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It's worth noting that this is almost certainly a deliberate policy to push Firebase Cloud Messaging signups & inclusion of accompanying blobs in 3rd-party Andr

It's worth noting that this is almost certainly a deliberate policy to push Firebase Cloud Messaging signups & inclusion of accompanying blobs in 3rd-party Android apps. Even within the non-PWA app world, low adoption of initiatives like UnifiedPush[0] & Android OpenPush[1] mean the canonical way for even open-source Android apps to do efficient push is by including proprietary Google blobs for FCM support, all mediated through Google servers. This is by far the biggest blocker for otherwise FOSS apps to distribute "clean" releases without proprietary code. If Google are putting up these kind of hurdles for app store apps, it makes sense they wouldn't make it any better for PWAs. [0] https://unifiedpush.org/ https://unifiedpush.org/ [1] https://bubu1.eu/openpush/ https://bubu1.eu/openpush/

modeless 3y ago
I don't believe it's any kind of conspiracy to make life hard for open source apps. There are legitimate technical reasons to use a single service for push messaging. This is just a regular old case of bad incentives. Chrome doesn't do a good job of prioritizing issues with user impact and Android doesn't support other teams well.
- dathinab 3y ago
  As far as I can tell the story was something along the line of: 1. design push notifications as technical solution but not the necessary UX/UI and any abuse mitigations making them the perfect tool for abuse (both Chrome and FF, on Windows I only have seen Chrome impl. and it was horrible) 2. oh dang it get's abused 3. add abuse mitigations 4. which do not really mitigate the abuse at all but do prevent any proper use The the 4th point is the wtf something seems fishy point. If they would outright removed it arguing "too much abuse" I would not have been surprised. If they had tried to add proper abuse migrations and failed I would not have been surprised. But they added migrations which very obviously would not fix the most common wide spread abuse but would kill most proper use. And where that isn't a unexpected result, but a very easily predictable result. And that is what is strange because it is as if they kept it around as a pretense at the cost of a lot of non technical users "safety/experience" and iff that was intentionally I would guess it's to cause enough damage so that external institutes like consumer safety groups ask for it to be removed. Which if that would be the case would be quite disgusting. Firefox could fix that by fixing the UI/UX abuse issue (it's all about things outside of the web standard, i.e. doable without changing the standard). But as far as I can tell they do not care, and either implemented it for feature compatibility with chrome or I think the now gone FirefoxOS.
- ComputerGuru 3y ago
  I don’t believe that “conspiracy” is the right word, but I don’t believe your post does the situation justice either. I think it is easy to find yourself in a situation - through no intentional planning of your own - where you have a difficult problem to solve and you don’t stand to benefit from doing so (or, even worse, you lose from do that). You are acknowledging the first part but not the second.
- lucideer 3y ago
  > I don't believe it's any kind of conspiracy to make life hard for open source apps. This is an odd framing of something that generates revenue & provides valuable analytical data - obviously Google aren't doing this just to make life harder for open source apps, that's just a knock-on effect of lock-in in general. > There are legitimate technical reasons to use a single service for push messaging. This is only true if you're referring to local daemons as "services" (e.g. Play Services), not remotely hosted services as is the case here (e.g. FCM). There's zero reason Play couldn't support multiple providers as UnifiedPush, etc. do. Just as there's no technical reason not to properly support Web Push.

modeless 3y ago

I don't believe it's any kind of conspiracy to make life hard for open source apps. There are legitimate technical reasons to use a single service for push messaging. This is just a regular old case of bad incentives. Chrome doesn't do a good job of prioritizing issues with user impact and Android doesn't support other teams well.

dathinab 3y ago
As far as I can tell the story was something along the line of: 1. design push notifications as technical solution but not the necessary UX/UI and any abuse mitigations making them the perfect tool for abuse (both Chrome and FF, on Windows I only have seen Chrome impl. and it was horrible) 2. oh dang it get's abused 3. add abuse mitigations 4. which do not really mitigate the abuse at all but do prevent any proper use The the 4th point is the wtf something seems fishy point. If they would outright removed it arguing "too much abuse" I would not have been surprised. If they had tried to add proper abuse migrations and failed I would not have been surprised. But they added migrations which very obviously would not fix the most common wide spread abuse but would kill most proper use. And where that isn't a unexpected result, but a very easily predictable result. And that is what is strange because it is as if they kept it around as a pretense at the cost of a lot of non technical users "safety/experience" and iff that was intentionally I would guess it's to cause enough damage so that external institutes like consumer safety groups ask for it to be removed. Which if that would be the case would be quite disgusting. Firefox could fix that by fixing the UI/UX abuse issue (it's all about things outside of the web standard, i.e. doable without changing the standard). But as far as I can tell they do not care, and either implemented it for feature compatibility with chrome or I think the now gone FirefoxOS.
ComputerGuru 3y ago
I don’t believe that “conspiracy” is the right word, but I don’t believe your post does the situation justice either. I think it is easy to find yourself in a situation - through no intentional planning of your own - where you have a difficult problem to solve and you don’t stand to benefit from doing so (or, even worse, you lose from do that). You are acknowledging the first part but not the second.
lucideer 3y ago
> I don't believe it's any kind of conspiracy to make life hard for open source apps. This is an odd framing of something that generates revenue & provides valuable analytical data - obviously Google aren't doing this just to make life harder for open source apps, that's just a knock-on effect of lock-in in general. > There are legitimate technical reasons to use a single service for push messaging. This is only true if you're referring to local daemons as "services" (e.g. Play Services), not remotely hosted services as is the case here (e.g. FCM). There's zero reason Play couldn't support multiple providers as UnifiedPush, etc. do. Just as there's no technical reason not to properly support Web Push.