10 ms·

> No single entity should wield this much power. And we should rewrite the laws to make this so. I think in fact a lot of people do want them to do this. Folks

> No single entity should wield this much power. And we should rewrite the laws to make this so. I think in fact a lot of people do want them to do this. Folks complain the Play store is full of malware and spam, and that there are data leaks and deceptive ads. Then Google or Apple goes and removes them, and then folks are mad if that process has errors. It seems like a business where you make everyone mad no matter what you do. [edit: Just to be clear, I'm not a fan of the practice. But an awful lot of folks seem to think Apple and Google SHOULD wield editorial power, if only to stop outright malware. And of course, certain politicians want to make sure that the internet refuses to show content unflattering to people in power]

echelon 8y ago
> I think in fact a lot of people do want them to do this. I, the engineer, do not want them to do this. Before Google and Apple, I didn't have this problem. I didn't have to pay their tax or march to their beat. You might argue that it's their platform and that's the cost for us to pay. But it wasn't always this way! These companies leveraged their advantages to steal eyeballs away from an open web and lock them in their own platform. They could have spent money making the open web work better on mobile. Or designing a portable app framework and runtime for all devices. But we know why they didn't and what the outcome has been. I want them to pay back the negative externalities they've leveraged onto us.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  > I, the engineer, do not want them to do this Eh, you are but one person, amongst billions. There's a good chance that what you don't want != what others want.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    That's the problem with targeting the lowest common denominator. Since that LCD is mindless consumption, that's what the ecosystem evolves to. If you have stuff to actually do, you're increasingly out of luck.
- hug 8y ago
  > Before Google and Apple, I didn't have this problem. I didn't have to pay their tax or march to their beat. You still don't! You don't have the play by their rules, and you can still target everyone who has a non-Google or non-Apple phone, which as a target market is appreciably no one, much as it was before Google and Apple entered the phone market. You can target them if they have phones produced by your hated manufacturers anyway by making your app a webapp instead of a native app. You don't want to do those things, and that's fine, but you're yearning to go back to a time that never existed.
  - Spoom 8y ago
    FWIW you can target Google phones outside Google Play too. You just need to tell the user to enable some settings and download an APK.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      What could possibly go wrong.... https://fox5sandiego.com/2019/01/17/fortnite-security-flaw-exposed-80-million-accounts/ https://fox5sandiego.com/2019/01/17/fortnite-security-flaw-e...
  - echelon 8y ago
    > back to a time that never existed Personal PCs were just this back in the 90's and 00's. Microsoft tried to create a walled garden, but it failed due to the world wide web. Google and Apple saw how Microsoft failed and decided that the app store would be a first class citizen on day one and that the mobile web [1] would be an afterthought. They learned from Microsoft's mistake and used their positions to make app stores the new status quo. It could have easily gone a different way, but I understand how the business interests got us to where we are. [1] the mobile web wouldn't have been nice without more money and research poured into it. The web stack could have been supplemented or a new one could have been developed. These companies obviously had other priorities than to pay for something that netted them nothing, but individual developers wound out worse for it.
    - kyralis 8y ago
- scarface74 8y ago
  Well, at the same time users had to deal with adware, viruses, etc. Your needs as a developer don’t trump users needs. They could have spent money making the open web work better on mobile. Or designing a portable app framework and runtime for all devices. But we know why they didn't and what the outcome has been. And write once run everywhere worked so well with Java applets.
- yegle 8y ago
  AFAIKT, Google indeed pushes Progressive Web Apps pretty hard.
- ucaetano 8y ago
  > I, the engineer, do not want them to do this. You don't matter, consumers matter. > Before Google and Apple, I didn't have this problem. And you didn't have distribution either. > But it wasn't always this way! Indeed, there wasn't even distribution. Do you actually remember what was shipping mobile software back in 2005? > I want them to pay back the negative externalities they've leveraged onto us. Again, you as an engineer don't matter, only as a consumer. And consumers have never had so many options and at such low prices.
  - hrayr 8y ago
    I don't entirely disagree with you, but what do we call the web if not distribution?
    - ucaetano 8y ago
      The web didn't disappear, quite the opposite. Now you have the web AND the in-device app stores. Even more choice.
      - echelon 8y ago
