it the #1 stop for people who have to buy the down-market phones anyway because they can't afford apps either. Dipple, meanwhile, promises no AI features or content, and immediately gets a following with the more monied crowd that not only will pay for apps, but prefers to to avoid ads and spammy generative content.
The problem, as I see it, is we still have the old, bad experience from google, and we now have one other experience that lets anything in, so people are still getting malware, and we have still a third that's offering premium features to users with cash to spend and leaves everyone else out in the cold.
I know I'm being negative with my examples, but at the same time, the PROBLEM, as I see it, is power asymmetry: lack of oversight on the part of the platforms means nasty shit gets through, and lack of actionable routes to be remediated means the risk lands squarely on the user, who is disempowered already. Additional app markets solve none of that.
Like, sure, an app market could come along promising to be on the user's side: it will immediately not attract developers, because developers will (correctly) see that it's riskier there than elsewhere. And there's not really a monetary reason to make an ethical app store, whatever that happens to mean, because far more money is made being an unethical one that hangs it's users out to dry.
I just don't think these are problems yet more markets can solve, because fundamentally, what's broken about them is what makes them so wildly profitable. And I can't fathom another store not coming along and, even if not at first, doing the exact same thing again anyways that Play has already done, because it works. Because Play itself was immitating/innovating on the same axis as Apple's App Store.
I don't think paywalling a non-fucked experience is a good solution for... anything, really. Like why do we have to charge people to get out of the fuck barrel? How about we just not have it?
yes, i agree with this. the context of my answer was n the even we have to have an appstore at all; personally i'd rather download an app from a website (and signed with their certificate, for example) than slog through a 'store'
My favorite quip in response to asking for something to get improved inside of Google is, "no one ever asked for this", knowing full well the opportunity to ask was near zero and no one ever looked.
Google is a crazy town, data driven by cherry picked post-hoc rationalizations driven by perf. The user never enters the equation.
Yeah this the thing that grinds my gears about Apple too. These fools will argue in court out of one side of their mouth that they need to police the store etc then out of the other side of their mouth they just don’t do it and collect the revenue. Which is it?
This is a pretty common sentiment. I make iOS exclusive apps because I know when facing any problem Google support will be non-existent. Apple takes ages to respond but has been known to be humanly possible so far.
> it is expected to pay something since the play store doesn't run on good thoughts and prayers.
Hard disagree. Google chose to insert themselves into software delivery on Android. If they don't want to pay the cost for doing that themselves they can stop.
I know this is a stupid question even before I ask it, but is there any chance at this point of seeing something out of the scope of Apple and Google for mobile?? Will the bank apps ever allow people out of these two players
Motorola is planning to release phones with GrapheneOS. So far only expensive models have been confirmed, but I assume cheapos should follow.
Of course they're not doing this out of good heart. My theory is that China wants to have a popular smartphone that is completely independent from US companies. But hey, once upon a time Google were "the good guys" too, so enjoy the party while it lasts.
An interesting point is that it's important to have powerful China around because they're a capitalist competition to the US.
> An interesting point is that it's important to have powerful China around because they're a capitalist competition to the US.
Semi-capitalist at best. They're good for cloning things invented in the West, but the problem is that that is much cheaper than inventing, so things get commoditised and the places that can do expensive R&D have to find other ways to make money all the time.
1. That's not true. More and more segments of technology are being dominated by China. China sells lots and lots of everyday objects that are wholly desgined in China, with quality beating western products. They're just small improvements over existing designs of relatively simple things, so nothing makes the headlines.
2. Lots of Chinese technology never leaves China for political reasons, rather than economic/technology ones.
3. If you want to buy a semi-professional machine as an advanced hobbyist, often your only option is China.
4. Apple is wildly known for taking existing designs and improving on them. Why is it good for Apple to do that, but bad for China to do that?
The important thing is not the product, its the machine that makes the product.
A lot of the tech in china in invisible, normal people don't buy machines the size of a pickup truck, runs on 3kv and has 500 hp motors, has a production run of 5 of these machines ever built, is custom designed by engineers and weighs as much as 4 pickup trucks.
2 companies can build the same product that looks similar and operates the same.
But they can end up with vastly different price points when you look at how the factory is designed, how these massive custom machines are engineered.
