I think in fact a lot of people do want them to do this. Folks complain the Play store is full of malware and spam, and that there are data leaks and deceptive ads.
Then Google or Apple goes and removes them, and then folks are mad if that process has errors.
It seems like a business where you make everyone mad no matter what you do.
[edit: Just to be clear, I'm not a fan of the practice. But an awful lot of folks seem to think Apple and Google SHOULD wield editorial power, if only to stop outright malware. And of course, certain politicians want to make sure that the internet refuses to show content unflattering to people in power]
But this cuts into the gatekeepers' profit. Why have a cost-neutral program when you can not worry about having that program at all, and (in Apple's case) still charge people for access to the store and documentation?
The problem is that right now a spammer who creates hundreds of low effort apps gets the same service as someone who spent months or years on an app, only to get it banned over a minor issue.
I know that reviewing apps and quality control costs a lot of money for Google and Apple, and I'm ready to pay for it, as long as I get some peace of mind that they don't kick me for accidentally violating some policy with a feature that thousands of other apps have as well.
In reality, even uneducated stupid customer service would be better than the current state of affairs. And it's not just play store developers - these youtube takedowns, etc, costly people real money.
These large platforms are markets in their own right, and should be seen as such. They are simply too big to be covered by existing laws.
A fixed filing fee would level that imbalance.
If App Stores charged a fee per submission, that would drastically cut down on spam submissions, and free up resources for those of us who actually put a lot of effort into our apps.
I, the engineer, do not want them to do this. Before Google and Apple, I didn't have this problem. I didn't have to pay their tax or march to their beat.
You might argue that it's their platform and that's the cost for us to pay. But it wasn't always this way! These companies leveraged their advantages to steal eyeballs away from an open web and lock them in their own platform.
They could have spent money making the open web work better on mobile. Or designing a portable app framework and runtime for all devices. But we know why they didn't and what the outcome has been.
I want them to pay back the negative externalities they've leveraged onto us.
Your needs as a developer don’t trump users needs.
They could have spent money making the open web work better on mobile. Or designing a portable app framework and runtime for all devices. But we know why they didn't and what the outcome has been.
And write once run everywhere worked so well with Java applets.
You still don't! You don't have the play by their rules, and you can still target everyone who has a non-Google or non-Apple phone, which as a target market is appreciably no one, much as it was before Google and Apple entered the phone market.
You can target them if they have phones produced by your hated manufacturers anyway by making your app a webapp instead of a native app.
You don't want to do those things, and that's fine, but you're yearning to go back to a time that never existed.
Personal PCs were just this back in the 90's and 00's. Microsoft tried to create a walled garden, but it failed due to the world wide web.
Google and Apple saw how Microsoft failed and decided that the app store would be a first class citizen on day one and that the mobile web [1] would be an afterthought. They learned from Microsoft's mistake and used their positions to make app stores the new status quo.
It could have easily gone a different way, but I understand how the business interests got us to where we are.
[1] the mobile web wouldn't have been nice without more money and research poured into it. The web stack could have been supplemented or a new one could have been developed. These companies obviously had other priorities than to pay for something that netted them nothing, but individual developers wound out worse for it.
Their SERPS will only return quotes on toxic MASCULINITY. Do the same thing in Yandex and they'll give you the correct results. Google uses AI to identify "non-PC sites" and push them down in the SERPS.
https://fox5sandiego.com/2019/01/17/fortnite-security-flaw-e...
I dislike apps. Sometimes they make sense. Fine.
Often, they do not, or offer less functionality than PC or web does.
If you need payment, make that easy, same. Cancel easy too. Just because that is nice, and we all could use nice. You like nice, I like nice. Let us be nice.
If you need profanity, whatever, I get it. Let's be adults.
I don't like the gate keepers and do not trust them. I do not expect you to trust me, nor you me.
Clean, open, portable web for both of us as much as can be managed.
I support you, you support me, us.
