10 ms·

From a cursory glance, their apps seem to be of the kind that don't need continuous updates and can be considered complete. Self-contained, offline software tha

by a2128 1y ago

From a cursory glance, their apps seem to be of the kind that don't need continuous updates and can be considered complete. Self-contained, offline software that serves a specific purpose: https://search.f-droid.org/?q=SECUSO&lang=en https://search.f-droid.org/?q=SECUSO&lang=en Unfortunately, Google no longer recognizes this as a valid development strategy. If you want to publish on Google Play, you need to continuously release updates targeting an SDK released within the past year[0]. If you don't, they will send you constant warnings about how your app is violating their policies, they might derank your app, and eventually they'll stop making your app available to new users. Updating the SDK is not that simple and it often introduces new bugs if you don't read through the full changelog and test thoroughly. I have 3 apps and it already feels like I spend too much time each year updating SDK, I can't imagine updating 30. They talk about how this somehow improves security and enhances user experience, meanwhile this policy worsens user experience by pushing people towards ad-filled apps that have the resources and courage to release needless updates, and they still publish spyware on their store. [0] https://developer.android.com/google/play/requirements/target-sdk https://developer.android.com/google/play/requirements/targe...

owebmaster 1y ago
I hope this push from Google (and also from Apple) forces us, the developers, to create and most important USE the alternatives.
- cnst 1y ago
  The F-Droid app store app is usually already the first app I ever install on any Android device: https://f-droid.org/ https://f-droid.org/ The second app is often the Aurora Store app store app, from within the F-Droid app, which then lets you install Google Play apps without having to have a Google Account: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.aurora.store/ https://f-droid.org/packages/com.aurora.store/ With these two apps installed first, on any Android device, whether locked or not, without any need for any computer or any other device, without having to type-in any Google Account details, you can then do pretty much whatever you require on the device, including installing bank apps, Amazon, Amazon Music, Audible, Prime Video, etc. Sadly, iOS has no alternatives like this. Apple proudly reports terminating 128,961,839 customer accounts in 2024 (yes, Apple has terminated 129 million customer accounts in just one year), and they do NOT allow using an iOS device without an Apple customer account: https://www.apple.com/legal/more-resources/docs/2024-App-Store-Transparency-Report.pdf https://www.apple.com/legal/more-resources/docs/2024-App-Sto...
  - butshouldyou 1y ago
    How do you even get to the point of installing F-Droid without first setting up Android, which, in my experience, requires a valid Google login. When I set up my Android device, there wasn't an option to set it up without a Google Account.
    - Semaphor 1y ago
      That's not normal, that will probably be the vendor skin you use enforcing that. Maybe samsung, as they tend to try and be apple at home.
      - hadrien01 1y ago
        I have a Samsung phone and I was never forced to use a Google account.
    - cnst 1y ago
      There's always a "later" or equivalent button in all of these setups, sometimes it does have a few prompts. I personally have iPhone, Google Pixel, OnePlus, Motorola and Samsung devices, without any accounts on them. The iPhones are very limited without an account, obviously, but I never feel that way on Android. All that I did to set them up, is click on the screen a few times, no extra tools or anything. Then just go into the browser, and follow the instructions for F-Droid installation; which can be done entirely on the phone, without a computer or any other phone, or any username/password.
      - shakna 1y ago
        For my Motorola, the "later" or equivalent did not appear if you connected to WiFi during setup. You have to have no network connection, first, to not have a Google Account.
    - immibis 1y ago
      Whenever I buy a new Android device I take the opportunity to pretend I'm a grandma getting her first piece of technology and create a brand new Google account, since it's one of the only signup pathways that doesn't require some kind of identity verification.
zihotki 1y ago
I also share this resentment. It became very hard to have a niche app for a family or a small circle. Not like it was easy before, but amount of time one needs to invest to keep it up to date with requirements is not sustainable. Web apps are also a hard thing once you consider hosting and storage expenses.
- nolist_policy 1y ago
  I think both of you and TFA misunderstand what the targetSdkVersion is. If your app barely uses any permissions (like TFA's apps), you just need to update the targetSdkVersion in the manifest once per year and push the update. That's it. You're not updating SDKs or compiling against a newer SDK or anything.
  - ploxiln 1y ago
    You do need a newer SDK to update the target-sdk-version though. And you may find that libraries you used are not compatible, unless you update them, and updating them may break things. Maybe for a minimal app in pure java or kotlin this won't be a problem. There was an open-source app that hasn't been updated in a few years that was delisted from the store. I decided to try my hand at recompiling to target latest required sdk "target" or whatever. It used Xamarin / C# and some additional libraries. It does not talk to the internet, it's just a minimal remote-control and data-logger for a bluetooth multimeter. If you can find a copy of the last APK published and sideload it, it works. But if you try to update the SDK so you can target the required SDK version for the Play Store, compile fails, misc cryptic errors due to libraries. Updating libraries was tricky for me because while I'm quite familiar with C, C++, Python, Go (etc), I'm not at all familiar with Android, Java, Kotlin, nor C#, visual-studio, etc. After a few days of struggle I managed to update libraries and fix the build, but the app's layout was totally broken, only one button appears (and again I'm not familiar with any of this stuff). This app really didn't need any updates. It's a < 20MB app to control a local device, and it still works. At least you can still side-load it. Sheesh.
