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> The resigning stuff is because they alter the apps to fix dependence on Google play apis and gsuite apis. Except the article clearly states: > Amazon wraps

> The resigning stuff is because they alter the apps to fix dependence on Google play apis and gsuite apis. Except the article clearly states: > Amazon wraps your app with code that enables the app to communicate with the Amazon Appstore client to collect analytics, evaluate and enforce program policies, and share aggregated information with you. Your app will always communicate with the Amazon Appstore client when it starts Now, the original reason to do this might have been benign and well-intentioned, but the result is bad already. This is for now, who says they don't simply add ads like Google [0], or even without the developers knowledge like SF [1] once did? Ubuntu tried to only implement a search and it backfired badly [2], I hope this goes down a similar path. As a side-note: Of course I'm very happy that competition to the PlayStore is getting some love. This is direly needed. But Microsoft could have gone with F-Droid easily. Trading a bad thing for something worse does not fill me with joy. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27643208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27643208 [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/sourceforge-grabs-gimp-for-windows-account-wraps-installer-in-bundle-pushing-adware/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/sourc... [2] https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/11/01/ubuntu-search-amazon-privacy/ https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/11/01/ubuntu-search-am...

cptskippy 5y ago
> But Microsoft could have gone with F-Droid easily. Slipping that in at the end really hurts your argument. Microsoft opting to use F-Driod would be worse than starting from scratch and only benefit F-Droid. Presenting F-Droid as an equivalent to any of the large stores is like trying to say a lending library in someone's front yard is the equivalent to Barnes & Noble or Amazon. It's borderline delusional to compare F-Droid to the big players in much the same way it's silly to compare FOSS apps like GIMP to Photoshop. Sure it performs the same core function but they're in completely different classes. They aren't equivalents unless you willfully ignore a lot of differences and that is just dishonest.
- hanselot 5y ago
  The most major difference being that I have come to associate apps installed via F-droid with quality, while I associate anything produced by the "Big players" with bloatware and trash. Almost without exception, the more apps from "Big players'" stores I install, the more laggy and trash my experience on mobile becomes, until I am forced to buy a flagship. This is exactly the same way my PC experience had become prior to migrating to Linux. Now, I get to be in control of my computer, and honestly, if people would shift their attention from "it doesn't compare to 'insert hacked together proprietary trash X' " to, "who actually owns my data and computing devices?", we would immediately see a turnaround of this experience. The catch22 has always been, nobody is using the software on Linux enough for enough people to be submitting feedback, while simultaneously, not enough people believe Linux is worth moving to. Those people still left supporting these corporations immediately jump to the same argument as always, while these "big players" find and innovate unique ways of slipping ever more propaganda directly onto your machine, all while you are stuck staring at the newest trash filter added to photoshop. Quite honestly **** you good sir, how dare you **** on the effort of the Open Source community by even pretending for a second that you are not representing the opinion of the very corporations that would see these communities extinguished if it added so much as a cent to their quarterly profits. Seriously, don't even try to represent what qualifies as software in today's world with what used to be "good" software. There does not exist a program in today's world that isn't a bunch of hacked together trash, sticky-taped together by countless shortcuts, all in an effort to ship in time for the next deadline.
  - na85 5y ago
    >The most major difference being that I have come to associate apps installed via F-droid with quality, while I associate anything produced by the "Big players" with bloatware and trash. Oh c'mon, there are plenty of garbage apps on fdroid. Let's not kid ourselves here.