        But they're not equal citizens on mobile devices. Web often feels sluggish on mobile, and it doesn't have the same access to device and hardware APIs, nor does it allow low-level control of concurrency and allocation. (I don't want to get off topic about HTML/JS. It does a lot of jobs well.) There could have been an open, cross-platform native app stack if Apple and Google and a consortium of other companies had joined forces and made it so. There's no technical reason preventing this. The economic incentives got us to where we are. Devices should be easy to target. There should be the option to use multiple app stores right off the bat, and you shouldn't have to bundle to get access to Gmail. Or even better - point your browser at gmail.com and get the native app installed on your mobile device. Distributed updates from gmail.com sans app store. The OS would still control permissions and guard against malicious apps. The world wide web era was truly unique and special, and it's a shame the same principles didn't carry into the mobile world.
- ddingus 8y ago
  Please, you engineer, do your best to make the app usable from a browser. I dislike apps. Sometimes they make sense. Fine. Often, they do not, or offer less functionality than PC or web does. If you need payment, make that easy, same. Cancel easy too. Just because that is nice, and we all could use nice. You like nice, I like nice. Let us be nice. If you need profanity, whatever, I get it. Let's be adults. I don't like the gate keepers and do not trust them. I do not expect you to trust me, nor you me. Clean, open, portable web for both of us as much as can be managed. I support you, you support me, us. I can be a user on linux, android, iOS, Windows, BSD, whatever I can get on the web. Sometimes dependent stuff is needed for the job. I get it. Please try to avoid that stuff, and I will try and run more relevant systems. :D I really do avoid apps, really do try and be a good user, really do prefer web and really do run a bunch of OSes. We both are rare. I do advocacy every chance I get. Maybe you can too. Stick together in a figurative sense. My development is small, embedded systems and or specific purpose programs. Enough to get the engineer speaking here. Hopefully, you are a user enough to do similar things.
  - drdaeman 8y ago
    I happen to prefer the exactly opposite - I don't want to run the browser (or a browser-wrapper), I want app to be native. <rant>Websites lack solid, consistent and platform-native look-and-feel. They are always limited, they aren't integrated with the operating system (i.e. task switcher), they are slow on almost anything (because modern web browsers are ugly giant behemoths. I've recently built myself a very beefy machine (16-core CPU, 128GiB RAM) and even now _sometimes_ sites are still choppy. On mobile, lots of sites are performing poorly.</rant>
    - hombre_fatal 8y ago
      Perhaps the best features about the web, though, are the share-centric nature of being able to pass around a link, the control we have over the client, and the distribution of apps and info that's least encumbered by gatekeepers. For example, let's go all the way to the other end of the spectrum where the web as we know it didn't take off and everything was siloed into native apps that you had to download from the App Store before trying something new. That seems pretty grim to me. I think we're in a sweet spot and lucky to have both.
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
The problem is the process is largely automated, both for approval and removal. If trash wasn't let into the Play Store in the first place, there wouldn't be so many issues with pulling content back out of it. Consumers and developers alike would be far better off dealing with a properly human-curated store with actual customer service, even if it meant there were less apps in it.
- dwighttk 8y ago
  This is Google. If you want human-curated go to Yahoo!
  - ucaetano 8y ago
    We all know how that ended :)
- UncleMeat 8y ago
  > If trash wasn't let into the Play Store in the first place How exactly do you plan on enforcing this without automation? There are millions of apps on the Play Store. Many are updated dozens of times a year. How many thousands of reverse engineers do you plan on hiring to prevent bad behavior without error?
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    There's no reason for there to be "millions on apps on the Play Store". Literally no reason. It's likely 99% of users would entirely be served by the top 50,000 to 100,000 apps. For the other 1%, there is sideloading. As far as how many app reviewers to hire? Well, Apple manages their store pretty well. Google has about eleventy billion dollars in cash, so I'm sure they could afford to hire a few people to do the job.
    - Nasrudith 8y ago
      If you want absolutely no competition, guild style selection, and losing people enmasse when it inevitably lacks a killer app sure - and don't mind losing money over time instead of gaining it - inflow vs outflow is what matters not cash reserves.
btown 8y ago
It is absolutely possible to do this without making people mad. The solution is simple: educated, intelligent customer service for developers. Heck, make them pay a developer subscription fee to make the customer service cost-neutral. Or make them pay a refundable deposit to escalate a situation for manual review by a trained developer, at the cost of a market salary for however long that developer would take to review the situation. But this cuts into the gatekeepers' profit. Why have a cost-neutral program when you can not worry about having that program at all, and (in Apple's case) still charge people for access to the store and documentation?