    - nolist_policy 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
cnst 1y ago
> "Additionally, the app prevents devices from taking screenshots." Why do the "security" apps ALWAYS have to have this anti-feature? It's especially annoying when employed by the banking apps. Famously, Schwab had some issues where it didn't properly keep track of orders during highest loads (people ending up selling more shares than they had even in IRA accounts), yet conveniently they prevent users from taking screenshots of their app, so you wouldn't be able to prove that you did cancel or replace the order and did receive the cancel confirmation, before it executed anyways. Of course, if it's an IRA account, selling more shares than you own, is clearly Schwab's bug, but not being able to keep these things locally, is one of the biggest anti-features of modern apps.
- pmontra 1y ago
  That's a very shallow protection. Even if one has no other camera (phone, table, a real camera) there are always friends and relatives that can help and take a picture of the screen. Furthermore a picture of the screen and the phone around it has a more real feel than a screenshot that could be photoshopped.
  - cnst 1y ago
    A screenshot develops evidence of something happening or not happening according to the person who took the screenshot. If you start claiming that it can be photoshopped, well, what prevents anyone from photoshopping a real camera shot? Or photoshopping a screenshot, and then taking a "real" shot with a camera? With AI, you can now even do this with video, too. For practical purposes, your suggestion is simply unrealistic. It's unrealistic to be using a second phone to be taking random confirmations from your main phone, and it's even more unrealistic if you're doing trading where every second counts, and where the whole reason that Schwab cannot execute properly, is because orders are placed and cancelled than once. It's even yet more unrealistic because of focus and angle issues, and reduced precision, and increased file size etc. BTW, I have personally encountered this consistency bug at Schwab Brokerage. I wasn't even using Schwab's app, precisely because it doesn't let you take screenshots. In my case, the loss was not major, and not worth pursuing. But other people reported that their IRA accounts sold shares short as a result of this consistency issue, which is kind of a problem for everybody when you cannot buy it back if it has 10x'ed since the sale like GME once had, and cannot even add any more money even if you have it, because it's a tax-advantaged account with limits on how much you can add each year.
rpdillon 1y ago
I've attempted to make this point to proponents of the walled gardens as a real benefit they are losing. There are app developers that just want to make useful stuff and share it. But Play (and the App Store) are completely designed around developers that are trying to make a living there (because that's how Google/Apple make money off the store). As such, the stores are quite hostile to community built software that changes rarely. This is a real loss, as I think that software is often the best available for a given purpose due to simplicity, privacy, and longevity. So glad I have F-Droid!
- protimewaster 1y ago
  I've had some thoughts in a similar vein, but I was thinking from a privacy perspective. The Google and Apple arguments for the walled gardens basically boil down to "You can't trust other stores to protect your privacy and security", but the obvious counter-argument to that is that other stores may actually be able to focus more on privacy and security than the walled gardens do. Apple and Google inevitably have limited privacy protections, because they'd probably run off Meta and a bunch of other really popular / in-demand apps and cut into their own bottom-line if they really cracked down. In contrast, a third party store may be more free to only host apps that are more privacy-oriented or have been security audited, etc.
  - immibis 1y ago
    Arguments in this day and age are soldiers[1], at least when they come from powerful people: (if you're a corporation or a government) they are things you send to fight for you. You don't have to actually believe them, and the most effective ones are often not ones that are true. [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/w/arguments-as-soldiers https://www.lesswrong.com/w/arguments-as-soldiers
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - alex1138 1y ago
    Look, to be blunt about it I think what Apple did to Facebook was a necessary evil, they (Facebook) seemed to buy Whatsapp as purely a way to entrench their network effects, get access to phone numbers and contacts etc, and their data hoovering practices are so severe that they tried to pin their own certificate (or something like that, I'm hazy on the details) I get the Apple skepticism, I'm not happy with some of what they do, I think it's contentious when app stores ban something like Parler, but fine-grained granularity is something we kind of desperately need
p1mrx 1y ago
Yeah, SDK updates are a pain. I wrote ChromaDoze in 2010 so I've gone through several. Recently, the most annoying changes were: - Foreground services used to require a persistent notification, now they're not allowed to have a notification unless you prompt the user. So I added a button to beg for POST_NOTIFICATIONS permission, but now permission can be granted after the service starts, so I had to build some magic to make the service refresh its own notification. - Gesture navigation steals user input when swiping on the left/right edges of the screen, so I had to build some magic to automatically make my UI narrower when gesture navigation is enabled. Drawing apps can't really use setSystemGestureExclusionRects() because it's limited to 200dp. - By default, apps now render edge-to-edge vertically, behind the semi-transparent status bar and bottom navigation buttons, so I had to build some magic to avoid those areas. Now that gesture navigation is the default, many developers aren't testing with 3-button navigation, so I've noticed apps where I can't interact with the bottom because it collides with my navigation buttons.
