Fortunately PWA are well supported on android, half the apps on my phone are PWA and I didn't need an app store or hacking my device to install them. But I moved from native android to PWA after having hellish issues with their automated developer nightmare system.
Permissions are fine, but on android they happen every single time (and there's yet no option for the 'Allow everytine' that is present on desktop chrome). This is pretty horrible UX for some use cases.
PWAs are awesome but Firefox does not support them, you can only install them with Chrome based browsers. So it is still largely Googles ecosystem and they can fuck with it like they are doing with android apps.
PWA support got worse on the latest android. They removed the clear "Install" button and copied iOS, that is you have to scroll down a long list and select "Add shortcut" / "Add to home screen". IIRC they removed the "install" wording.
It gets better, I too had my account closed for inactivity, but I STILL get emails from them I can't stop because I can't log in to change email preferences.
I don't think they'd be brazen enough to not honor user pref in the mailbox. Although it just might also make it more likely that they can such users at the slightest thing.
Why does anyone even dev for G or A - unless you get a big pay check from either ? Every time I look into mobile dev I just go “yep, NOPE!” and go to have a shower. And it seems to just get worse and worse? Are both app stores going to be full of just unusable vibe coded crap in few years time?
The app I am trying to publish is a PWA but needs a CORS policy bypass for which I have created a small proxy. This proxy needs to be running natively on the device.
Because personal computers are a legacy platform for nerds and programmers, and smartphones are the most widely used consumer computing platform in the world. This desperately needs regulation. Unfortunately the EU is currently regulating the duopoly into law, making their phones necessary for ID verification, so we're probably completely fucked for at least a decade or two before we even have a chance, but that's still not a reason to shrug our shoulders and accept it.
Because at my work, clients want the general public to be able to install their apps sometimes, and my department does native apps, a different department does web stuff. If you want Joe Public to be able to install your app, you have to go through the Google or Apple stores.
However, we don't directly dev in Kotlin or Swift, we use Unity, which can export directly to an APK, or an XCode project (which has to be compiled a second time which is a nightmare). Sometimes we have to write native plugins to access device specific features (Last time I needed to was to access the FoV of the device's main camera), but it's not common, Unity has great support for most things you want to do out of the box
Had the exact same thing. Developed a small game, pushed it to iOS without much fanfare (well, other than having to pay the insanely high toll to get into the garden) and then turned to Android to do the same. Another toll gate at only a quarter the price - sure, lets pay that as well. But then we get to the point where they require images of government issued id and address verification. You can have my money, buddy, but that level of personal data for something small like a game? How about no…
My account got closed for inactivity while I had multiple apps published. Google does not understand the concept of a finished app apparently, and requires you to continuously push updates or else you permanently lose your account with no way of reopening it.
I don't think cron can write code. Jokes aside, I suppose you could just alternate between two lines of code and just publish alternating patch versions. What a stupid situation, fuck Google.
I have just one app I published way back in 2014 or so, and I think there were only 2 updates (only counting changes that required uploading new builds) since then that were like "do this or we're taking the app down".
One of them was requiring a privacy policy, even for a fully offline game that doesn't even have the internet permission. The other one was having to update the target platform version if I remember correctly.
And that would have been fine, if Google hadn't tried to shove the Google Play Store ecosystem down everyone's throat by throwing up barriers for side-loading apps and such.
People love to bash how Microsoft manages Windows, yet they keep forgetting that Microsoft is one of the few OS vendors that actually keeps the APIs around, instead of having a deprecation process, finalised by actually removing the APIs, or hard forcing the new behaviour.
I do like the concept that developers need to put in some effort to keep the app in the app store. Otherwise there'll be millions of orphaned apps and thousands with duplicate functionality.
By mandating a yearly effort the number of apps will fall through attrition and your app stands a bigger chance to get noticed.
Brett Victor’s Earth Primer, one of the most fantastic educational app for Earth. The team has long ago disbanded, so - let’s delete it without trace? Seriously?