- GorgeRonde 8y ago
  I shouldn't have to pay for that customer service if Google or Apple's cut is 30% of app revenues.
  - jakobegger 8y ago
    I'm pretty sure that 99% of apps on the store make so little revenue that it's not worth it to pay someone competent to review them, especially with all the ad supported free apps. So a very low percentage of apps pay for the cost of running the app store. A fixed filing fee would level that imbalance.
    - a_imho 8y ago
      Developers pay $25 or so on sign up.
      - stedaniels 8y ago
        Which barely covers a competent person sipping a coffee whilst glancing at the title of your app.
      - jakobegger 8y ago
        And after paying those $25 they are free to spam the review team with hundreds of submissions? Doesn't sound sustainable to me. If App Stores charged a fee per submission, that would drastically cut down on spam submissions, and free up resources for those of us who actually put a lot of effort into our apps.
yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
> Folks complain the Play store is full of malware and spam, and that there are data leaks and deceptive ads. They have trouble with false positive and false negatives. This does not make me want to give them more power.
rjf72 8y ago
The problem and solution are one and the same. Google is trying to automate tasks that are nowhere near ready for automation. This doesn't even really make any sense either. You might argue its because they're huge, but the numbers don't add up. Google netted about $31 billion in 2018. It's hard to tell exactly how many apps are published on Google Play per year, but it seems to be in the ballpark of 200,000 [1]. Let's hire some low wage employees to spend just 1 hour per app which is generally enough time to determine if an app is at all legitimate. That's obviously 200,000 man hours. Creating these jobs in the USA could be done for about $10/hour, or $2 million, or a minuscule fraction of 1% of their their annual net income. Problem solved, happy customers, happy developers, jobs created. But Google gonna Google. Though even here if they really wanted to Google, they could even hire these guys in e.g. India or wherever and pay a fraction of even that fraction of what they'd have to pay if they created these jobs in the US. But I'm certain they've Googled that the $ cost of pissed off customers and developers is less than the $ cost of providing a decent solution. The one confounding issue here might be that the 200k is lowballing the number of apps. After all that's only the apps that are published, not the ones that are refused publication. But all of the above holds true even if you push it up to 2,000,000 apps trying to publish per year. Perhaps the more salient point is that Google also charges $25 before you can even try to publish an app. Why not direct that money to a human being and actually have a half decent review process? That same human being might even be able to answer complex questions like, "Hey, I don't even have any ads in my app. Why was my app removed for deceptive ads?" in a timely fashion. [1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/266210/number-of-available-applications-in-the-google-play-store/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266210/number-of-availab...
- KirinDave 8y ago
  Apple doesn't automate it and it's difficult to make a case that it's better. They've certainly made errors and bad decisions. So... I'm not sure automation is to blame. What's more, you could make an argument that any process will have an observable error rate at scale. Would we be having a different conversation in a different universe where this same post exists, but Google didn't automate? I'm not so sure. > Creating these jobs in the USA could be done for about $10/hour, Uh, minimum wage is $15 in most places. $10/hr isn't even above the poverty line. It's less than $20k a year pre-tax. If you're appropriating the language of socialism, at least do it in a way that doesn't fall apart to someone with mental math skills.
8note 8y ago
sounds like a great time to make it a matter of legal compliance; that way, they can always blame the government for how it's done.
zahrc 8y ago
It’s a slippery slope for me, personally. I’ve been working in security quite some time, before that I’ve been in support and Helpdesk. (To give a little background on my anecdotal experience) The sheer number of people who got infected with mal- and adware is disturbing and they demanded and believed that their provider or the device OEM is to be held responsible. That’s not my evaluation of the situation, but the entry barrier for the web and its possibilities is very low, while the damage which can be done is pretty critical sometimes. I personally don’t see any “everyone is pleased” solution, it’s a bit frustrating that the more tech-savvy folk is getting punished for straight out ignorance of the vast majority.
fifnir 8y ago
> It seems like a business where you make everyone mad no matter what you do. Maybe you can spent some of your gazillion dollars to hire humans instead of relying on automated half-measures

