5 ms·

VLC: App Stores Were a Mistake

91 points by bundie 3y ago

ur-whale 3y ago
> App store were a mistake Like most thing on the internet that are designed to make the end user's life easier while boiling the frog behind the scenes, centralizing control and taking away end user freedom. Story as old as the world, if you think about it: relinquishing control and freedom in exchange for comfort and ease of life. The list is endless (iOS, Android, App stores, Windows, censored search engines, YT ...). Just yesterday there was a HN story about gitlab taking down the source code for some game emulator. Exact same premises, exact same outcome: you can either be free or be lazy. You can't be both.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  Yes, my grandparents and parents, who barely had schooling and are not fluid in English are lazy because they have not spent their time learning the ins and outs of spotting malware. They should have spent their time browsing the internet, reinstalling Windows over and over, and reading HN, hopefully learning the signals that can ensure they won’t have some program steal their login credentials to their bank accounts. So lazy of them to do other things in life such as cooking, cleaning, raising a family, and building a business as immigrants in a foreign country.
  - idle_zealot 3y ago
    This isn't a free or safe choose one scenario. As a platform owner Apple could offer a vetting service for known-safe popular applications, make those easy to install, and create a clear scare-screen when enabling installation from other sources, as well as management profile settings for disabling unvetted or 3rd party app installation all together. Then the only education anyone needs is to not install unvetted apps. As a bonus, they could make the app curation system extendable, so other groups could run vetting programs. By default your device would only have Apple as a trusted vetter, but as part of a management profile or something you could also trust apps vetter by some security research group, or Epic, or Valve, or whoever. That way security isn't all-or-nothing. And of course, if anything slips through and your layman user OKs all the warnings and installs a malicious app, it's still operating in a sandbox, and can't do much more harm than clicking a shady link and ending up on a scam website can.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      > This isn't a free or safe choose one scenario. And yet the choose one scenario is the one that has worked best for me. My dad would fill up his Android phone with malware regardless of scare screens. The solution was simple, and allowed at least him and I to spend more time doing other things.
      - idle_zealot 3y ago
        In the scenario I described, equivalent action would be to set up a device policy for him that disables installing untrusted apps. You wouldn't even need to have bought him a new phone!
      - dmz73 3y ago
        It is hard to believe anyone would manage to fill Android phone with malware without going out of their way to do so. Google Play is the default app store. You have to enable installing from other sources. Google Play then still gets to inspect the app and warn you about possible malware. Of course you can disable all the safety feature and only use 3rd party stores...but you have to go out of your way to do that. If person has done that without knowing what they are doing then they will probably fall for the first, second and 10,000th phishing email or phone call and there is nothing anyone can do to protect them.
        idle_zealot 3y ago
        You can fill your phone with malware without ever leaving the Play Store. Similar is true of the App Store, with the caveat that at least hostile iOS apps can't replace your homescreen.
  - majkinetor 3y ago
    Actually, probably lazy :) I know grandparents who actually try to learn IT stuff.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      Sure, classify them as lazy. I’ll prefer to recommend the older people in my family to use iPads and iPhones, and they can spend the time they are not learning IT stuff to do things they are already good at or want to do.
      - majkinetor 3y ago
        You can both do things you love and learn the stuff this world is currently made of.
        lotsofpulp 3y ago
        There are 24 hours in a day, and a limited number of days to live. Everyone makes tradeoffs. Between now and the time my parents die, there is zero value add on them spending time on how to navigate malware. Just like I how don’t spend my time learning how to fix a tractor that my grandpa knows how to fix.
        prmoustache 3y ago
        > there is zero value add on them spending time on how to navigate malware. What about not having to deal with malware?
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  > you can either be free or be lazy. You can't be both. Absolutes and dichotomies make appealing phrasings, but rarely in life is anything that cut and dry.
  - ccppurcell 3y ago
    I think it would be fair to say: there's (often) a trade off between freedom and laziness. From there it follows that, in such situations, you cannot be both maximally free and maximally lazy.
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      Regarding what? People a hundred years ago would say that we are all lazy because we have robotic vacuums and dishwashers and we spend most of our lives on our ass. Everything is a matter of perspective, and that's why neat sounding phrases that try and distill complicated things into if else statements are misleading.