You're right that a policy like this favors newcomers. Buy why is being "old" and/or "done" seen as bad in software? We need more developers to embrace "done" and stop changing software for the sake of changing it. Most of the software I use, I like just the way it is. I don't want more features. I don't want the UI to change (again). I don't want AI and chat in them. I don't want to have to upgrade my operating system just to keep using them.
they aren't asking to make changes. It is android is constantly evolving so basically their 'hope' is every app developer will rebuild with latest android and test on a modern device and proactively fix or remove an app if it doesn't. Plenty of apps crash on startup and not a great user experience to be the consumer that finds the crash so pushing it back to dev to do this yearly is a reasonable expectation.
I don't think it's reasonable to change an OS in such a way that apps which did not previously crash on startup now crash on startup. Unless there is some huge change, like moving from one CPU architecture to another, apps should not even have to be rebuilt, let alone modified, just to keep working year after year.
>Unless there is some huge change, like moving from one CPU architecture to another, apps should not even have to be rebuilt, let alone modified, just to keep working year after year.
And, as history teaches us[0], not necessarily even then.
It's not about newcomers. You merely need to update the API level which is something you can do in a few hours. It's mostly an update of the app version, retrieve the SDK for the API level, recompile and go through the motions in the Play Store.
You don't need to add features if you don't want to.
I do like the concept that developers need to submit to yearly flogging to keep the app in the app store. Otherwise there'll be millions of orphaned apps and thousands with duplicate functionality.
By mandating a yearly punishment the number of apps will fall through attrition and your app stands a bigger chance to get noticed.
No, why? If we're going to create arbitrary barriers to entry just to keep the competition down, why not maximize the unpleasantness of these barriers?
They ask you to update SDKs and target Android versions every year, IIRC. So the same philosophy is applied to their OS and devices: they are planned as short-lived artifacts.
Honestly, beyond my deGoogled Android smartphone and a GNU/Linux laptop I am looking around for pocketable device between those. Mecha Comet looks like a perfect fit, but it is not released yet.
Yes, fuck it. This is beyond insane, apparently I cant distribute apps just in GitHub "releases" section anymore without Google's approval. I hope some EU antimonopoly something will fry their asses.
I've heard different things, but as far I knew if you try and install an unsigned apk on a play protect device you can still install it but you have to click "install anyway" on the warning popup
They also love keeping malware apps on the play store as well. I tried reporting an app that took over one of my parents phone. It stayed up for quite a while. I'm sure it's still up.
"App store experience" was continually degrading. I used to be able to find small apps and games I liked a lot and basically binge downloading. The last few times I tried, I ended up with nothing useable.
> So, the guy that HN loves to mock and poke fun at - Richard Stallman - was utterly correct after all.
Yes, he was correct indeed.
But the fact that the message was broadcasted by a dude rocking the personality of a psychotic 4 year old and the general looks of ... let's not go there ... basically prevented everyone with a normal outlook on life to pay attention.
There's this famous chapter of the Little Prince that depicts this exactly, "asteroid B-612" :
Yes, fuck Android though I have to use an Android phone(and I don't want fucking Apple either). I pulled my hobby game from play store because they won't just let it be. Some new regulation now and then and threats to disable the app.
I paid my fee - $20 or $25, I can’t quite remember - but when I couldn’t reliably enter or find my physical home address via Google Maps because of some weird street-name issues, I never got to complete the process!
the browser is the best tool we have now to fight the duopoly and its absurd rules.
Funnily, or depressingly, a lot of people here on HN are against the browser, either because "the UI doesn't look native" or because of security/privacy issues, with regular apps shipping with hundreds of MB or spyware you have no control of.
Let's push for the browser to become more feature rich, more secure and more universal. Or maybe for another OS altogether?
I wouldn't say that it's "production ready" or anything, but I've recently tried KDE Plasma Mobile on an old phone, and it's actually good - not perfect - but I think that if I were to just gove it to someone to play around with, I wouldn't get a "wtf is this weird nerd thing?" response from them
> the browser is the best tool we have now to fight the duopoly and its absurd rules.
The browser, this infamous neutral platform fighting against Google and Apple duopoly by having the two biggest browser made by... Google and Apple ?