- phh 1y ago
  > - Gesture navigation steals user input when swiping on the left/right edges of the screen, Well I've seen even 1B+ dl apps failing to handle that (on a Google Pixel), so at this point I'm putting the blame on Google. I've switched back to three button navigation. Though even some trivial OS gestures like screen unlock fail reliably on my Pixel 6a. (As in, I do the gesture, it fails to register the gesture, i try to make the gesture "with more conviction" through the whole screen and it still fails, and after few minutes it ends up okay somehow)
  - cyberax 1y ago
    > I've switched back to three button navigation. Don't worry. Google broke it as well with shitty "edge-to-edge" nonsense to make the apps more "engaging" by forcing them to deal with the disappearing bottom bar. By default.
  - breakingcups 1y ago
    > I've switched back to three button navigation. I've been using it since forever, but recently noticed that the latest update broke the back button in certain scenarios I can't figure out yet.
throwaway743 1y ago
It's such bullshit. Having been fed up with Google over the last year, since releasing for Android, I'm slowly moving away from them and prioritizing iOS. Haven't had to deal with nearly as much bullshit with them.
- rs186 1y ago
  Sorry to inform you that Apple has the same bs: https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/07/15/developer-angry-that-app-store-is-removing-game-that-hasnt-been-updated-in-7-years https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/07/15/developer-angry-t...
- immibis 1y ago
  Please note that you can let people download the .apk from your website (for now!), and although the end user will have to bypass 2-3 scare screens, it's not possible at all on Apple products. (Even after the EU mandated Apple to make this possible and then fined them a few billions for not doing it, Apple still hasn't done it)
dostick 1y ago
Not exactly constantly update, in past 4 years it was only 2 or 3 required updates to rebuild with latest SDK.
izacus 1y ago
I find this kind of posting deeply ironic, since HN and ArsTechnica has been ripping Android a new one before this policy came into effect for allowing apps to exploit old APIs for stealing data, triggering popups, spamming notifications and many more changes that have been done from there. Many praises were sung to superiority of iOS and their demand to keep up to date with new policies and even new design. And now we hear complaining again over things like... (a few posts lower)... having to implement permission dialog to show notifiactions? Right :D The reality of the situation is that without required SDK changes, every single app - from your banking app to every game - would STILL demand access to all your files, all your documents, all your photos (and their locations) before they run. And then proceeded to spam you with notifications from background trying to sell you crypto. Fixing those things unfortunately means that also the opensource developers need to move their behinds and implement APIs in a way that respect users more.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  And beyond those things there are often performance / battery optimization related things as part of the update too. Just because an app claims it respects your privacy, it doesn't mean that it is a well behaved app. Most other android app stores enforce a high target sdk. Fdroid is the only one I know that doesn't and allows apps as far back as Android supports. Android has been yearly, except Android 16 it seems, raising the minimum installable target sdk so eventually updates will be needed to run on new devices.
- franga2000 1y ago
  So just don't let developers push updates targeting old SDKs? Show a scary permission dialog on every app launch for dangerous permissions? Delist only the apps that actually use or at least register those permissions? There are many possible solutions and none of them are "you have to recompile once per year or we ban you".
  - izacus 1y ago
    Ehm, that's EXACTLY what happens now. Noone is being banned because of this. You can't publish an update if it targets old Sdk and old sdk targeting apps don't appear to users (unless the user has already installed that app before). That's it. Google is directly following your recommendation. Developers have usually more than a full year to comply (e.g. Android 16 has just released, developers will have to target Android 15 at the end of August. Android 15 beta was released around march 2024 giving developers ability to prepare and test).
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
netsharc 1y ago
This page also has the list of apps, and each app has their own detailed description page: https://secuso.aifb.kit.edu/english/105.php https://secuso.aifb.kit.edu/english/105.php
vachina 1y ago
Saving grace is that it’s possible to sideload or use an alternative App Store. Android has matured past a point of diminishing return, you can stay on an Android version 6 versions behind and not miss anything.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
Tor3 1y ago
Also, those new SDKs make slightly older Android versions not work anymore with the updated applications, in some cases. My main Android tablet can't get updates for several apps, and some apps are updated but won't work with e.g. Chromecast anymore (and were updated _only_ because of the nag-system of Google, there are no changes in the apps themselves). And going to the latest Android version isn't an option, that would imply buying a (at these times Really Expensive) new tablet, and what's offered now aren't even covering what I want from a tablet. Of course, if the vendors continued to provide updates to tablets and phones.. but they don't.
zengineer 1y ago
Totally agree - I have a platform with an app which hardly changes but I constantly need to do maintenance which doesn't help my platform or is a gain for my users.