echelon 8y ago

> I think in fact a lot of people do want them to do this. I, the engineer, do not want them to do this. Before Google and Apple, I didn't have this problem. I didn't have to pay their tax or march to their beat. You might argue that it's their platform and that's the cost for us to pay. But it wasn't always this way! These companies leveraged their advantages to steal eyeballs away from an open web and lock them in their own platform. They could have spent money making the open web work better on mobile. Or designing a portable app framework and runtime for all devices. But we know why they didn't and what the outcome has been. I want them to pay back the negative externalities they've leveraged onto us.

craftyguy 8y ago
> I, the engineer, do not want them to do this Eh, you are but one person, amongst billions. There's a good chance that what you don't want != what others want.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  That's the problem with targeting the lowest common denominator. Since that LCD is mindless consumption, that's what the ecosystem evolves to. If you have stuff to actually do, you're increasingly out of luck.
hug 8y ago
> Before Google and Apple, I didn't have this problem. I didn't have to pay their tax or march to their beat. You still don't! You don't have the play by their rules, and you can still target everyone who has a non-Google or non-Apple phone, which as a target market is appreciably no one, much as it was before Google and Apple entered the phone market. You can target them if they have phones produced by your hated manufacturers anyway by making your app a webapp instead of a native app. You don't want to do those things, and that's fine, but you're yearning to go back to a time that never existed.
- Spoom 8y ago
  FWIW you can target Google phones outside Google Play too. You just need to tell the user to enable some settings and download an APK.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    What could possibly go wrong.... https://fox5sandiego.com/2019/01/17/fortnite-security-flaw-exposed-80-million-accounts/ https://fox5sandiego.com/2019/01/17/fortnite-security-flaw-e...
- echelon 8y ago
  > back to a time that never existed Personal PCs were just this back in the 90's and 00's. Microsoft tried to create a walled garden, but it failed due to the world wide web. Google and Apple saw how Microsoft failed and decided that the app store would be a first class citizen on day one and that the mobile web [1] would be an afterthought. They learned from Microsoft's mistake and used their positions to make app stores the new status quo. It could have easily gone a different way, but I understand how the business interests got us to where we are. [1] the mobile web wouldn't have been nice without more money and research poured into it. The web stack could have been supplemented or a new one could have been developed. These companies obviously had other priorities than to pay for something that netted them nothing, but individual developers wound out worse for it.
  - kyralis 8y ago
scarface74 8y ago
Well, at the same time users had to deal with adware, viruses, etc. Your needs as a developer don’t trump users needs. They could have spent money making the open web work better on mobile. Or designing a portable app framework and runtime for all devices. But we know why they didn't and what the outcome has been. And write once run everywhere worked so well with Java applets.
yegle 8y ago
AFAIKT, Google indeed pushes Progressive Web Apps pretty hard.
ucaetano 8y ago
> I, the engineer, do not want them to do this. You don't matter, consumers matter. > Before Google and Apple, I didn't have this problem. And you didn't have distribution either. > But it wasn't always this way! Indeed, there wasn't even distribution. Do you actually remember what was shipping mobile software back in 2005? > I want them to pay back the negative externalities they've leveraged onto us. Again, you as an engineer don't matter, only as a consumer. And consumers have never had so many options and at such low prices.
- hrayr 8y ago
  I don't entirely disagree with you, but what do we call the web if not distribution?
  - ucaetano 8y ago
    The web didn't disappear, quite the opposite. Now you have the web AND the in-device app stores. Even more choice.
    - echelon 8y ago
      But they're not equal citizens on mobile devices. Web often feels sluggish on mobile, and it doesn't have the same access to device and hardware APIs, nor does it allow low-level control of concurrency and allocation. (I don't want to get off topic about HTML/JS. It does a lot of jobs well.) There could have been an open, cross-platform native app stack if Apple and Google and a consortium of other companies had joined forces and made it so. There's no technical reason preventing this. The economic incentives got us to where we are. Devices should be easy to target. There should be the option to use multiple app stores right off the bat, and you shouldn't have to bundle to get access to Gmail. Or even better - point your browser at gmail.com and get the native app installed on your mobile device. Distributed updates from gmail.com sans app store. The OS would still control permissions and guard against malicious apps. The world wide web era was truly unique and special, and it's a shame the same principles didn't carry into the mobile world.
ddingus 8y ago
Please, you engineer, do your best to make the app usable from a browser. I dislike apps. Sometimes they make sense. Fine. Often, they do not, or offer less functionality than PC or web does. If you need payment, make that easy, same. Cancel easy too. Just because that is nice, and we all could use nice. You like nice, I like nice. Let us be nice. If you need profanity, whatever, I get it. Let's be adults. I don't like the gate keepers and do not trust them. I do not expect you to trust me, nor you me. Clean, open, portable web for both of us as much as can be managed. I support you, you support me, us. I can be a user on linux, android, iOS, Windows, BSD, whatever I can get on the web. Sometimes dependent stuff is needed for the job. I get it. Please try to avoid that stuff, and I will try and run more relevant systems. :D I really do avoid apps, really do try and be a good user, really do prefer web and really do run a bunch of OSes. We both are rare. I do advocacy every chance I get. Maybe you can too. Stick together in a figurative sense. My development is small, embedded systems and or specific purpose programs. Enough to get the engineer speaking here. Hopefully, you are a user enough to do similar things.
- drdaeman 8y ago
  I happen to prefer the exactly opposite - I don't want to run the browser (or a browser-wrapper), I want app to be native. <rant>Websites lack solid, consistent and platform-native look-and-feel. They are always limited, they aren't integrated with the operating system (i.e. task switcher), they are slow on almost anything (because modern web browsers are ugly giant behemoths. I've recently built myself a very beefy machine (16-core CPU, 128GiB RAM) and even now _sometimes_ sites are still choppy. On mobile, lots of sites are performing poorly.</rant>
  - hombre_fatal 8y ago
    Perhaps the best features about the web, though, are the share-centric nature of being able to pass around a link, the control we have over the client, and the distribution of apps and info that's least encumbered by gatekeepers. For example, let's go all the way to the other end of the spectrum where the web as we know it didn't take off and everything was siloed into native apps that you had to download from the App Store before trying something new. That seems pretty grim to me. I think we're in a sweet spot and lucky to have both.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago

The problem is the process is largely automated, both for approval and removal. If trash wasn't let into the Play Store in the first place, there wouldn't be so many issues with pulling content back out of it. Consumers and developers alike would be far better off dealing with a properly human-curated store with actual customer service, even if it meant there were less apps in it.

dwighttk 8y ago
This is Google. If you want human-curated go to Yahoo!
- ucaetano 8y ago
  We all know how that ended :)
UncleMeat 8y ago
> If trash wasn't let into the Play Store in the first place How exactly do you plan on enforcing this without automation? There are millions of apps on the Play Store. Many are updated dozens of times a year. How many thousands of reverse engineers do you plan on hiring to prevent bad behavior without error?
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  There's no reason for there to be "millions on apps on the Play Store". Literally no reason. It's likely 99% of users would entirely be served by the top 50,000 to 100,000 apps. For the other 1%, there is sideloading. As far as how many app reviewers to hire? Well, Apple manages their store pretty well. Google has about eleventy billion dollars in cash, so I'm sure they could afford to hire a few people to do the job.
  - Nasrudith 8y ago
    If you want absolutely no competition, guild style selection, and losing people enmasse when it inevitably lacks a killer app sure - and don't mind losing money over time instead of gaining it - inflow vs outflow is what matters not cash reserves.

btown 8y ago

It is absolutely possible to do this without making people mad. The solution is simple: educated, intelligent customer service for developers. Heck, make them pay a developer subscription fee to make the customer service cost-neutral. Or make them pay a refundable deposit to escalate a situation for manual review by a trained developer, at the cost of a market salary for however long that developer would take to review the situation. But this cuts into the gatekeepers' profit. Why have a cost-neutral program when you can not worry about having that program at all, and (in Apple's case) still charge people for access to the store and documentation?