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    > The catch22 has always been, nobody is using the software on Linux enough for enough people to be submitting feedback, while simultaneously, not enough people believe Linux is worth moving to. The problem is somewhere else: Most Linux software doesn't have commercial backers but is written by people to a "works fine enough for me" standard, often with no UX/UI design at all or copying from Windows/OSX at best. As a result, "ordinary" people used to the Windows/OSX get frustrated because of wildly differing design principles between programs, no design principles at all (hello GTK), basic stuff (hello Bluetooth, suspend, audio) not working or atrocious performance. I'm nearly 30 now and don't have the free time to deal with kernel recompilations, trying out forks or whatever just to have a basic system I can work with anymore. "You get what you pay for" is a thing you might look past when you're young and only have to choose how to divide your time between experimenting with hardware, gaming and getting wasted. And in most of the time, I can't even pay for proper support because the developers only make their project on their own as a side gig, which means no project management and issue handling either other than filing issues in a pile of issues in Github (or, worse, mailing lists)... Edit: another thing that comes to mind... people always complain why schools aren't using FOSS but proprietary software (Windows, MS Office). Well guess what, teachers don't have the time to waste on bugs (Libreoffice is nowhere near as polished as MS Office is), explaining to parents why their kids have to learn something different to what everyone else uses at home or to maintain a FOSS-based AD. Samba is decent for a setup in which you have a team of experienced engineers (since you save on licensing costs heavily), but nothing beats the simplicity of a MS Server GUI.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  I did not read Sebb767's comment that way. I read it as one user thinking about alternatives and stating what is technically possible. Technicaly no one needs an "app store", i.e., middleman, to run a program on a computer; meantime, F-Droid works. I think the strange analogies you make are just abstractions you have created in your mind. The comment you replied to offered no such bizarre analogies. HN is a site for intellectual curiosity. Trying to censor or bully free-thinking users into accepting the narrow-minded marketing of large corporations like Microsoft and Amazon is arguably not this forum's highest and best use.
  - Sebb767 5y ago
    > I read it as one user thinking about alternatives and stating what is technically possible You're exactly right; my thought process was "if they want to go with an existing store, F-Droid might be an option". > Trying to censor or bully free-thinking users into accepting the narrow-minded marketing of large corporations like Microsoft and Amazon is arguably not this forum's highest and best use. I think cptskippy just wanted to say that F-Droid is in no way a suitable replacement; since he read my comment in a different way, he just emphasized this more than necessary :)
- Sebb767 5y ago
  As 1vuio0pswjnm7 already correctly pointed out, my suggestion was based on the fact that if they wanted to go with an existing infrastructure, F-Droid would be a possibility. > It's borderline delusional to compare F-Droid to the big players in much the same way it's silly to compare FOSS apps like GIMP to Photoshop. Sure it performs the same core function but they're in completely different classes. I disagree with that. The software itself is clearly irrelevant in this case as they will hardly run the actual store app on windows and the required infrastructure is not a big problem for Microsoft. The existing app base is what matters. To be fair, though, I wasn't aware of how alive the Amazon app store actually is.
ImprobableTruth 5y ago
F-Droid is just way too small, it has ~4000 apps vs ~500000 for Amazon's appstore.
- ohyeshedid 5y ago
  Have you actually spent time in the Amazon android ecosystem? It's absolutely terrible. Total amount of available apps is not a good metric for quality.
  - zo1 5y ago
    Agreed. 95% of all those apps are useless and rehashes of existing apps in some way. And the only reason the whole thing doesn't fall over is because of semi-random search that "spreads" some portion of user downloads to lower quality (or less popular) apps, thereby incentivizing the spaghetti-throwing-at-the-wall ecosystem that is the app stores. Curation models are better in that sense, because they have a limit that forces a quality filter. The alternative is just an evolution of the spam model. You see it with Google turning the web into blog spam, YouTube with videos, ebay/Amazon/aliexpress with "products", and the app stores with their 5million "apps".
- dannyr 5y ago
  My guess though is that most of these apps haven't been updated for years.
whoopdedo 5y ago
> Your app will always communicate with the Amazon Appstore client when it starts One of the consequences of this is that apps refuse to start if they haven't been able to connect with the Store in the past `x` days.
smoldesu 5y ago
I mean, we could also ask Apple to officially support Homebrew while we're at it. The bottom line is... well, the bottom line. Microsoft is very willing to diversify it's partnerships as it's heading into a new decade, and I bet Amazon wasn't adverse to shaking some money their way for routing it all through their services. It's not great, but it's significantly better (imho) than if they had exclusively chosen the Play Store. It's a creative way to gently pressure developers to publish to additional marketplaces, which indirectly pressures Apple since the Microsoft Store now doesn't force developers to route payments through their system (thusly reducing Microsoft's "cut" to 0% for many apps)