  - sixdimensional 3y ago
    Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure it all takes hard work/effort. Which App Store would we say is the “open” one? I don’t know that one truly exists.. and I feel confident it would be hard work to make such a thing (but it might be worth it).
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      > Which App Store would we say is the “open” one? I don’t know that one truly exists.. and I feel confident it would be hard work to make such a thing (but it might be worth it). There is none, and no matter how much you aren't lazy, you can't have one because Apple won't let you. Which is why that statement 'be free or be lazy' is nonsense.
      - sixdimensional 3y ago
        I haven’t read the details of US vs Apple [1] (only recently heard about it), but presumably this may be part of it? [1] https://www.theverge.com/24107581/doj-v-apple-antitrust-monoply-news-updates https://www.theverge.com/24107581/doj-v-apple-antitrust-mono...
reaperman 3y ago
Would really love to know more details about their struggles on Android Play Store and Windows Store. Edit: Windows Store - https://twitter.com/videolan/status/1759688788232523788?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet https://twitter.com/videolan/status/1759688788232523788?ref_... Android Play Store - https://twitter.com/videolan/status/1771102415279763909?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet https://twitter.com/videolan/status/1771102415279763909?ref_...
- ryandrake 3y ago
  For those who don't want to follow even more Twitter links: It looks like for Windows Store, they are unable to contact a human at Microsoft for technical help, and for Android Play, the store itself is insisting on obtaining their private signing keys and that they drop support for older API versions.
  - KingMob 3y ago
    An important note about their Windows store issue: they've been trying to get help for two years now.
  - orf 3y ago
    What specific technical things do they need help with? Being more clear than “we just need a human to talk to” is better.
    - lostmsu 3y ago
      Yeah, that one is suspect.
    - jaybeavers 3y ago
      Having submitted a number of “product breaking bug reports” through official channels while using a paid support incident, can confirm Kafkaesque and a multi year support process. Oh, I can get a person to “respond” to a problem with a paid support incident. But the person responding is clearly hired only based on their ability to respond to an English email, once a week, with either, “thank you, I will forward that to our engineering team” or “thank you for your patience, our engineers are still looking into that issue.” Severity, impact, paid support, none of that matters. Heck, it’s impossible to tell if it’s an actual person or just a sophisticated shell script.
woadwarrior01 3y ago
Does anybody still use iOS 9? If someone hasn't updated their OS in 8 years, is it reasonable for them the expect app updates on it?
- ryandrake 3y ago
  I have a device (an O.G. iPad) that is stuck on iOS 5.1.1. The hardware still works beautifully, as well as the day I bought it, but thanks to Apple, it's pretty much a brick now. 3P apps refuse to support it because they've all moved their minimum OS version beyond that. Perfectly working junk purely because of software choices.
  - MissTake 3y ago
    “Thanks to Apple”? The original iPad was a 32 bit A8 single core CPU that topped out as 1Ghz and with 256MB Ram and used the ARMv7 instruction set. How do you expect a modern day OS with requirements to deal with real world sensors, and user requirements that didn’t exist back then, to run against that? The latest iPads have 2GB Ram, are 64 bit, run multiple cores and have embedded motion coprocessors and neural capabilities running a much later instruction set. Let’s be reasonable here - that device is now about to be 14 years old. And, if “the hardware works beautifully” how is it “pretty much a brick”? iPads are not the same as laptops or desktops. Sure, you can still run some Linux distros on older 32 bit hardware, but everyone who does knows of the limitations of doing so and realize that they lack the horsepower of modern day computers and use them accordingly.
    - arprocter 3y ago
      I used to roll my eyes at the 'Apple = planned obsolescence' thing; but on the macOS side OpenCore pretty much proves that it's true The amount of hardware that's been thrown away just because they decided it's time you bought a new Mac is insane We're about to see something similar when Windows 10 hits end of life, and everything without a TPM will get trashed
      - 3y ago
ForHackernews 3y ago
VLC is one of the most impressive pieces of software I've ever used. I still remember the time in school when an older kid showed me he could launch VLC from a usb stick, without "installing it" and play torrented movies on the machines in the computer lab, without admin rights or the ability to install codecs. Runs everywhere, plays anything is not an understatement.
- alecsm 3y ago
  And don't forget all the money the founder refused to keep big corps out of it. It's a unique piece of software.
  - HlessClaudesman 3y ago
    That's why the butthurt big tech companies hate it; it blows their bloated crapware out of the water, for free!
sp332 3y ago
