10 ms·

Just waiting for Adobe Store, Amazon Store, Microsoft Store, Epic Games Store, etc. to be installed on every phones soon. Current status isn't normal, but no o

by da768 2y ago

Just waiting for Adobe Store, Amazon Store, Microsoft Store, Epic Games Store, etc. to be installed on every phones soon. Current status isn't normal, but no one would complain about it if transaction fees weren't abusive.

doctorpangloss 2y ago
> Current status isn't normal, but no one would complain about it if transaction fees weren't abusive. This is an oft-repeated misconception. Even if transaction fees were 0%, we'd be way better off with alternative stores. You're just so used to how shitty things are that you can't conceive of a better alternative. Consider that there are plenty of completely free games on Steam that are popular and help those creators find thriving communities. How? They have good discovery. App Store and Google Play sucks in every way. Discovery is awful. Their approach is awful. Why even show download counts and top lists? Stupid, stupid stupid. But you have no choice as a consumer or developer. So the top developers will not complain. What's the point? And anyway, you're complaining about a world where alternatives are viable. Why are alternatives being viable a bad thing. If EGS is paying up front for games and giving them away for free as cross-promo for Fortnite, better that than ad supported garbage. What exactly is the bad thing here, for consumers? The negative aesthetic experience of having more icons? Everyone has to oppose this crushed-in-head line of thinking. One meaingless detail that impacts an extremely low brow part of the aesthetic experience - the fucking home screen icons - should not preclude the gain in meaning from 10k-100k more developers who could flourish in the mobile ecosystem if it were to have working discovery. It has the same energy as requiring Helldivers users to create PSN accounts - offensive only in a strictly aesthetic sense even though successful competition and cross promo benefits everyone. The users' fixation on meaningless aesthetics is wrong. I mean Apple could make discovery pluggable too, all of it could be pluggable and have fewer "icons," this isn't even a real obstacle. There are many, many ideas in this space, and no permissions to do any of it. As it is, the App Store and Google Play are glorified install wizards. Open, install TikTok, Google Maps, whatever. Never visit again. That is 98% of people. That's horrible and its Apple's fault. TikTok already does not pay any fees. This is just to show that you are not right in general, even if you are right about the one company you've heard of that went and took these people to court in this country for an outcome that you should be in favor of.
- talldayo 2y ago
  Free app stores like F-Droid are also great for stopping you from downloading crap software. Whenever I need "normal software" (music player, PDF reader, RSS feed, what have you) I search for it there and don't suffer through ads or microtransactions. It's like using Linux, free software is just what I default to now. Using stock iOS and Android today, it feels like both sides have lost the script. The entire pipeline of "consumption" dominates both platforms, and demands you pay money or accept a competitor's inferior product. Google didn't even let F-Droid auto-update apps until recently, it's a racket on either side. We need to bring the hammer down and enable people to stop supporting shit businesses. The current loop of consumption is going to kill everything we love about computing with a long and painful extortion process.
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    Real question: How does F-Droid police malware?
    - talldayo 2y ago
      By disallowing all proprietary software, building each application themselves, and then signing it with their key before the end-user receives it.
      - throwaway2037 2y ago
        I was not aware. This is interesting to know. Let's go deeper about "malware". I'm sorry that I was not more specific. What about some dumb app that shows holiday calendars or "the weather", but actually uses your mobile to secretly mine Bitcoin? Does their process also stop that type of malware?
        talldayo 2y ago
        That sort of attack would need to take one of two forms: 1) Hijacking an already-approved application 2) Creating a forked/new fraudulent application and submitting it to the store Option 1 requires you to fool the repository owner, first of all. That would mean submitting a pull-request with your malicious code, having that malicious code reviewed by the app author, and then getting it into a major release. In most apps with a significant userbase that's nigh-unimaginable; especially if there are testers or multiple contributors testing and debugging on recent builds. Option 2 requires you to fool the F-Droid admins. This means one of two things. Either creating a forked application with plausible yet distinct features that make it necessary to be forked from the main project. Alternatively, you get ChatGPT (or just copy boilerplate ffs) and make a calculator app or whatever, commit it all to Github and send it in for review. Both of these routes are horribly suspicious - a reviewer is going to want to see if you have multiple contributors, a long history on Github, linked social media accounts or websites, other repositories, binary blobs, that sort of stuff. Maybe they aren't the most cautious, but suffice to say anyone making an attack like this is going to be covered in red flags. So; it's a feasible attack. But it requires so much social manipulation for so little feasible gain (especially when F-Droid wasn't even auto-updating for most people) that it's not worth the effort. If you do manage such a daring attack, your reward is maybe 300-odd sideloading users that mistakenly clicked your install button instead of the other guy's.
seydor 2y ago
app stores have been around for decades now, time to regulate them like they do banks or retail stores
seszett 2y ago
> Just waiting for Adobe Store, Amazon Store, Microsoft Store, Epic Games Store, etc. to be installed on every phones soon. Why would it happen with iOS when it has not happened in the 15 years or so since Android exists? There's basically just one relevant alternative app store which is F-Droid, and it's just all around much better than Google's Play Store, although of course it doesn't have any proprietary, closed-source apps.
- delecti 2y ago
  Android does have other appstores though. Samsung has one for their phones, and Amazon has had an openly available one for well over a decade (wikipedia says 2011, which tracks with when I remember first using it). Epic wants one, but pursued a court case because they argued Google made it an uncompetitive environment to work within.
sneak 2y ago
I would. The App Store censorship is abhorrent even if they charged nothing. I should be able to install hacking tools, background apps that might kill my battery, sandbox breaking apps that allow adversarial interoperability, porn apps, protest apps that track cops, or apps that do legal things that nonetheless assist me in breaking the law. Apple allows none of this.