You need to keep in mind to make one product you need to design and build like 10 machines, these machines are each the size and weight of 1->4 pickup trucks, BOM's with 10,000+ components, are filled with circuit boards, sensors, takes an army of engineers multiple years etc... and the company is going to build like 5 of these machines in the lifetime of the design.
China's competitive advantage is basically this and why the products that can be made by hand aren't moving from china to 3rd world countries. They have a lot of engineers, with this type of experience and a lot of invisible tech that average consumers don't see.
Their machines that make products are not only expertly designed, maintained, but they squeeze out as much efficiency as possible in things like electricity consumption, cooling, minimizing maintenance over millions of cycles of running these machines, and pass these to consumers as lower costs. China is very competitive, if your machine making widgets isn't well designed, a competitor will design their own widget making machine that consumes 40% electricity and requires half the maintenance and then will undercut your widgets.
Isn't graphene completely dependent on what Google ships though? Ok they may be able to support Motorola devices longer than Googles releases facilitate supporting Google devices, but it's still ultimately android, which is still ultimately controlled by Google.
I'm not saying it isn't an improvement but this feels like choosing centos because you don't like the direction fedora is taking.
If you are referring to banking apps, I just don't use banking apps that don't work on my degoogled phone thus granting them the low fraud risk they so strive for with forcing locked devices.
> your bank 100% has a checkbox on your account they can click to disable any phone hardware requirements
I was going to thank you. I still thank you if this is true.
How do you know about the bank checkbox?
My bank is huge and I’m skeptical they give a crap about me any more than Google. Their app certainly doesn’t look like it.
(I noticed your account has been posting a lot of what I consider to be “garbage comments” in this article, so I’d like some kind of claim to fact check.)
No, because it is near impossible to compete with "free" and totally impossible to compete with "free-and-you-can-use-ad-block."
The truth is that these corps are so entrenched because people love love love the ad model. I mean, they hate the ads, but they are so sold on access being free that introducing a cost would come off like charging money to walk in a public park. Totally confusing.
And frankly the other path wouldn't be all roses either. There would be a wealth divide in technology where poor people wouldn't be able to afford to use all the stuff available to them now for free.
We can’t even get some of the largest banks to do competent 2 factor, after all these years. The idea that they’re going to produce feature parity on peculiar platforms does seem like a big stretch.
(not GP) i'd be interested in knowing. i dont have any banking apps as i havent needed them yet, but i'd be curious to know if any fraction of these actions are impossible without an app VS going into a branch of your bank and spending time with a rep
> This effectively means I’m paying Google more than 1000 Euro per year for their services. 1000 Euro per year is 1.5x what I’m paying for my internet access. It’s roughly what I’m paying for my notebook per year if you assume I use it for three to four years. When my internet breaks, someone drives to my house and fixes it. When my notebook breaks, someone drives to my house and fixes it.
Couldn’t have said better. We all allowed it to come to this.
Unfortunately google is now a massive juggernaut that has 20+ layers before you can ship anything, and thats bled out to the users of their services. I wish we had better alternatives. In fact, I now just focus on shipping a PWA.
Btw thanks to the author. I got Conversations to work with Micro (https://micro.mu), the personal assistant I'm building. Its a nice XMPP client. Now just need to figure out how to do encryption for queries going into the model itself.
Sorry this is a bit of a long rant. To many people here this will be a very old hut but I've only recently realized that Apple and Google are basically extortion rackets and have made the online world way worse and enshittified than it should be. Why? They deliberately make it as hard as possible to sell true cross-platform apps. "Buy one license, install our software on all of your devices." That should sound reasonable, yet it's impossible as a business model. If you put an app on the Apple Store or on Google Play, you cannot have it unlocked by a license code. So you have to sell it on their platform. That means that if you want to sell one license for all platforms, you'd have to force your users to buy the license in one of those stores, then generate desktop license from that store purchase. That's not just nonsense, it still wouldn't work because the user can still not switch from iOS to Android and vice versa.