I can be a user on linux, android, iOS, Windows, BSD, whatever I can get on the web.
Sometimes dependent stuff is needed for the job. I get it. Please try to avoid that stuff, and I will try and run more relevant systems.
:D
I really do avoid apps, really do try and be a good user, really do prefer web and really do run a bunch of OSes.
We both are rare. I do advocacy every chance I get. Maybe you can too.
Stick together in a figurative sense.
My development is small, embedded systems and or specific purpose programs. Enough to get the engineer speaking here.
Hopefully, you are a user enough to do similar things.
<rant>Websites lack solid, consistent and platform-native look-and-feel. They are always limited, they aren't integrated with the operating system (i.e. task switcher), they are slow on almost anything (because modern web browsers are ugly giant behemoths. I've recently built myself a very beefy machine (16-core CPU, 128GiB RAM) and even now _sometimes_ sites are still choppy. On mobile, lots of sites are performing poorly.</rant>
For me, on mobile, it takes a LOT to bother with an app. Any alternative, even close to reasonable, gets the nod every time.
On a PC, this is less of an issue. Applications will often have great, or superior functionality. No worries.
On mobile? No. The opposite is nearly always true.
Should have been clear.
As for solid platform look and feel... depends there too. If the UX is really optimized for the task, I will take it. Have used so many now. Almost non issue there.
Generally I dislike app stores. This favors PC too.
For example, let's go all the way to the other end of the spectrum where the web as we know it didn't take off and everything was siloed into native apps that you had to download from the App Store before trying something new.
That seems pretty grim to me. I think we're in a sweet spot and lucky to have both.
Eh, you are but one person, amongst billions. There's a good chance that what you don't want != what others want.
You don't matter, consumers matter.
> Before Google and Apple, I didn't have this problem.
And you didn't have distribution either.
> But it wasn't always this way!
Indeed, there wasn't even distribution. Do you actually remember what was shipping mobile software back in 2005?
> I want them to pay back the negative externalities they've leveraged onto us.
Again, you as an engineer don't matter, only as a consumer. And consumers have never had so many options and at such low prices.
I agree it's not an Apples to Apples comparison, but it always strikes me that people forget they used to have to pay for distribution too.
I remember one piece of software I was working on would cost the company around $5K per release in download costs alone.
Now you have the web AND the in-device app stores. Even more choice.
There could have been an open, cross-platform native app stack if Apple and Google and a consortium of other companies had joined forces and made it so. There's no technical reason preventing this. The economic incentives got us to where we are.
Devices should be easy to target. There should be the option to use multiple app stores right off the bat, and you shouldn't have to bundle to get access to Gmail. Or even better - point your browser at gmail.com and get the native app installed on your mobile device. Distributed updates from gmail.com sans app store. The OS would still control permissions and guard against malicious apps.
The world wide web era was truly unique and special, and it's a shame the same principles didn't carry into the mobile world.
What's the difference? There's also no technical reason preventing you from developing your own cross-platform native app stack that beats Apple's and Google's with no conceivable return on investment, constant PR disasters, and time-consuming negotiation with bad-faith or incompetent partners. The forces that stop you are mostly economic.
The rest is just saudosistic nostalgia. There wasn't mass access to the internet, you're just missing the times when a small elite had access to the internet.
Consumers are far better now than they were.
The interest wasn't massive because things were not super easy. Phones bridged the gap. Fast forward to today you have less choice but bigger buy buttons.
You seem to have a mental image of the internet that doesn't correspond to reality. Poor didn't have access, they couldn't afford a computer, much less an internet plan.
Step out of the Hacker News bubble for a bit.
I was very, very poor. So were most of the kids I grew up with. Most of us couldn't afford new computers; that's true. So we bought old ones. My father - tears in his eyes - lugged in something ancient that he'd picked up for $50, having no idea how to use it but hoping that putting it in front me would do me some good. AOL had been mailing everyone in town (Detroit). Some kids got PCs from the nearby churches, some got them from the school (others still only ever used them in school). We collected and hoarded the access disks, and would go ringing each others' phones or knocking down doors to share websites we'd found. Imagine my embarrassment when I realized the AOL search results page was not the entire internet, and that I could click on any text with a blue outline.