by a2128 1y ago

owebmaster 1y ago

I hope this push from Google (and also from Apple) forces us, the developers, to create and most important USE the alternatives.

cnst 1y ago
The F-Droid app store app is usually already the first app I ever install on any Android device: https://f-droid.org/ https://f-droid.org/ The second app is often the Aurora Store app store app, from within the F-Droid app, which then lets you install Google Play apps without having to have a Google Account: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.aurora.store/ https://f-droid.org/packages/com.aurora.store/ With these two apps installed first, on any Android device, whether locked or not, without any need for any computer or any other device, without having to type-in any Google Account details, you can then do pretty much whatever you require on the device, including installing bank apps, Amazon, Amazon Music, Audible, Prime Video, etc. Sadly, iOS has no alternatives like this. Apple proudly reports terminating 128,961,839 customer accounts in 2024 (yes, Apple has terminated 129 million customer accounts in just one year), and they do NOT allow using an iOS device without an Apple customer account: https://www.apple.com/legal/more-resources/docs/2024-App-Store-Transparency-Report.pdf https://www.apple.com/legal/more-resources/docs/2024-App-Sto...
- butshouldyou 1y ago
  How do you even get to the point of installing F-Droid without first setting up Android, which, in my experience, requires a valid Google login. When I set up my Android device, there wasn't an option to set it up without a Google Account.
  - Semaphor 1y ago
    That's not normal, that will probably be the vendor skin you use enforcing that. Maybe samsung, as they tend to try and be apple at home.
    - hadrien01 1y ago
      I have a Samsung phone and I was never forced to use a Google account.
  - cnst 1y ago
    There's always a "later" or equivalent button in all of these setups, sometimes it does have a few prompts. I personally have iPhone, Google Pixel, OnePlus, Motorola and Samsung devices, without any accounts on them. The iPhones are very limited without an account, obviously, but I never feel that way on Android. All that I did to set them up, is click on the screen a few times, no extra tools or anything. Then just go into the browser, and follow the instructions for F-Droid installation; which can be done entirely on the phone, without a computer or any other phone, or any username/password.
    - shakna 1y ago
      For my Motorola, the "later" or equivalent did not appear if you connected to WiFi during setup. You have to have no network connection, first, to not have a Google Account.
  - immibis 1y ago
    Whenever I buy a new Android device I take the opportunity to pretend I'm a grandma getting her first piece of technology and create a brand new Google account, since it's one of the only signup pathways that doesn't require some kind of identity verification.