I didn't realize this until I saw it in a comment there, but if you download an app from the Windows Store, it will often run its own updater instead of updating from the Store. So even if you download an out of date version of VLC to begin with, it will at least prompt you to upgrade when you start it.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
grishka 3y ago
Another thing why I hate app stores is that they have ratings and reviews. While a good idea in theory, in practice they're meaningless. But because the rating is an "important" metric, app developers do so much to inflate it. All those annoying, incessant popups to "rate your experience", that, if you give 5 starts, would plead you to also rate the app in the store. As an Android app developer, I also have complaints about this — people would sometimes leave negative reviews because of something your app is not related to. Like "I used this app and my account got hacked", on the official app for the service that hosts the account in question. And another tangential issue is how search in Google Play is a ridiculous mess lately. It would show you WhatsApp and some other popular apps for literally any search query, while not finding the app you're actually looking for, even if you enter its exact name.
- doruk101 3y ago
  > And another tangential issue is how search in Google Play is a ridiculous mess lately. It would show you WhatsApp and some other popular apps for literally any search query, while not finding the app you're actually looking for, even if you enter its exact name. I think this applies to any Google product's search these days. As a company that started with a business in search, it is quite ironic.
- donatj 3y ago
  An app I wrote has a single written review complaining about how it can’t read data from another app. I have no way to read data from that app, that’s not a thing I can do.
- viraptor 3y ago
  > All those annoying, incessant popups to "rate your experience", To be fair this is also a behaviour the stores could regulate. (If they cared at all...)
PaulKeeble 3y ago
The combination of store and update service isn't a necessary approach and splitting the two is a lot more open and windows installer like anyway. Chocolatey does just the updating but I don't love how it works but it separates the concerns and allows hosting where ever you want.
sixdimensional 3y ago
Marketplaces are either open or closed. For open marketplaces to thrive, they must be under the control ultimately of decentralized, federated authority. This means light governance based on interoperability standards, followed by independent, autonomous organizational units and individuals participating in open standard process frameworks. That doesn’t mean closed marketplaces don’t work - they do, and well (to a point and certain scale) and are necessary, and there is an interplay between the two. That said, open marketplaces and standards are for certain the superset of closed ones, this is where we get the interplay of public and private. App stores as a model aren’t necessarily the problem, they are just a distribution model. The control and operation of app stores as they are currently controlled mainly as closed/private could be perceived as an obstacle. But, why not then pursue what an open App Store/marketplace might look like? I believe the above is like physics, and some may label me a heretic for the strength of my belief in the above. I truly believe that the sooner humanity advances to this understanding more broadly and we can more easily converse and cooperate in decentralized, federated, open marketplaces as an everyday pursuit, the better off all will be. The Internet, and me being able to post this right now on the open forum of HN is proof of the value in fully understanding and being comfortable with the concepts.
- sixdimensional 3y ago
  Seeing the downvote, let me add relevant context - VLC is one of the most awesome products I have ever seen that is open. My feeling is that an equally great “open App Store” that is popular enough does not exist (and if it did, I suspect Apple for example would actively have prevented it from being an option on iOS). Probable Google too for Android? I am not as sure in the second one.. is there an open Android App Store/marketplace/catalog?
  - kyleee 3y ago
    Yea, fdroid
thunderbong 3y ago
The text: App Stores were a mistake. Currently, we cannot update VLC on Windows Store, and we cannot update VLC on Android Play Store, without reducing security or dropping a lot of users... For now, iOS App Store still allows us to ship for iOS9, but until when?
sixdimensional 3y ago
So what should change?
- thisislife2 3y ago
  Developers shouldn't support App Stores to begin with. Have you heard of Minix, Windows Mobile and Sailfish OS - without developers a platform dies / cannot survive.
politelemon 3y ago
Fdroid handles this pretty well. They don't impose the restrictions that the larger tech firms do, you can build for very very old devices.
wkat4242 3y ago
At least on Android you can simply use another store or sideload the app itself directly. I love that about Android. I don't even have a Google account on my phone.
sys_64738 3y ago
It's about control and OS companies want to return to the old days where the ISV was not a thing unless blessed by them. Sony was a big proponent of this in recent years.
nojvek 3y ago
App stores were definitely a mistake. I see the arguments for we gotta vet and ensure security, but it’s been so political and poorly done that Apple and Google play king makers and rent-collecting empires.
Turing_Machine 3y ago
iOS...9? I actually went to the link to check if this was a mistake.