Okay, so sell mobile platforms separately but make desktop platforms with one license. That would still be nice and comparatively hassle-free for your customers. Not so fast, though! Desktop app stores also prohibit free apps with unlock mechanism. So you have to put unlockable versions on your website. However, app stores explicitly prohibit even just mentioning that the user doesn't have to buy an app if they have already bought it elsewhere. They strictly prohibit pointing the user elsewhere to check whether they could use it for free. Consequently, unless your users are extremely well educated about those platform quirks, many of them will erroneously buy your app twice.
But wait! There is an exception in Apple Store and Google Play Store. You're strictly prohibited from putting an app on there that needs to be unlocked by a license key, but you are allowed to ask the user to create an account or log into an existing account with a user name and email address. As long as users can also purchase the app on the respective store, that's allowed. So you can tie the app to an account and unlock it if the user already bought it for another platform. For some reason, unlocking an app with a code is strictly prohibited but unlocking it by providing your email and a password and then contacting a server is totally fine. That's why so many apps have those shitty login requirements. I wasn't really aware of that.
In a nutshell, apart from "freemium models" there are two major ways to sell cross-platform software that really is cross-platform. First, make the user pay individually for each platform, make them buy your app again and again with all the hassle that brings. Second, force them to login with an email and a user name with some direct contact to some centralized hub server.
IMHO, all of these options are strictly worse than just allowing your users to buy the app anywhere they like and unlock it for all other platforms.
All these stores, Apple Store, Google etc... must be
opened up. They constitute an illegal monopoly. Why does
the US government protect monopolies? This is against
the core tent of capitalism, aka more competition in
a free, open market, to have prices be as low as reasonable
possible for the customer. The USA shifted towards de-facto
monopolistic mafias. Financial kickbacks to the US government
must logically exist here - otherwise one can not explain
why the US government works for the interest of mega-corporations
only now.
To the author.
Go buy yourself some socks.Maybe a wallet, and go to the resturaunt that never fails you, or more generaly put in a concerted shameless effort to catch up, relax, fit the worst little personal bugs and recuring inconvieniences, essentialy put the same attention that you put into maintaining your product, into your self, remember to say fuck you google as you put the new
" toothbrush * " you got by the sink, that you have reminded yourself but failed to get for the last six months, because thats what we give up, when we are blamming ourselves for the rejections we get from nameless faceless functionaries, that doom loop of 'engagement' is the point behind the delays and mindless activity, and reversing it is almost magical.
* 'toothbrush', anything that is a constant tiny irritant going away can be absurdly triumphant
I get excited every time I learn about another E2EE messaging app where the server can be self-hosted. But as I understand it, the server that triggers push notifications for any android app must be hard-coded into the app's binary. Are there any good architectural workarounds for this? I've read a little bit about VAPID[1] but I don't know if it is actually a viable approach and I don't think I've ever seen it promoted in an E2EE messaging app with a self-hosted server.
It's possible for the app to poll the server for new messages. iOS also supports light background work that can poll server from time to time and trigger notification on the device, rather than using apple's push notification infra.
The trade off is that you gain some extra privacy with simpler architecture and accept that some notifications will be delayed as ios decides when to run the bg job for the app.
source: I develop e2e app with self-hostable server (145 lines of zero deps python for the whole server).
I assume the only way it to be a good citizen: an app someone uses often, app itself is low cpu/memory, BG app refresh quick/cheap/doesn't drain much energy.
But yeah, if you need a predictable way is either APN or safari push notifications.
Conversations is a XMPP client, it's essentially the same protocol that delivers reliable notifications to every Android, Nintendo switch, etc. Unless you have an Android distro that kills every background app indiscriminately, you will be fine with Conversations delivering messages and notifications to you.
Interestingly, the link you posted relates to Unified Push, which is a protocol that relies on a "distributor" app which acts as a proxy, receiving reliable notifications on behalf of other applications. And it happens that Conversations can be configured as a UP distributor, because of how good it is at that/how well the XMPP protocol lends itself to it.
Long way to say you should give XMPP a shot, it really works well!
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadAnd they're annoying and often screw up the review process.
Google is always going to make money off any work they do. That's just business. They're not going to put more money towards better reviews without taking more money. And without the reviews, even as crappy as they are, a lot of really crappy software would be on the store. And a lot more would be actively malicious
And you were making like 7x as much as they were taking. Without them, you would even get noticed and you'd have made nothing.
