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here's one example where app store policy disrupted one platform and thousands of people's lives: tumblr. the way it played out ended up very directly impacting
by pxoe 4y ago
here's one example where app store policy disrupted one platform and thousands of people's lives: tumblr. the way it played out ended up very directly impacting online communities and creators. even those who might've been not as directly affected by policy changes, still end up getting disrupted by shifts in audience. those appstores end up affecting users well outside of where their reach supposedly ends, not limited to the actual customers of those appstores. they continuously engage in censorship, and it doesn't stop at 'good censorship', it can be opinionated, prudish, or materialistic and self-serving (such as, prohibiting apps from telling people that they can subscribe directly, instead of going through the appstore). personally I don't need a frigid nanny with a hollier-than-thou 'let us decide for you' attitude. but even when you pick a platform that won't involve being beholden to such decisions, you still end up getting fallout from other platforms that do make decisions like that, even though you're not using them. and this is why it's worth raising a huge stink about monopolistic control over platforms. some policy decisions end up spreading to everyone, no matter what platform they use.
with vague talk about twitter possibly getting some kind of boot from appstores, which will invariably result in some kind of act of censorship to mold it to fit the appstore policies, i don't really get how one could go 'yeah, these things aren't actually impacting people in their day-to-day life'. they absolutely do. literally all of those things mentioned are playing out in real time for twitter and people who use it or affected by it in some kind of way. which turns out to be increasingly everyone.
- carewell 4y agoWe have to fight censorship, not introduce a new attack vector that will result in a whole new class of scams targeted at hundreds of millions of people. Tumblr, Twitter, TikTok - ok, let's focus on preserving access to these apps if you feel this is important. Allowing users to install any unverified app is a massive problem. Just look at what we use our phones for: banking, health, investment, personal info, 2FA, and more.
- lern_too_spel 4y agoF-droid is safer (reproducible builds of open source software) than the Play Store (static analysis followed by dynamic analysis in a cloud emulator), which is safer than the Apple App Store (human looking at a HIG checklist).
- carewell 4y agoTo be clear, F-droid is an excellent piece of software. It's small and is used mostly by quite technical people, so it's not as an attractive target as Apple's AppStore. But that's the thing: some technical solutions work amazingly well for the 0.001% (like HN users). But they do not scale to tech illiterate people. It's a completely different problem space.