GorgeRonde 8y ago
I shouldn't have to pay for that customer service if Google or Apple's cut is 30% of app revenues.
- jakobegger 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure that 99% of apps on the store make so little revenue that it's not worth it to pay someone competent to review them, especially with all the ad supported free apps. So a very low percentage of apps pay for the cost of running the app store. A fixed filing fee would level that imbalance.
  - a_imho 8y ago
    Developers pay $25 or so on sign up.
    - stedaniels 8y ago
      Which barely covers a competent person sipping a coffee whilst glancing at the title of your app.
    - jakobegger 8y ago
      And after paying those $25 they are free to spam the review team with hundreds of submissions? Doesn't sound sustainable to me. If App Stores charged a fee per submission, that would drastically cut down on spam submissions, and free up resources for those of us who actually put a lot of effort into our apps.

yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago

> Folks complain the Play store is full of malware and spam, and that there are data leaks and deceptive ads. They have trouble with false positive and false negatives. This does not make me want to give them more power.

rjf72 8y ago

The problem and solution are one and the same. Google is trying to automate tasks that are nowhere near ready for automation. This doesn't even really make any sense either. You might argue its because they're huge, but the numbers don't add up. Google netted about $31 billion in 2018. It's hard to tell exactly how many apps are published on Google Play per year, but it seems to be in the ballpark of 200,000 [1]. Let's hire some low wage employees to spend just 1 hour per app which is generally enough time to determine if an app is at all legitimate. That's obviously 200,000 man hours. Creating these jobs in the USA could be done for about $10/hour, or $2 million, or a minuscule fraction of 1% of their their annual net income. Problem solved, happy customers, happy developers, jobs created. But Google gonna Google. Though even here if they really wanted to Google, they could even hire these guys in e.g. India or wherever and pay a fraction of even that fraction of what they'd have to pay if they created these jobs in the US. But I'm certain they've Googled that the $ cost of pissed off customers and developers is less than the $ cost of providing a decent solution. The one confounding issue here might be that the 200k is lowballing the number of apps. After all that's only the apps that are published, not the ones that are refused publication. But all of the above holds true even if you push it up to 2,000,000 apps trying to publish per year. Perhaps the more salient point is that Google also charges $25 before you can even try to publish an app. Why not direct that money to a human being and actually have a half decent review process? That same human being might even be able to answer complex questions like, "Hey, I don't even have any ads in my app. Why was my app removed for deceptive ads?" in a timely fashion. [1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/266210/number-of-available-applications-in-the-google-play-store/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266210/number-of-availab...

KirinDave 8y ago
Apple doesn't automate it and it's difficult to make a case that it's better. They've certainly made errors and bad decisions. So... I'm not sure automation is to blame. What's more, you could make an argument that any process will have an observable error rate at scale. Would we be having a different conversation in a different universe where this same post exists, but Google didn't automate? I'm not so sure. > Creating these jobs in the USA could be done for about $10/hour, Uh, minimum wage is $15 in most places. $10/hr isn't even above the poverty line. It's less than $20k a year pre-tax. If you're appropriating the language of socialism, at least do it in a way that doesn't fall apart to someone with mental math skills.

8note 8y ago

sounds like a great time to make it a matter of legal compliance; that way, they can always blame the government for how it's done.

zahrc 8y ago

It’s a slippery slope for me, personally. I’ve been working in security quite some time, before that I’ve been in support and Helpdesk. (To give a little background on my anecdotal experience) The sheer number of people who got infected with mal- and adware is disturbing and they demanded and believed that their provider or the device OEM is to be held responsible. That’s not my evaluation of the situation, but the entry barrier for the web and its possibilities is very low, while the damage which can be done is pretty critical sometimes. I personally don’t see any “everyone is pleased” solution, it’s a bit frustrating that the more tech-savvy folk is getting punished for straight out ignorance of the vast majority.

fifnir 8y ago

> It seems like a business where you make everyone mad no matter what you do. Maybe you can spent some of your gazillion dollars to hire humans instead of relying on automated half-measures