We know this because almost nobody installs FDroid, and the other stores like Samsung make basically nothing for developers, even though they're preinstalled on so many devices.
Imagine if all streets were owned by two large companies who charged you enough to use them that you'd be paying as much in fees as you are in paying for gas. People would still use cars. The streets could be in horrible condition, the two companies would be making an insane amount of profit, but there would still be people out there saying that if it wasn't for those companies we wouldn't be getting anywhere and it's just business.
what is "fair" in your opinion?
If you are here, thank you for Conversations, Daniel, it has been my go-to for years for communicating with friends and family.
The farmer take care of his pigs but only to the point they get slaughtered.
(Long) distance communications, just like public roads, breathable air, potable drinking water and so on do not fit into a "free market economy" paradigm.
They simply don't fulfill the basic requirements that make the "market" idea work.
Specifically, a free market needs goods from different suppliers to be easily interchangeable. You cannot sensibly build multiple roads parallel to each other, or have multiple water pipes installed and you have only one airway to breath through.
And there are other companies: Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Tencent MyApp, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Honor, K Telecom T-Store, Jio, MTN Play.
Not even close to a captured utility. And if it were, which state on the planet should own it?
Tell me about the different OSes each of Samsung, Huawei, Tencent MyApp, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Honor etc. run then that we can choose from.
It's like saying Windows doesn't have a monopoly in the PC space because HP, Dell, Lenovo, ASUS.
Other companies using Google's incredible R&D spend and selling phones that use it is not Google's failing.
And we're talking app stores. They all have app stores disconnected from Google's app store.
> It's like saying Windows doesn't have a monopoly in the PC space because HP, Dell, Lenovo, ASUS.
No, on two counts. One: - and it's the same with Android - Apple exists, and so there's definitely not a monopoly from a lowercase personal computing perspective. Two: the conversation is about app stores. There are many app stores. It's like saying Microsoft doesn't have a PC hardware monopoly because HP, Dell, Lenovo, ASUS.
Pretending, some other company could come stroll along and take over Google's turf, completely ignores the underlying reality.
People don't talk on two phones at once, they only use one search engine regularly and they even only use one browser to surf the internet.
That bottleneck leads to market capture due to inevitable logical reasons, not because I say so.
If you want autonomous states, each one has to control their own infrastructure. Just don't forget to question your assumptions.
But try telling the internet that their "morally pure" addiction to skirting compensation is actually what is killing (killed?) the web.
Every competitor dies in the cradle because 40% of the internet won't pay them while using their service.
Youtube with ad-blocking is the best video service on the internet, and no one can touch that.
There should be an agency you can complain to for monopolies which has the power to dictate new rules to the monopolist with far reaching power to crack down on anything that smells like anti competitive behavior.
e.g.
- force banking apps that try to secure themselves with google play services to make that dependency optional.
- force google to stop blocking newpipe, aurora, etc.
- force google pay to make itself available on any platform that wants to integrate it.
- force google to allow alternative app stores to become first class citizens.
So anyway, the US government should run an open-access, quad-track railroad and fiber backbone along every highway. Maximize the ROI on that ROW. Also they should nationalize Android and iOS.
[0] Because slavery. The South really, REALLY hated any government roads because it diminished the economic power of literally owning a lot of people. Hell, one of the stipulations of the Confederate Constitution was to strip the General Welfare clause out of the constitution.
Mobile app stores are more like banks - a big problem when there are not a lot but a problem that can be remedied by having the government compete (e.g. with a post office bank).
The government could set up a competing app store, that might not be a bad idea, actually. They could hardly do a worse job than google and apple at vetting app developers and it would put a firecracker up google and apples ass.
I think part of what makes a utility a utility is that the nature of the service is naturally a monopoly. For example, you can only realistically have one set of waterways, so the company providing water as a service is a utility. Same with power lines, you can only realistically have one set, so the electricity-supplying company is a utility. With phone/internet service, I imagine they also share infrastructure.
Google doesn't fit in that paradigm. The nature of their services don't naturally require sharing resources to compete. They a monopoly simply because they amassed a ton a money to do things that other people can't, like drive on all roads on Earth with special cameras, or host however many videos there are on YouTube, serving those videos throughout the world, and even pay livable wages for the creation of such videos.