91 points by bundie 3y ago

> App store were a mistake Like most thing on the internet that are designed to make the end user's life easier while boiling the frog behind the scenes, centralizing control and taking away end user freedom. Story as old as the world, if you think about it: relinquishing control and freedom in exchange for comfort and ease of life. The list is endless (iOS, Android, App stores, Windows, censored search engines, YT ...). Just yesterday there was a HN story about gitlab taking down the source code for some game emulator. Exact same premises, exact same outcome: you can either be free or be lazy. You can't be both.

lotsofpulp 3y ago
Yes, my grandparents and parents, who barely had schooling and are not fluid in English are lazy because they have not spent their time learning the ins and outs of spotting malware. They should have spent their time browsing the internet, reinstalling Windows over and over, and reading HN, hopefully learning the signals that can ensure they won’t have some program steal their login credentials to their bank accounts. So lazy of them to do other things in life such as cooking, cleaning, raising a family, and building a business as immigrants in a foreign country.
- idle_zealot 3y ago
  This isn't a free or safe choose one scenario. As a platform owner Apple could offer a vetting service for known-safe popular applications, make those easy to install, and create a clear scare-screen when enabling installation from other sources, as well as management profile settings for disabling unvetted or 3rd party app installation all together. Then the only education anyone needs is to not install unvetted apps. As a bonus, they could make the app curation system extendable, so other groups could run vetting programs. By default your device would only have Apple as a trusted vetter, but as part of a management profile or something you could also trust apps vetter by some security research group, or Epic, or Valve, or whoever. That way security isn't all-or-nothing. And of course, if anything slips through and your layman user OKs all the warnings and installs a malicious app, it's still operating in a sandbox, and can't do much more harm than clicking a shady link and ending up on a scam website can.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    > This isn't a free or safe choose one scenario. And yet the choose one scenario is the one that has worked best for me. My dad would fill up his Android phone with malware regardless of scare screens. The solution was simple, and allowed at least him and I to spend more time doing other things.
    - idle_zealot 3y ago
      In the scenario I described, equivalent action would be to set up a device policy for him that disables installing untrusted apps. You wouldn't even need to have bought him a new phone!
    - dmz73 3y ago
      It is hard to believe anyone would manage to fill Android phone with malware without going out of their way to do so. Google Play is the default app store. You have to enable installing from other sources. Google Play then still gets to inspect the app and warn you about possible malware. Of course you can disable all the safety feature and only use 3rd party stores...but you have to go out of your way to do that. If person has done that without knowing what they are doing then they will probably fall for the first, second and 10,000th phishing email or phone call and there is nothing anyone can do to protect them.
      - idle_zealot 3y ago
        You can fill your phone with malware without ever leaving the Play Store. Similar is true of the App Store, with the caveat that at least hostile iOS apps can't replace your homescreen.
- majkinetor 3y ago
  Actually, probably lazy :) I know grandparents who actually try to learn IT stuff.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    Sure, classify them as lazy. I’ll prefer to recommend the older people in my family to use iPads and iPhones, and they can spend the time they are not learning IT stuff to do things they are already good at or want to do.
    - majkinetor 3y ago
      You can both do things you love and learn the stuff this world is currently made of.
      - lotsofpulp 3y ago
        There are 24 hours in a day, and a limited number of days to live. Everyone makes tradeoffs. Between now and the time my parents die, there is zero value add on them spending time on how to navigate malware. Just like I how don’t spend my time learning how to fix a tractor that my grandpa knows how to fix.
        prmoustache 3y ago
        > there is zero value add on them spending time on how to navigate malware. What about not having to deal with malware?
Eisenstein 3y ago
> you can either be free or be lazy. You can't be both. Absolutes and dichotomies make appealing phrasings, but rarely in life is anything that cut and dry.
- ccppurcell 3y ago
  I think it would be fair to say: there's (often) a trade off between freedom and laziness. From there it follows that, in such situations, you cannot be both maximally free and maximally lazy.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    Regarding what? People a hundred years ago would say that we are all lazy because we have robotic vacuums and dishwashers and we spend most of our lives on our ass. Everything is a matter of perspective, and that's why neat sounding phrases that try and distill complicated things into if else statements are misleading.
- sixdimensional 3y ago
  Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure it all takes hard work/effort. Which App Store would we say is the “open” one? I don’t know that one truly exists.. and I feel confident it would be hard work to make such a thing (but it might be worth it).
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    > Which App Store would we say is the “open” one? I don’t know that one truly exists.. and I feel confident it would be hard work to make such a thing (but it might be worth it). There is none, and no matter how much you aren't lazy, you can't have one because Apple won't let you. Which is why that statement 'be free or be lazy' is nonsense.
    - sixdimensional 3y ago
      I haven’t read the details of US vs Apple [1] (only recently heard about it), but presumably this may be part of it? [1] https://www.theverge.com/24107581/doj-v-apple-antitrust-monoply-news-updates https://www.theverge.com/24107581/doj-v-apple-antitrust-mono...