cptskippy 5y ago

> But Microsoft could have gone with F-Droid easily. Slipping that in at the end really hurts your argument. Microsoft opting to use F-Driod would be worse than starting from scratch and only benefit F-Droid. Presenting F-Droid as an equivalent to any of the large stores is like trying to say a lending library in someone's front yard is the equivalent to Barnes & Noble or Amazon. It's borderline delusional to compare F-Droid to the big players in much the same way it's silly to compare FOSS apps like GIMP to Photoshop. Sure it performs the same core function but they're in completely different classes. They aren't equivalents unless you willfully ignore a lot of differences and that is just dishonest.

hanselot 5y ago
The most major difference being that I have come to associate apps installed via F-droid with quality, while I associate anything produced by the "Big players" with bloatware and trash. Almost without exception, the more apps from "Big players'" stores I install, the more laggy and trash my experience on mobile becomes, until I am forced to buy a flagship. This is exactly the same way my PC experience had become prior to migrating to Linux. Now, I get to be in control of my computer, and honestly, if people would shift their attention from "it doesn't compare to 'insert hacked together proprietary trash X' " to, "who actually owns my data and computing devices?", we would immediately see a turnaround of this experience. The catch22 has always been, nobody is using the software on Linux enough for enough people to be submitting feedback, while simultaneously, not enough people believe Linux is worth moving to. Those people still left supporting these corporations immediately jump to the same argument as always, while these "big players" find and innovate unique ways of slipping ever more propaganda directly onto your machine, all while you are stuck staring at the newest trash filter added to photoshop. Quite honestly **** you good sir, how dare you **** on the effort of the Open Source community by even pretending for a second that you are not representing the opinion of the very corporations that would see these communities extinguished if it added so much as a cent to their quarterly profits. Seriously, don't even try to represent what qualifies as software in today's world with what used to be "good" software. There does not exist a program in today's world that isn't a bunch of hacked together trash, sticky-taped together by countless shortcuts, all in an effort to ship in time for the next deadline.
- na85 5y ago
  >The most major difference being that I have come to associate apps installed via F-droid with quality, while I associate anything produced by the "Big players" with bloatware and trash. Oh c'mon, there are plenty of garbage apps on fdroid. Let's not kid ourselves here.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > The catch22 has always been, nobody is using the software on Linux enough for enough people to be submitting feedback, while simultaneously, not enough people believe Linux is worth moving to. The problem is somewhere else: Most Linux software doesn't have commercial backers but is written by people to a "works fine enough for me" standard, often with no UX/UI design at all or copying from Windows/OSX at best. As a result, "ordinary" people used to the Windows/OSX get frustrated because of wildly differing design principles between programs, no design principles at all (hello GTK), basic stuff (hello Bluetooth, suspend, audio) not working or atrocious performance. I'm nearly 30 now and don't have the free time to deal with kernel recompilations, trying out forks or whatever just to have a basic system I can work with anymore. "You get what you pay for" is a thing you might look past when you're young and only have to choose how to divide your time between experimenting with hardware, gaming and getting wasted. And in most of the time, I can't even pay for proper support because the developers only make their project on their own as a side gig, which means no project management and issue handling either other than filing issues in a pile of issues in Github (or, worse, mailing lists)... Edit: another thing that comes to mind... people always complain why schools aren't using FOSS but proprietary software (Windows, MS Office). Well guess what, teachers don't have the time to waste on bugs (Libreoffice is nowhere near as polished as MS Office is), explaining to parents why their kids have to learn something different to what everyone else uses at home or to maintain a FOSS-based AD. Samba is decent for a setup in which you have a team of experienced engineers (since you save on licensing costs heavily), but nothing beats the simplicity of a MS Server GUI.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
I did not read Sebb767's comment that way. I read it as one user thinking about alternatives and stating what is technically possible. Technicaly no one needs an "app store", i.e., middleman, to run a program on a computer; meantime, F-Droid works. I think the strange analogies you make are just abstractions you have created in your mind. The comment you replied to offered no such bizarre analogies. HN is a site for intellectual curiosity. Trying to censor or bully free-thinking users into accepting the narrow-minded marketing of large corporations like Microsoft and Amazon is arguably not this forum's highest and best use.
- Sebb767 5y ago
  > I read it as one user thinking about alternatives and stating what is technically possible You're exactly right; my thought process was "if they want to go with an existing store, F-Droid might be an option". > Trying to censor or bully free-thinking users into accepting the narrow-minded marketing of large corporations like Microsoft and Amazon is arguably not this forum's highest and best use. I think cptskippy just wanted to say that F-Droid is in no way a suitable replacement; since he read my comment in a different way, he just emphasized this more than necessary :)
Sebb767 5y ago
As 1vuio0pswjnm7 already correctly pointed out, my suggestion was based on the fact that if they wanted to go with an existing infrastructure, F-Droid would be a possibility. > It's borderline delusional to compare F-Droid to the big players in much the same way it's silly to compare FOSS apps like GIMP to Photoshop. Sure it performs the same core function but they're in completely different classes. I disagree with that. The software itself is clearly irrelevant in this case as they will hardly run the actual store app on windows and the required infrastructure is not a big problem for Microsoft. The existing app base is what matters. To be fair, though, I wasn't aware of how alive the Amazon app store actually is.

ImprobableTruth 5y ago

F-Droid is just way too small, it has ~4000 apps vs ~500000 for Amazon's appstore.

ohyeshedid 5y ago
Have you actually spent time in the Amazon android ecosystem? It's absolutely terrible. Total amount of available apps is not a good metric for quality.
- zo1 5y ago
  Agreed. 95% of all those apps are useless and rehashes of existing apps in some way. And the only reason the whole thing doesn't fall over is because of semi-random search that "spreads" some portion of user downloads to lower quality (or less popular) apps, thereby incentivizing the spaghetti-throwing-at-the-wall ecosystem that is the app stores. Curation models are better in that sense, because they have a limit that forces a quality filter. The alternative is just an evolution of the spam model. You see it with Google turning the web into blog spam, YouTube with videos, ebay/Amazon/aliexpress with "products", and the app stores with their 5million "apps".
dannyr 5y ago
My guess though is that most of these apps haven't been updated for years.

whoopdedo 5y ago

> Your app will always communicate with the Amazon Appstore client when it starts One of the consequences of this is that apps refuse to start if they haven't been able to connect with the Store in the past `x` days.

smoldesu 5y ago

I mean, we could also ask Apple to officially support Homebrew while we're at it. The bottom line is... well, the bottom line. Microsoft is very willing to diversify it's partnerships as it's heading into a new decade, and I bet Amazon wasn't adverse to shaking some money their way for routing it all through their services. It's not great, but it's significantly better (imho) than if they had exclusively chosen the Play Store. It's a creative way to gently pressure developers to publish to additional marketplaces, which indirectly pressures Apple since the Microsoft Store now doesn't force developers to route payments through their system (thusly reducing Microsoft's "cut" to 0% for many apps)