zihotki 1y ago

I also share this resentment. It became very hard to have a niche app for a family or a small circle. Not like it was easy before, but amount of time one needs to invest to keep it up to date with requirements is not sustainable. Web apps are also a hard thing once you consider hosting and storage expenses.

nolist_policy 1y ago
I think both of you and TFA misunderstand what the targetSdkVersion is. If your app barely uses any permissions (like TFA's apps), you just need to update the targetSdkVersion in the manifest once per year and push the update. That's it. You're not updating SDKs or compiling against a newer SDK or anything.
- ploxiln 1y ago
  You do need a newer SDK to update the target-sdk-version though. And you may find that libraries you used are not compatible, unless you update them, and updating them may break things. Maybe for a minimal app in pure java or kotlin this won't be a problem. There was an open-source app that hasn't been updated in a few years that was delisted from the store. I decided to try my hand at recompiling to target latest required sdk "target" or whatever. It used Xamarin / C# and some additional libraries. It does not talk to the internet, it's just a minimal remote-control and data-logger for a bluetooth multimeter. If you can find a copy of the last APK published and sideload it, it works. But if you try to update the SDK so you can target the required SDK version for the Play Store, compile fails, misc cryptic errors due to libraries. Updating libraries was tricky for me because while I'm quite familiar with C, C++, Python, Go (etc), I'm not at all familiar with Android, Java, Kotlin, nor C#, visual-studio, etc. After a few days of struggle I managed to update libraries and fix the build, but the app's layout was totally broken, only one button appears (and again I'm not familiar with any of this stuff). This app really didn't need any updates. It's a < 20MB app to control a local device, and it still works. At least you can still side-load it. Sheesh.
  - nolist_policy 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

cnst 1y ago

> "Additionally, the app prevents devices from taking screenshots." Why do the "security" apps ALWAYS have to have this anti-feature? It's especially annoying when employed by the banking apps. Famously, Schwab had some issues where it didn't properly keep track of orders during highest loads (people ending up selling more shares than they had even in IRA accounts), yet conveniently they prevent users from taking screenshots of their app, so you wouldn't be able to prove that you did cancel or replace the order and did receive the cancel confirmation, before it executed anyways. Of course, if it's an IRA account, selling more shares than you own, is clearly Schwab's bug, but not being able to keep these things locally, is one of the biggest anti-features of modern apps.