reaperman 3y ago

Would really love to know more details about their struggles on Android Play Store and Windows Store. Edit: Windows Store - https://twitter.com/videolan/status/1759688788232523788?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet https://twitter.com/videolan/status/1759688788232523788?ref_... Android Play Store - https://twitter.com/videolan/status/1771102415279763909?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet https://twitter.com/videolan/status/1771102415279763909?ref_...

ryandrake 3y ago
For those who don't want to follow even more Twitter links: It looks like for Windows Store, they are unable to contact a human at Microsoft for technical help, and for Android Play, the store itself is insisting on obtaining their private signing keys and that they drop support for older API versions.
- KingMob 3y ago
  An important note about their Windows store issue: they've been trying to get help for two years now.
- orf 3y ago
  What specific technical things do they need help with? Being more clear than “we just need a human to talk to” is better.
  - lostmsu 3y ago
    Yeah, that one is suspect.
  - jaybeavers 3y ago
    Having submitted a number of “product breaking bug reports” through official channels while using a paid support incident, can confirm Kafkaesque and a multi year support process. Oh, I can get a person to “respond” to a problem with a paid support incident. But the person responding is clearly hired only based on their ability to respond to an English email, once a week, with either, “thank you, I will forward that to our engineering team” or “thank you for your patience, our engineers are still looking into that issue.” Severity, impact, paid support, none of that matters. Heck, it’s impossible to tell if it’s an actual person or just a sophisticated shell script.

woadwarrior01 3y ago

Does anybody still use iOS 9? If someone hasn't updated their OS in 8 years, is it reasonable for them the expect app updates on it?

ryandrake 3y ago
I have a device (an O.G. iPad) that is stuck on iOS 5.1.1. The hardware still works beautifully, as well as the day I bought it, but thanks to Apple, it's pretty much a brick now. 3P apps refuse to support it because they've all moved their minimum OS version beyond that. Perfectly working junk purely because of software choices.
- MissTake 3y ago
  “Thanks to Apple”? The original iPad was a 32 bit A8 single core CPU that topped out as 1Ghz and with 256MB Ram and used the ARMv7 instruction set. How do you expect a modern day OS with requirements to deal with real world sensors, and user requirements that didn’t exist back then, to run against that? The latest iPads have 2GB Ram, are 64 bit, run multiple cores and have embedded motion coprocessors and neural capabilities running a much later instruction set. Let’s be reasonable here - that device is now about to be 14 years old. And, if “the hardware works beautifully” how is it “pretty much a brick”? iPads are not the same as laptops or desktops. Sure, you can still run some Linux distros on older 32 bit hardware, but everyone who does knows of the limitations of doing so and realize that they lack the horsepower of modern day computers and use them accordingly.
  - arprocter 3y ago
    I used to roll my eyes at the 'Apple = planned obsolescence' thing; but on the macOS side OpenCore pretty much proves that it's true The amount of hardware that's been thrown away just because they decided it's time you bought a new Mac is insane We're about to see something similar when Windows 10 hits end of life, and everything without a TPM will get trashed
    - 3y ago

ForHackernews 3y ago

VLC is one of the most impressive pieces of software I've ever used. I still remember the time in school when an older kid showed me he could launch VLC from a usb stick, without "installing it" and play torrented movies on the machines in the computer lab, without admin rights or the ability to install codecs. Runs everywhere, plays anything is not an understatement.

alecsm 3y ago
And don't forget all the money the founder refused to keep big corps out of it. It's a unique piece of software.
- HlessClaudesman 3y ago
  That's why the butthurt big tech companies hate it; it blows their bloated crapware out of the water, for free!