> doesn't correspond to reality
I know there are people who managed (or didn't..) to grow up poorer than I did. But even poverty is a spectrum.
The "very poor" in the US are rich in most of the developing world.
If that doesn't qualify it as a product only available to the elites, I don't know what will...
Heck, in 2000, just under 30% of the global population had access to properly built sanitation services.
And about 28% of the global population live with under a $1 (in PPP) per day.
Respectfully, I think you are lacking some context about life in other countries.
I’m not though, and I have already said so. My original “poverty is a spectrum” comment still firmly addresses everything you’ve said, so if we still disagree, we can agree that’s ok.
You’re also factually incorrect about “a small elite had access to the internet”. That may have been true in the 80s, but by 2000 usage was at 50% and climbed to 75% by 2010. I mean the dot com boom was predicated on wide user adoption, so I don’t even know why you would even think that stat made inuitive sense.
No, it isn't false. Buying and/or installing an app today is orders of magnitude easier, safer and cheaper than 2005.
You clearly don't like it, and you probably are part of the little elite that had access to the internet before the general public did.
You can still do online everything that you used to in 2005, nothing was removed.
> That may have been true in the 80s, but by 2000 usage was at 50% and climbed to 75% by 2010.
Sorry the break the news to you, but the US isn't the world.
Maybe you should step out of the hacker news bubble for a minute.
What matters is only the impact to the consumer, and the consumer is far, far better off than in 2005.
edit: Its ofcourse a difficult subject, like with your parents getting too old to drive and not recognizing it, but after all not a technical but a societal problem.
They have trouble with false positive and false negatives. This does not make me want to give them more power.
This doesn't even really make any sense either. You might argue its because they're huge, but the numbers don't add up. Google netted about $31 billion in 2018. It's hard to tell exactly how many apps are published on Google Play per year, but it seems to be in the ballpark of 200,000 [1]. Let's hire some low wage employees to spend just 1 hour per app which is generally enough time to determine if an app is at all legitimate. That's obviously 200,000 man hours. Creating these jobs in the USA could be done for about $10/hour, or $2 million, or a minuscule fraction of 1% of their their annual net income. Problem solved, happy customers, happy developers, jobs created.
But Google gonna Google. Though even here if they really wanted to Google, they could even hire these guys in e.g. India or wherever and pay a fraction of even that fraction of what they'd have to pay if they created these jobs in the US. But I'm certain they've Googled that the $ cost of pissed off customers and developers is less than the $ cost of providing a decent solution.
The one confounding issue here might be that the 200k is lowballing the number of apps. After all that's only the apps that are published, not the ones that are refused publication. But all of the above holds true even if you push it up to 2,000,000 apps trying to publish per year. Perhaps the more salient point is that Google also charges $25 before you can even try to publish an app. Why not direct that money to a human being and actually have a half decent review process? That same human being might even be able to answer complex questions like, "Hey, I don't even have any ads in my app. Why was my app removed for deceptive ads?" in a timely fashion.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/266210/number-of-availab...
If their task devolves to "run this security tool" then (a) that can be automated and (b) can be reverse engineered by the people putting this out.
If it is a proper security audit then it's not an hour of work and it's not a $10/h employee, even in India.
You'd have to audit literally every version update.
What's more, you could make an argument that any process will have an observable error rate at scale. Would we be having a different conversation in a different universe where this same post exists, but Google didn't automate? I'm not so sure.
> Creating these jobs in the USA could be done for about $10/hour,
Uh, minimum wage is $15 in most places. $10/hr isn't even above the poverty line. It's less than $20k a year pre-tax. If you're appropriating the language of socialism, at least do it in a way that doesn't fall apart to someone with mental math skills.