pmontra 1y ago
That's a very shallow protection. Even if one has no other camera (phone, table, a real camera) there are always friends and relatives that can help and take a picture of the screen. Furthermore a picture of the screen and the phone around it has a more real feel than a screenshot that could be photoshopped.
- cnst 1y ago
  A screenshot develops evidence of something happening or not happening according to the person who took the screenshot. If you start claiming that it can be photoshopped, well, what prevents anyone from photoshopping a real camera shot? Or photoshopping a screenshot, and then taking a "real" shot with a camera? With AI, you can now even do this with video, too. For practical purposes, your suggestion is simply unrealistic. It's unrealistic to be using a second phone to be taking random confirmations from your main phone, and it's even more unrealistic if you're doing trading where every second counts, and where the whole reason that Schwab cannot execute properly, is because orders are placed and cancelled than once. It's even yet more unrealistic because of focus and angle issues, and reduced precision, and increased file size etc. BTW, I have personally encountered this consistency bug at Schwab Brokerage. I wasn't even using Schwab's app, precisely because it doesn't let you take screenshots. In my case, the loss was not major, and not worth pursuing. But other people reported that their IRA accounts sold shares short as a result of this consistency issue, which is kind of a problem for everybody when you cannot buy it back if it has 10x'ed since the sale like GME once had, and cannot even add any more money even if you have it, because it's a tax-advantaged account with limits on how much you can add each year.

rpdillon 1y ago

I've attempted to make this point to proponents of the walled gardens as a real benefit they are losing. There are app developers that just want to make useful stuff and share it. But Play (and the App Store) are completely designed around developers that are trying to make a living there (because that's how Google/Apple make money off the store). As such, the stores are quite hostile to community built software that changes rarely. This is a real loss, as I think that software is often the best available for a given purpose due to simplicity, privacy, and longevity. So glad I have F-Droid!

protimewaster 1y ago
I've had some thoughts in a similar vein, but I was thinking from a privacy perspective. The Google and Apple arguments for the walled gardens basically boil down to "You can't trust other stores to protect your privacy and security", but the obvious counter-argument to that is that other stores may actually be able to focus more on privacy and security than the walled gardens do. Apple and Google inevitably have limited privacy protections, because they'd probably run off Meta and a bunch of other really popular / in-demand apps and cut into their own bottom-line if they really cracked down. In contrast, a third party store may be more free to only host apps that are more privacy-oriented or have been security audited, etc.
- immibis 1y ago
  Arguments in this day and age are soldiers[1], at least when they come from powerful people: (if you're a corporation or a government) they are things you send to fight for you. You don't have to actually believe them, and the most effective ones are often not ones that are true. [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/w/arguments-as-soldiers https://www.lesswrong.com/w/arguments-as-soldiers
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- alex1138 1y ago
  Look, to be blunt about it I think what Apple did to Facebook was a necessary evil, they (Facebook) seemed to buy Whatsapp as purely a way to entrench their network effects, get access to phone numbers and contacts etc, and their data hoovering practices are so severe that they tried to pin their own certificate (or something like that, I'm hazy on the details) I get the Apple skepticism, I'm not happy with some of what they do, I think it's contentious when app stores ban something like Parler, but fine-grained granularity is something we kind of desperately need

p1mrx 1y ago

Yeah, SDK updates are a pain. I wrote ChromaDoze in 2010 so I've gone through several. Recently, the most annoying changes were: - Foreground services used to require a persistent notification, now they're not allowed to have a notification unless you prompt the user. So I added a button to beg for POST_NOTIFICATIONS permission, but now permission can be granted after the service starts, so I had to build some magic to make the service refresh its own notification. - Gesture navigation steals user input when swiping on the left/right edges of the screen, so I had to build some magic to automatically make my UI narrower when gesture navigation is enabled. Drawing apps can't really use setSystemGestureExclusionRects() because it's limited to 200dp. - By default, apps now render edge-to-edge vertically, behind the semi-transparent status bar and bottom navigation buttons, so I had to build some magic to avoid those areas. Now that gesture navigation is the default, many developers aren't testing with 3-button navigation, so I've noticed apps where I can't interact with the bottom because it collides with my navigation buttons.

phh 1y ago
> - Gesture navigation steals user input when swiping on the left/right edges of the screen, Well I've seen even 1B+ dl apps failing to handle that (on a Google Pixel), so at this point I'm putting the blame on Google. I've switched back to three button navigation. Though even some trivial OS gestures like screen unlock fail reliably on my Pixel 6a. (As in, I do the gesture, it fails to register the gesture, i try to make the gesture "with more conviction" through the whole screen and it still fails, and after few minutes it ends up okay somehow)
- cyberax 1y ago
  > I've switched back to three button navigation. Don't worry. Google broke it as well with shitty "edge-to-edge" nonsense to make the apps more "engaging" by forcing them to deal with the disappearing bottom bar. By default.
- breakingcups 1y ago
  > I've switched back to three button navigation. I've been using it since forever, but recently noticed that the latest update broke the back button in certain scenarios I can't figure out yet.