sp332 3y ago

I didn't realize this until I saw it in a comment there, but if you download an app from the Windows Store, it will often run its own updater instead of updating from the Store. So even if you download an out of date version of VLC to begin with, it will at least prompt you to upgrade when you start it.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

grishka 3y ago

Another thing why I hate app stores is that they have ratings and reviews. While a good idea in theory, in practice they're meaningless. But because the rating is an "important" metric, app developers do so much to inflate it. All those annoying, incessant popups to "rate your experience", that, if you give 5 starts, would plead you to also rate the app in the store. As an Android app developer, I also have complaints about this — people would sometimes leave negative reviews because of something your app is not related to. Like "I used this app and my account got hacked", on the official app for the service that hosts the account in question. And another tangential issue is how search in Google Play is a ridiculous mess lately. It would show you WhatsApp and some other popular apps for literally any search query, while not finding the app you're actually looking for, even if you enter its exact name.

doruk101 3y ago
> And another tangential issue is how search in Google Play is a ridiculous mess lately. It would show you WhatsApp and some other popular apps for literally any search query, while not finding the app you're actually looking for, even if you enter its exact name. I think this applies to any Google product's search these days. As a company that started with a business in search, it is quite ironic.
donatj 3y ago
An app I wrote has a single written review complaining about how it can’t read data from another app. I have no way to read data from that app, that’s not a thing I can do.
viraptor 3y ago
> All those annoying, incessant popups to "rate your experience", To be fair this is also a behaviour the stores could regulate. (If they cared at all...)

PaulKeeble 3y ago

The combination of store and update service isn't a necessary approach and splitting the two is a lot more open and windows installer like anyway. Chocolatey does just the updating but I don't love how it works but it separates the concerns and allows hosting where ever you want.

sixdimensional 3y ago

Marketplaces are either open or closed. For open marketplaces to thrive, they must be under the control ultimately of decentralized, federated authority. This means light governance based on interoperability standards, followed by independent, autonomous organizational units and individuals participating in open standard process frameworks. That doesn’t mean closed marketplaces don’t work - they do, and well (to a point and certain scale) and are necessary, and there is an interplay between the two. That said, open marketplaces and standards are for certain the superset of closed ones, this is where we get the interplay of public and private. App stores as a model aren’t necessarily the problem, they are just a distribution model. The control and operation of app stores as they are currently controlled mainly as closed/private could be perceived as an obstacle. But, why not then pursue what an open App Store/marketplace might look like? I believe the above is like physics, and some may label me a heretic for the strength of my belief in the above. I truly believe that the sooner humanity advances to this understanding more broadly and we can more easily converse and cooperate in decentralized, federated, open marketplaces as an everyday pursuit, the better off all will be. The Internet, and me being able to post this right now on the open forum of HN is proof of the value in fully understanding and being comfortable with the concepts.

sixdimensional 3y ago
Seeing the downvote, let me add relevant context - VLC is one of the most awesome products I have ever seen that is open. My feeling is that an equally great “open App Store” that is popular enough does not exist (and if it did, I suspect Apple for example would actively have prevented it from being an option on iOS). Probable Google too for Android? I am not as sure in the second one.. is there an open Android App Store/marketplace/catalog?
- kyleee 3y ago
  Yea, fdroid

thunderbong 3y ago

The text: App Stores were a mistake. Currently, we cannot update VLC on Windows Store, and we cannot update VLC on Android Play Store, without reducing security or dropping a lot of users... For now, iOS App Store still allows us to ship for iOS9, but until when?

sixdimensional 3y ago

So what should change?

thisislife2 3y ago
Developers shouldn't support App Stores to begin with. Have you heard of Minix, Windows Mobile and Sailfish OS - without developers a platform dies / cannot survive.

politelemon 3y ago

Fdroid handles this pretty well. They don't impose the restrictions that the larger tech firms do, you can build for very very old devices.

wkat4242 3y ago

At least on Android you can simply use another store or sideload the app itself directly. I love that about Android. I don't even have a Google account on my phone.

sys_64738 3y ago

It's about control and OS companies want to return to the old days where the ISV was not a thing unless blessed by them. Sony was a big proponent of this in recent years.

nojvek 3y ago

App stores were definitely a mistake. I see the arguments for we gotta vet and ensure security, but it’s been so political and poorly done that Apple and Google play king makers and rent-collecting empires.

Turing_Machine 3y ago

iOS...9? I actually went to the link to check if this was a mistake.