I called the bus company, a native speaker of my language immediately picked up, rescheduled the ticket, and told me to pay €2 extra to the bus driver.
I was shocked that customer support could be so simple.
BTW I spent 6 hours total spread along 12 months calling an Indian customer service before I got my money back for the cancelled flight.
Outsourcing was a predecessor of LLMs.
Obviously not the same everywhere, but generally it’s true and holds up.
(of course a side effect might be that half the economy implodes but thats besides the point ^^)
making things free causes a loss of price signal, so i'd say it would be a good idea to restore that...
said in another way, i feel like giving the customer upfront knowledge about what something actually costs is more pro-consumer because now we can make informed choices
I don't think this (people not realizing it) is true. We've heard this argument since early 2010s, and the general attitude of population is "ok, cool, so what?". Even people like me, who know that I'm paying it with my data, still overwhelmingly prefer using such services.
For every scandal about data leakage, 3rd party access and etc., the social media websites are still top used apps. People don't want their privacy/secrets/photos to be available to people they know, or might know. They don't really care about "giant faceless company"/government, even though they say they do.
I wish this was not true.
And yet people (in general) just dont care, because they don't truly feel the pain until it's too late - issues like privacy and such are like that.
The fact is, google engineered their app store to be monopoly, following apple's model (which is also engineered - they had more foresight about it).
There are no good artificial monopolies, and natural monopolies should be regulated to prevent undue influence (and unwarranted profit).
> For years I’ve felt like I was in a toxic relationship with Google, and the only reason I stayed was economic dependency.
Not slavery: one party makes you supply widgets or you aren't allowed to eat or sleep. Another party gives you widgets for picking cotton.
We should all be happy to participate in the not slavery society, right?
+1.
Free to read online - https://charleseisenstein.org/books/sacred-economics/
https://stripe.com/managed-payments
This is what Apple said about it:
> Stripe and Paddle are leading full-service, turnkey payment processing, and merchant-of-record providers handling all the services necessary for link-out, including payment processing, tax compliance, fraud detection, and customer service. Across the top apps, the mean implied processing and merchant-of-record fee based on Stripe’s and Paddle’s rack rates (which few, if any, large developers actually pay because they negotiate discounts or provision in-house) is 8.1% using Stripe rates, or 7.8% using Paddle rates.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
The terrible support is really deeper than support. You literally stopped doing business here, because the lack of a feedback channel that allows Google to improve their business (i.e. realize they need a way to quickly correct stupid automated decisions) been Google's worst enemy and best friend. By ignoring support & feedback, the friction for internal decision making is low (no pesky customer demands, the product manager is king, management gets their way), but it leads to I think a lot of Google's products failing because they do not really understand their users, and the why behind the what they use.
I'm not sure being a monopoly alone explains Google's behavior here, but it could be as simple as that: who cares about one small customer... it's not like they have a viable alternative.
I'd like to support that this goes "both" ways for companies who destroy their customer service. Not only do they not know what their customers want/problems they're having, but they don't know what their customers wouldn't want/problems they're not having. Like you say, it "lowers the friction," so some dumb, destructive idea that somebody has gets implemented based on title and force of personality.
But that's a monopoly. Nothing they do is destructive, other than putting any more work in than is necessary. If the store went down for weeks at a time, they might have a problem. The problem would result from this personally irritating and inconveniencing a regulator/politician, judge, or major stockholder/owner.
The company's philosophy on the issue seems to be rooted in the hacker ethos of not giving repetitive work to humans if a machine could do it. When a machine can't do it, Google's thinking is to improve the machine. If the systems are good enough, nobody will need support.
The systems are not good enough, and that has been true for a long enough time that a reasonable company would have realized that a good support team is necessary until some far-future time.
I have not worked at Google, but rather at 4 different companies that built automation machinery (ie multi discipline execution between mechanical, electrical, and software engineers). In none of those cases was it ever “the hacker ethos”. It was mid to upper level management whose incentive loops tended to be associated more with either shareholder perception or HR head counts. All of the engineers were usually begging the company to do a better job (allocate resources) to last mile customer support. Engineers build things, and are usually more satisfied if the products they build are well received because of the “last mile” bit where someone helps a customer appreciate their creation.