throwaway743 1y ago

It's such bullshit. Having been fed up with Google over the last year, since releasing for Android, I'm slowly moving away from them and prioritizing iOS. Haven't had to deal with nearly as much bullshit with them.

rs186 1y ago
Sorry to inform you that Apple has the same bs: https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/07/15/developer-angry-that-app-store-is-removing-game-that-hasnt-been-updated-in-7-years https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/07/15/developer-angry-t...
immibis 1y ago
Please note that you can let people download the .apk from your website (for now!), and although the end user will have to bypass 2-3 scare screens, it's not possible at all on Apple products. (Even after the EU mandated Apple to make this possible and then fined them a few billions for not doing it, Apple still hasn't done it)

dostick 1y ago

Not exactly constantly update, in past 4 years it was only 2 or 3 required updates to rebuild with latest SDK.

izacus 1y ago

I find this kind of posting deeply ironic, since HN and ArsTechnica has been ripping Android a new one before this policy came into effect for allowing apps to exploit old APIs for stealing data, triggering popups, spamming notifications and many more changes that have been done from there. Many praises were sung to superiority of iOS and their demand to keep up to date with new policies and even new design. And now we hear complaining again over things like... (a few posts lower)... having to implement permission dialog to show notifiactions? Right :D The reality of the situation is that without required SDK changes, every single app - from your banking app to every game - would STILL demand access to all your files, all your documents, all your photos (and their locations) before they run. And then proceeded to spam you with notifications from background trying to sell you crypto. Fixing those things unfortunately means that also the opensource developers need to move their behinds and implement APIs in a way that respect users more.

charcircuit 1y ago
And beyond those things there are often performance / battery optimization related things as part of the update too. Just because an app claims it respects your privacy, it doesn't mean that it is a well behaved app. Most other android app stores enforce a high target sdk. Fdroid is the only one I know that doesn't and allows apps as far back as Android supports. Android has been yearly, except Android 16 it seems, raising the minimum installable target sdk so eventually updates will be needed to run on new devices.
franga2000 1y ago
So just don't let developers push updates targeting old SDKs? Show a scary permission dialog on every app launch for dangerous permissions? Delist only the apps that actually use or at least register those permissions? There are many possible solutions and none of them are "you have to recompile once per year or we ban you".
- izacus 1y ago
  Ehm, that's EXACTLY what happens now. Noone is being banned because of this. You can't publish an update if it targets old Sdk and old sdk targeting apps don't appear to users (unless the user has already installed that app before). That's it. Google is directly following your recommendation. Developers have usually more than a full year to comply (e.g. Android 16 has just released, developers will have to target Android 15 at the end of August. Android 15 beta was released around march 2024 giving developers ability to prepare and test).

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

netsharc 1y ago

This page also has the list of apps, and each app has their own detailed description page: https://secuso.aifb.kit.edu/english/105.php https://secuso.aifb.kit.edu/english/105.php

vachina 1y ago

Saving grace is that it’s possible to sideload or use an alternative App Store. Android has matured past a point of diminishing return, you can stay on an Android version 6 versions behind and not miss anything.

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Tor3 1y ago

Also, those new SDKs make slightly older Android versions not work anymore with the updated applications, in some cases. My main Android tablet can't get updates for several apps, and some apps are updated but won't work with e.g. Chromecast anymore (and were updated _only_ because of the nag-system of Google, there are no changes in the apps themselves). And going to the latest Android version isn't an option, that would imply buying a (at these times Really Expensive) new tablet, and what's offered now aren't even covering what I want from a tablet. Of course, if the vendors continued to provide updates to tablets and phones.. but they don't.

zengineer 1y ago

Totally agree - I have a platform with an app which hardly changes but I constantly need to do maintenance which doesn't help my platform or is a gain for my users.