by da768 2y ago

doctorpangloss 2y ago

> Current status isn't normal, but no one would complain about it if transaction fees weren't abusive. This is an oft-repeated misconception. Even if transaction fees were 0%, we'd be way better off with alternative stores. You're just so used to how shitty things are that you can't conceive of a better alternative. Consider that there are plenty of completely free games on Steam that are popular and help those creators find thriving communities. How? They have good discovery. App Store and Google Play sucks in every way. Discovery is awful. Their approach is awful. Why even show download counts and top lists? Stupid, stupid stupid. But you have no choice as a consumer or developer. So the top developers will not complain. What's the point? And anyway, you're complaining about a world where alternatives are viable. Why are alternatives being viable a bad thing. If EGS is paying up front for games and giving them away for free as cross-promo for Fortnite, better that than ad supported garbage. What exactly is the bad thing here, for consumers? The negative aesthetic experience of having more icons? Everyone has to oppose this crushed-in-head line of thinking. One meaingless detail that impacts an extremely low brow part of the aesthetic experience - the fucking home screen icons - should not preclude the gain in meaning from 10k-100k more developers who could flourish in the mobile ecosystem if it were to have working discovery. It has the same energy as requiring Helldivers users to create PSN accounts - offensive only in a strictly aesthetic sense even though successful competition and cross promo benefits everyone. The users' fixation on meaningless aesthetics is wrong. I mean Apple could make discovery pluggable too, all of it could be pluggable and have fewer "icons," this isn't even a real obstacle. There are many, many ideas in this space, and no permissions to do any of it. As it is, the App Store and Google Play are glorified install wizards. Open, install TikTok, Google Maps, whatever. Never visit again. That is 98% of people. That's horrible and its Apple's fault. TikTok already does not pay any fees. This is just to show that you are not right in general, even if you are right about the one company you've heard of that went and took these people to court in this country for an outcome that you should be in favor of.

talldayo 2y ago
Free app stores like F-Droid are also great for stopping you from downloading crap software. Whenever I need "normal software" (music player, PDF reader, RSS feed, what have you) I search for it there and don't suffer through ads or microtransactions. It's like using Linux, free software is just what I default to now. Using stock iOS and Android today, it feels like both sides have lost the script. The entire pipeline of "consumption" dominates both platforms, and demands you pay money or accept a competitor's inferior product. Google didn't even let F-Droid auto-update apps until recently, it's a racket on either side. We need to bring the hammer down and enable people to stop supporting shit businesses. The current loop of consumption is going to kill everything we love about computing with a long and painful extortion process.
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  Real question: How does F-Droid police malware?
  - talldayo 2y ago
    By disallowing all proprietary software, building each application themselves, and then signing it with their key before the end-user receives it.
    - throwaway2037 2y ago
      I was not aware. This is interesting to know. Let's go deeper about "malware". I'm sorry that I was not more specific. What about some dumb app that shows holiday calendars or "the weather", but actually uses your mobile to secretly mine Bitcoin? Does their process also stop that type of malware?
      - talldayo 2y ago
        That sort of attack would need to take one of two forms: 1) Hijacking an already-approved application 2) Creating a forked/new fraudulent application and submitting it to the store Option 1 requires you to fool the repository owner, first of all. That would mean submitting a pull-request with your malicious code, having that malicious code reviewed by the app author, and then getting it into a major release. In most apps with a significant userbase that's nigh-unimaginable; especially if there are testers or multiple contributors testing and debugging on recent builds. Option 2 requires you to fool the F-Droid admins. This means one of two things. Either creating a forked application with plausible yet distinct features that make it necessary to be forked from the main project. Alternatively, you get ChatGPT (or just copy boilerplate ffs) and make a calculator app or whatever, commit it all to Github and send it in for review. Both of these routes are horribly suspicious - a reviewer is going to want to see if you have multiple contributors, a long history on Github, linked social media accounts or websites, other repositories, binary blobs, that sort of stuff. Maybe they aren't the most cautious, but suffice to say anyone making an attack like this is going to be covered in red flags. So; it's a feasible attack. But it requires so much social manipulation for so little feasible gain (especially when F-Droid wasn't even auto-updating for most people) that it's not worth the effort. If you do manage such a daring attack, your reward is maybe 300-odd sideloading users that mistakenly clicked your install button instead of the other guy's.

seydor 2y ago

app stores have been around for decades now, time to regulate them like they do banks or retail stores

seszett 2y ago

> Just waiting for Adobe Store, Amazon Store, Microsoft Store, Epic Games Store, etc. to be installed on every phones soon. Why would it happen with iOS when it has not happened in the 15 years or so since Android exists? There's basically just one relevant alternative app store which is F-Droid, and it's just all around much better than Google's Play Store, although of course it doesn't have any proprietary, closed-source apps.

delecti 2y ago
Android does have other appstores though. Samsung has one for their phones, and Amazon has had an openly available one for well over a decade (wikipedia says 2011, which tracks with when I remember first using it). Epic wants one, but pursued a court case because they argued Google made it an uncompetitive environment to work within.

sneak 2y ago

I would. The App Store censorship is abhorrent even if they charged nothing. I should be able to install hacking tools, background apps that might kill my battery, sandbox breaking apps that allow adversarial interoperability, porn apps, protest apps that track cops, or apps that do legal things that nonetheless assist me in breaking the law. Apple allows none of this.