Joke aside, the state of the web and browser is depressing right now. Sure, we get webusb and webgpu, and all new fancy spec, and are slowly turning the browser into the final portability layer of the OS. But at what cost ? All browsers are now chrome with a layer of paint. Safari only continues to exist because of iPhone, and everyone is apparently moving on from Firefox.
I keep using FF because I don't want the web to become a Google monopoly, but it's getting harder and harder. Google services that I have to use for work are becoming buggier and buggier on FF, I had big SaaS with bugs making them unusable on FF too. Even a government software I have to use... Nobody seem to QA on FF anymore.
From what I have seen, the WebKit team is actually pretty nice. They are more accommodating to outside developers than the Blink team. It still feels like the open source department at Apple while the Blink team is more like Google corporate development team 38 which happens to reluctantly publish source code.
I don't see the issue with having one open source browser everybody uses with all sorts of variants, as I don't see one Linux kernel with all sorts of distros.
If making a browser has become such a deal (as is making a full OS), then let it be one Chrome. I'm fine with it. But maybe it should be taken over by a foundation instead of a company.
I just recently reopened an account that was closed due to inactivity.
Lucky me i manage different accounts, because the new way to get help for developers is to do that through play console.
But if your account is suspended, you get always redirected to a page that tells you the account is suspended.
Looking at other ways to get to the help portal.... when you select you need help for developers, yep you're redirected.
So because i have another developer account, i could open a support ticket. I had to write the same message to the fucking bot at least three times, which was funny because the answer was more or less a rephrasing of my message, and every time it would add the rephrasing again, and again.
At the fourth time something must have happened because it was escalated, and then i had my account back.
I was actually open to making a new account, which i wrote several times, it's only that i needed to get back the app IDs because you know, the app is installed in places.
Now, it's the first of october and i have constant nagging for unregistered package names on another account: this is for apps that are suspended for bullshit reasons, which i can't reinstate because the bot is in loop mode around the same wrong rule violation (like: i can't make a basic / pro version of my app now? pro version is too simillar so it must be blocked?) and i can't register the package name because it's suspended, an i can't reinstate it because loop. I can't delete it because it's suspended, an i can't reinstate it because loop.
Google employees can pat themselves on the back for a job well done putting the same hurdles in place for software development that apply in a country 3rd last on the World Press Freedom Index.[1][2]
See for example Rosado et al. v. Blanche et al., 1:26-cv-01532[1] which is an active case addressing whether the US federal government suppressed the first amendment rights of the "Eyes Up" application developer by pressuring Apple to remove this application for crowd-sourced recording/reporting of ICE incidents. An injunction has been granted with the following finding:[2]
"the Court finds that Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their claim that Defendants violated their First Amendment rights through coercion of Facebook and Apple."
My reference to a press freedom index is due to a lack of "countries by freedom of software development" index. If such index existed, the methodology may have some commonality with a press freedom index however.
I don't know why Google Play Store/Android in general has a good reputation - in my opinion they got worse than Apple. I recently created apps for both stores, and the Google experience is so bad. Because I am an individual (sole trader) I cannot go down the business route - but need to go through the 12 testers route. That is, I need to find 12 people willing to join a google group, opt-in to beta testing, and have my app installed for 14 days at the same time before I can publish the app on the Play Store. This is ridiculous. I'd rather pay a lump sum as I did for the Apple Store: 99€/year, go through App review, publish.
I had to submit my id, private bank statements (we often don't have monthly utility bills in europe, so I had to submit bank statements) and click through a ton of wizards for compliance, and of course pay 25€. Still no publishing rights. Now I would just pay some clickworkers on Fiverr to fulfill the testing criteria, but that risks getting my account (and app) banned forever. Needless to say that google now has all my private data associated with my google account.
People always say walled garden to the Appstore, but at least the entry ticket has a clear price label.
Because the App is not open source - F-Droid requires OSS software. And yes, there is private repositories that users could manually add, but users won't find you by browsing the F-Droid appstore. F-Droid alone is a tiny fraction of users of Android, and F-Droid users that deal with private repos is a fraction of that fraction. Not worth to bother with that, no one is going to use your app then.
Makes sense, thanks for the context. :) I guess there might be a place for a F-Droid like service that basically stores signed blobs, added by app authors, in a secure manner. Kinda like Flathub - which has closed source stuff, like Steam or Discord.
