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Thank goodness Google is looking out for my privacy! It's doing about as good of a job at that as it is in upholding my right to decide what apps to run on my

by YPPH 4y ago

Thank goodness Google is looking out for my privacy! It's doing about as good of a job at that as it is in upholding my right to decide what apps to run on my device. It's remarkable that all that so-called "unmaintainable code" results in an app which is far more powerful, and just as reliable, as Gmail.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
I dread to think what gmail's codebase looks like, I've heard Stories. Some resources: https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-code-quality-of-the-initial-version-of-Google https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-code-quality-of-the-initi... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2452126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2452126
crowbahr 4y ago
1. The issue here is one of failing to maintain the code, so I don't see how calling it unmaintainable is unfair 2. Google is absolutely doing a lot to prevent 3rd parties from reading your contacts and sending them to a 3rd party server (like this developer was doing). I'm not saying your data is private, I'm saying you have more control over data privacy... but probably not from Google. 3. You can still run this app on your device. Android Studio is free. Go fork, build & side-load it. It will however crash on later versions of Android. Manually giving it permissions should resolve that through at least Android 13. We'll see what 14 brings.
- bhcompy 4y ago
  > You can still run this app on your device. For now. Google's in the process of killing the ability to sideload apks
- dzikimarian 4y ago
  1. How is he failing to maintain it? There was no single issue with code quality in this situation. 2. He is not sending contact list anywhere. If application finds john@gmail.com in your contact list, it makes request for https://gmail.com/favicon.ico https://gmail.com/favicon.ico it's off by default, and has disclaimer next to it. It poses literally zero privacy risk. 3. I use this app daily on Android 12, and this is last android version available for regular users. There's zero issues with it. I would be very happy if all apps were maintained up to this level. I couldn't care less about java being used in order to make that happen.

by YPPH 4y ago

Cthulhu_ 4y ago

I dread to think what gmail's codebase looks like, I've heard Stories. Some resources: https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-code-quality-of-the-initial-version-of-Google https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-code-quality-of-the-initi... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2452126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2452126

crowbahr 4y ago

1. The issue here is one of failing to maintain the code, so I don't see how calling it unmaintainable is unfair 2. Google is absolutely doing a lot to prevent 3rd parties from reading your contacts and sending them to a 3rd party server (like this developer was doing). I'm not saying your data is private, I'm saying you have more control over data privacy... but probably not from Google. 3. You can still run this app on your device. Android Studio is free. Go fork, build & side-load it. It will however crash on later versions of Android. Manually giving it permissions should resolve that through at least Android 13. We'll see what 14 brings.

bhcompy 4y ago
> You can still run this app on your device. For now. Google's in the process of killing the ability to sideload apks
dzikimarian 4y ago
1. How is he failing to maintain it? There was no single issue with code quality in this situation. 2. He is not sending contact list anywhere. If application finds john@gmail.com in your contact list, it makes request for https://gmail.com/favicon.ico https://gmail.com/favicon.ico it's off by default, and has disclaimer next to it. It poses literally zero privacy risk. 3. I use this app daily on Android 12, and this is last android version available for regular users. There's zero issues with it. I would be very happy if all apps were maintained up to this level. I couldn't care less about java being used in order to make that happen.