Like, their pipeline has been broken for months. No way to contact them. There is a support page for the api, but they close all issues as "the api is working". Well, sure, you accept the street view so the api is technically working, but haven't processed any for months.. It's probably a different team, but no way they would bother talking to each other..
>
> You are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt our data, as long as you credit OpenStreetMap and its contributors. If you alter or build upon our data, you may distribute the result only under the same license.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright
I've personally noticed this for edits I've made to obscure, completely out of the way areas.
You could have very easily chosen to be bitter, complain in an opaque manner, and do nothing, much like the siblings of this reply. You instead recognize that constructive action along with clear communication is the way.
The last line contradicts the first line. Being a monopoly means they don’t have to care. If Apple and Google were required to allow competing app stores as first-class citizens then they would have to provide better service or no one would use their stores and they’d lose out on all of the taxes they’re collecting from app developers.
Say we do what you're suggesting. There's now three stores on Android devices when you take them out of the box: Google Play, Crumbt, and Dipple. Crumbt quickly gains a reputation for hosting sketchy software, with some diamonds in the rough, but users also regularly report getting malware on their phones. That said everything is free, which makes it the #1 stop for people who have to buy the down-market phones anyway because they can't afford apps either. Dipple, meanwhile, promises no AI features or content, and immediately gets a following with the more monied crowd that not only will pay for apps, but prefers to to avoid ads and spammy generative content.
The problem, as I see it, is we still have the old, bad experience from google, and we now have one other experience that lets anything in, so people are still getting malware, and we have still a third that's offering premium features to users with cash to spend and leaves everyone else out in the cold.
I know I'm being negative with my examples, but at the same time, the PROBLEM, as I see it, is power asymmetry: lack of oversight on the part of the platforms means nasty shit gets through, and lack of actionable routes to be remediated means the risk lands squarely on the user, who is disempowered already. Additional app markets solve none of that.
Like, sure, an app market could come along promising to be on the user's side: it will immediately not attract developers, because developers will (correctly) see that it's riskier there than elsewhere. And there's not really a monetary reason to make an ethical app store, whatever that happens to mean, because far more money is made being an unethical one that hangs it's users out to dry.
I just don't think these are problems yet more markets can solve, because fundamentally, what's broken about them is what makes them so wildly profitable. And I can't fathom another store not coming along and, even if not at first, doing the exact same thing again anyways that Play has already done, because it works. Because Play itself was immitating/innovating on the same axis as Apple's App Store.
(this is putting aside wetter we should even need 'appstores')
Google is a crazy town, data driven by cherry picked post-hoc rationalizations driven by perf. The user never enters the equation.
Hard disagree. Google chose to insert themselves into software delivery on Android. If they don't want to pay the cost for doing that themselves they can stop.
Of course they're not doing this out of good heart. My theory is that China wants to have a popular smartphone that is completely independent from US companies. But hey, once upon a time Google were "the good guys" too, so enjoy the party while it lasts.
An interesting point is that it's important to have powerful China around because they're a capitalist competition to the US.
Semi-capitalist at best. They're good for cloning things invented in the West, but the problem is that that is much cheaper than inventing, so things get commoditised and the places that can do expensive R&D have to find other ways to make money all the time.
2. Lots of Chinese technology never leaves China for political reasons, rather than economic/technology ones.
3. If you want to buy a semi-professional machine as an advanced hobbyist, often your only option is China.
4. Apple is wildly known for taking existing designs and improving on them. Why is it good for Apple to do that, but bad for China to do that?
I'm not saying that's the case.
A lot of the tech in china in invisible, normal people don't buy machines the size of a pickup truck, runs on 3kv and has 500 hp motors, has a production run of 5 of these machines ever built, is custom designed by engineers and weighs as much as 4 pickup trucks.
2 companies can build the same product that looks similar and operates the same.
But they can end up with vastly different price points when you look at how the factory is designed, how these massive custom machines are engineered.
You need to keep in mind to make one product you need to design and build like 10 machines, these machines are each the size and weight of 1->4 pickup trucks, BOM's with 10,000+ components, are filled with circuit boards, sensors, takes an army of engineers multiple years etc... and the company is going to build like 5 of these machines in the lifetime of the design.