What a ridiculous policy. I dabbled in iOS development for a while, over 10 years ago, and published an app that probably got 10 users total, when it was available to everyone. I don't think I even know 12 people who would test an app for me.
Same! I ported my free iOS utility app[1] to Android because a lot of people were asking for it. Just before I could publish it, they closed my Play Store account for a year of inactivity. Now, I haven't been able to re-create the Play Store account. Every time I try, money gets debited from my card, but the process ultimately fails. TBF, the money gets refunded after a month or so.
I wonder if an anti-trust lawsuit would have any chance of succeeding. The Android Developer Verification Program is clearly meant to prevent alternative app stores from gaining market share under the guise of "security."
I think it's reasonable that Google mandates that developers identify themselves when publishing on its own app store. But why would they need to do so on alternative app stores if those don't require it?
IIRC the Android Developer Verification Program was only initiated after the EU mandated alternative app stores to be allowed. That would be sufficient cause for an anti-trust indictment.
Has anyone informed the EU about this?
BTW an anti-trust lawsuit would also have a reaonable chance of moving forward in the U.S.
122 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadNow if it is plain old CRUD style application, many that are webviews packaged as APK, sure.
https://progressier.com/what-web-can-do-today
Because personal computers are a legacy platform for nerds and programmers, and smartphones are the most widely used consumer computing platform in the world. This desperately needs regulation. Unfortunately the EU is currently regulating the duopoly into law, making their phones necessary for ID verification, so we're probably completely fucked for at least a decade or two before we even have a chance, but that's still not a reason to shrug our shoulders and accept it.
However, we don't directly dev in Kotlin or Swift, we use Unity, which can export directly to an APK, or an XCode project (which has to be compiled a second time which is a nightmare). Sometimes we have to write native plugins to access device specific features (Last time I needed to was to access the FoV of the device's main camera), but it's not common, Unity has great support for most things you want to do out of the box
Sounds like a perfect job to automate by an always-on LLM.
One of them was requiring a privacy policy, even for a fully offline game that doesn't even have the internet permission. The other one was having to update the target platform version if I remember correctly.
They do! They just hate it.
Apple does the same thing.
Alternative are having applications in 2026 that use POSIX like in UNIX System V, or Win32 like in Windows 95/NT 3.51.
If only……
For starters, there are many "done" apps that are like Swiss cheese in terms of security.
And that would have been fine, if Google hadn't tried to shove the Google Play Store ecosystem down everyone's throat by throwing up barriers for side-loading apps and such.
People love to bash how Microsoft manages Windows, yet they keep forgetting that Microsoft is one of the few OS vendors that actually keeps the APIs around, instead of having a deprecation process, finalised by actually removing the APIs, or hard forcing the new behaviour.
https://developer.android.com/guide/app-compatibility
By mandating a yearly effort the number of apps will fall through attrition and your app stands a bigger chance to get noticed.
https://earthprimer.com
And, as history teaches us[0], not necessarily even then.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-code_machine
*: Conditions may apply.
You don't need to add features if you don't want to.
By mandating a yearly punishment the number of apps will fall through attrition and your app stands a bigger chance to get noticed.
Probably not. Google notoriously bad at customer support.
Wait, what was the question again?
Had to LOL at that understatement. Google invented the ultra-aggressively non-existent customer support model.
That you were still free to write code, put it out there and have people use it freely?
A decade ago, I made a joke comment to a friend that you were soon going to need a carry permit to operate a compiler.
Joke's not so funny in 2026.
Yes, he was correct indeed.
But the fact that the message was broadcasted by a dude rocking the personality of a psychotic 4 year old and the general looks of ... let's not go there ... basically prevented everyone with a normal outlook on life to pay attention.
There's this famous chapter of the Little Prince that depicts this exactly, "asteroid B-612" :
https://www.patternrecognition.asia/jin/prince/english/lpe04...
Which of the following are the reasons you chose Google Play related issues as one of the weaknesses?
The second option, written by Google was:
Sudden account termination without actionable feedback or clear restoration guidance
They know, they just don't care.