China's competitive advantage is basically this and why the products that can be made by hand aren't moving from china to 3rd world countries. They have a lot of engineers, with this type of experience and a lot of invisible tech that average consumers don't see.
Their machines that make products are not only expertly designed, maintained, but they squeeze out as much efficiency as possible in things like electricity consumption, cooling, minimizing maintenance over millions of cycles of running these machines, and pass these to consumers as lower costs. China is very competitive, if your machine making widgets isn't well designed, a competitor will design their own widget making machine that consumes 40% electricity and requires half the maintenance and then will undercut your widgets.
I'm not saying it isn't an improvement but this feels like choosing centos because you don't like the direction fedora is taking.
I was going to thank you. I still thank you if this is true.
How do you know about the bank checkbox?
My bank is huge and I’m skeptical they give a crap about me any more than Google. Their app certainly doesn’t look like it.
(I noticed your account has been posting a lot of what I consider to be “garbage comments” in this article, so I’d like some kind of claim to fact check.)
The truth is that these corps are so entrenched because people love love love the ad model. I mean, they hate the ads, but they are so sold on access being free that introducing a cost would come off like charging money to walk in a public park. Totally confusing.
And frankly the other path wouldn't be all roses either. There would be a wealth divide in technology where poor people wouldn't be able to afford to use all the stuff available to them now for free.
Couldn’t have said better. We all allowed it to come to this.
Btw thanks to the author. I got Conversations to work with Micro (https://micro.mu), the personal assistant I'm building. Its a nice XMPP client. Now just need to figure out how to do encryption for queries going into the model itself.
That just about sums up Big Tech
Okay, so sell mobile platforms separately but make desktop platforms with one license. That would still be nice and comparatively hassle-free for your customers. Not so fast, though! Desktop app stores also prohibit free apps with unlock mechanism. So you have to put unlockable versions on your website. However, app stores explicitly prohibit even just mentioning that the user doesn't have to buy an app if they have already bought it elsewhere. They strictly prohibit pointing the user elsewhere to check whether they could use it for free. Consequently, unless your users are extremely well educated about those platform quirks, many of them will erroneously buy your app twice.
But wait! There is an exception in Apple Store and Google Play Store. You're strictly prohibited from putting an app on there that needs to be unlocked by a license key, but you are allowed to ask the user to create an account or log into an existing account with a user name and email address. As long as users can also purchase the app on the respective store, that's allowed. So you can tie the app to an account and unlock it if the user already bought it for another platform. For some reason, unlocking an app with a code is strictly prohibited but unlocking it by providing your email and a password and then contacting a server is totally fine. That's why so many apps have those shitty login requirements. I wasn't really aware of that.
In a nutshell, apart from "freemium models" there are two major ways to sell cross-platform software that really is cross-platform. First, make the user pay individually for each platform, make them buy your app again and again with all the hassle that brings. Second, force them to login with an email and a user name with some direct contact to some centralized hub server.
IMHO, all of these options are strictly worse than just allowing your users to buy the app anywhere they like and unlock it for all other platforms.
Open ALL stores.
Google Play's app registration is so much more complicated now that Good Luck getting to production ever.
And even then the same thing on every update. If you're a small business and your livelihood depends on that then it's a nightmare to deal with.
And no, kicking them out won't be a problem. No sky is going to fall. Vacuum would be filled in very quickly.
* 'toothbrush', anything that is a constant tiny irritant going away can be absurdly triumphant
[1] (Disclosure: the AI gave me this link) https://unifiedpush.org/news/20250131_push_for_decentralized...
The trade off is that you gain some extra privacy with simpler architecture and accept that some notifications will be delayed as ios decides when to run the bg job for the app.
source: I develop e2e app with self-hostable server (145 lines of zero deps python for the whole server).
Even Android is not predicatable from my testing or I'm doing something wrong
But yeah, if you need a predictable way is either APN or safari push notifications.
Interestingly, the link you posted relates to Unified Push, which is a protocol that relies on a "distributor" app which acts as a proxy, receiving reliable notifications on behalf of other applications. And it happens that Conversations can be configured as a UP distributor, because of how good it is at that/how well the XMPP protocol lends itself to it.
Long way to say you should give XMPP a shot, it really works well!
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#Tivoization