There are third alternatives, too (GNU/Linux phones).
I paid my fee - $20 or $25, I can’t quite remember - but when I couldn’t reliably enter or find my physical home address via Google Maps because of some weird street-name issues, I never got to complete the process!
Funnily, or depressingly, a lot of people here on HN are against the browser, either because "the UI doesn't look native" or because of security/privacy issues, with regular apps shipping with hundreds of MB or spyware you have no control of.
Let's push for the browser to become more feature rich, more secure and more universal. Or maybe for another OS altogether?
The browser, this infamous neutral platform fighting against Google and Apple duopoly by having the two biggest browser made by... Google and Apple ?
Joke aside, the state of the web and browser is depressing right now. Sure, we get webusb and webgpu, and all new fancy spec, and are slowly turning the browser into the final portability layer of the OS. But at what cost ? All browsers are now chrome with a layer of paint. Safari only continues to exist because of iPhone, and everyone is apparently moving on from Firefox. I keep using FF because I don't want the web to become a Google monopoly, but it's getting harder and harder. Google services that I have to use for work are becoming buggier and buggier on FF, I had big SaaS with bugs making them unusable on FF too. Even a government software I have to use... Nobody seem to QA on FF anymore.
If making a browser has become such a deal (as is making a full OS), then let it be one Chrome. I'm fine with it. But maybe it should be taken over by a foundation instead of a company.
Lucky me i manage different accounts, because the new way to get help for developers is to do that through play console.
But if your account is suspended, you get always redirected to a page that tells you the account is suspended.
Looking at other ways to get to the help portal.... when you select you need help for developers, yep you're redirected.
So because i have another developer account, i could open a support ticket. I had to write the same message to the fucking bot at least three times, which was funny because the answer was more or less a rephrasing of my message, and every time it would add the rephrasing again, and again.
At the fourth time something must have happened because it was escalated, and then i had my account back.
I was actually open to making a new account, which i wrote several times, it's only that i needed to get back the app IDs because you know, the app is installed in places.
Now, it's the first of october and i have constant nagging for unregistered package names on another account: this is for apps that are suspended for bullshit reasons, which i can't reinstate because the bot is in loop mode around the same wrong rule violation (like: i can't make a basic / pro version of my app now? pro version is too simillar so it must be blocked?) and i can't register the package name because it's suspended, an i can't reinstate it because loop. I can't delete it because it's suspended, an i can't reinstate it because loop.
Fucking brillant!
[1] https://developer.huawei.com/consumer/en/doc/start/rna-00000...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_Index#Rank...
"the Court finds that Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their claim that Defendants violated their First Amendment rights through coercion of Facebook and Apple."
My reference to a press freedom index is due to a lack of "countries by freedom of software development" index. If such index existed, the methodology may have some commonality with a press freedom index however.
[1] https://www.fire.org/cases/rosado-et-al-v-blanche-et-al
[2] https://www.fire.org/sites/default/files/2026/04/Memorandum%...
Go and vibe-code your mobile OS. Lol.
I had to submit my id, private bank statements (we often don't have monthly utility bills in europe, so I had to submit bank statements) and click through a ton of wizards for compliance, and of course pay 25€. Still no publishing rights. Now I would just pay some clickworkers on Fiverr to fulfill the testing criteria, but that risks getting my account (and app) banned forever. Needless to say that google now has all my private data associated with my google account.
People always say walled garden to the Appstore, but at least the entry ticket has a clear price label.
I haven't bothered with them for years now, since the way they treat indie devs is absolutely awful.
And the 12 people/14 days things was a complete show-stopper. Two arbitrary numbers completely pulled out of someone's arse.
I'm happy supporting iOS, macOS and web.
[1]: https://cleanlinks.app/en
I think it's reasonable that Google mandates that developers identify themselves when publishing on its own app store. But why would they need to do so on alternative app stores if those don't require it?
IIRC the Android Developer Verification Program was only initiated after the EU mandated alternative app stores to be allowed. That would be sufficient cause for an anti-trust indictment.
Has anyone informed the EU about this?
BTW an anti-trust lawsuit would also have a reaonable chance of moving forward in the U.S.