No, it definitely is not: https://www.paycor.com/resource-center/minimum-wage-by-state...
But the rest stands, you're not going to be able to source that work. We already have seen how moderation ends up being done because it's essentially awful work prone to abuse. This is why Americans like to pretend it's done by algorithms while it's actually done by people in Filipino cybercafes.
And it's not even remotely clear to me that that'll do better than Apple does with more trained staff.
- $20,800 a year puts you ahead of 26% of earners in the US. [2]
- The guy making your $5 latte gets on average about $9/hour [3].
- A private company engaging in behavior to create jobs and offer increased value to their customers is not the "language of socialism."
[1] - https://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty-guidelines
[2] - https://dqydj.com/united-states-income-brackets-percentiles/
[3] - https://www.glassdoor.com/Hourly-Pay/Starbucks-Hourly-Pay-E2...
> Let's hire some low wage employees to spend just 1 hour per app which is generally enough time to determine if an app is at all legitimate. That's obviously 200,000 man hours.
But folks have already been down this road, and the ugly fact is that you can't source folks to do work like this outside of metropolitan areas. This is why already this work is outsourced to areas where low wages are common but infrastructure is present.
And you'll find, as several businesses I've worked with, that the difficulty of validating these jobs is very high. Turns out, you essentially get half the work you'd think you would.
Secondly:
> The United States is not California. Here [1] are the US poverty lines. For 1 person, it's $12,490.
Sorry, I just assumed an average family of three with a single wage earner as the default, which is like $20.5k for most guidelines I've read. [0]
> - A private company engaging in behavior to create jobs and offer increased value to their customers is not the "language of socialism."
It absolutely is, and its historical success in America is exactly why capitalists have adopted it as a talking point even when it's not actually their goal in any scenario.
[0]: I googled https://q1medicare.com/q1group/MedicareAdvantagePartD/Blog.p... before I wrote my post.
How exactly do you plan on enforcing this without automation? There are millions of apps on the Play Store. Many are updated dozens of times a year. How many thousands of reverse engineers do you plan on hiring to prevent bad behavior without error?
As far as how many app reviewers to hire? Well, Apple manages their store pretty well. Google has about eleventy billion dollars in cash, so I'm sure they could afford to hire a few people to do the job.
The sheer number of people who got infected with mal- and adware is disturbing and they demanded and believed that their provider or the device OEM is to be held responsible.
That’s not my evaluation of the situation, but the entry barrier for the web and its possibilities is very low, while the damage which can be done is pretty critical sometimes.
I personally don’t see any “everyone is pleased” solution, it’s a bit frustrating that the more tech-savvy folk is getting punished for straight out ignorance of the vast majority.
Maybe you can spent some of your gazillion dollars to hire humans instead of relying on automated half-measures
Google hasn't taken away anything. There is still a web and you're free to deploy what you want there on your terms.
(Edits to correct Google's autocorrect errors.)
Mostly it's just tweaking our existing monopoly laws to be a bit less blind.
You CAN sue them, but for what is unclear. "Wielding too much power" isn't a crime.
And even if you could find a legitimate reason, you are unlikely to win. I would assume Google Play's Terms of Service has several clauses, including indemnity, arbitration, and agreement that Google can remove your app at anytime for any reason.
Any of those should be sufficient to have the suit summarily dimissed.
At the very least, it should be easier to involve lawyers and not get totally ignored by the other party. It's never pretty, but at least it is possible.
Criminal statutes don't apply to an individual's remedy here. You can sue for damages, but, yes, "wielding power" is not evidence of damages.
However, the power being wielded could be evidence in an anti-trust suit brought by the government.
The Play Store does lots of interesting and innovative stuff in the space of automated tests to detect malware. But clearly there's a lot of room for improvement.
The main issue IMHO is not so much whether that would be possible but the fact that they have infinite financial resources while you and I probably have very little money to throw at legal costs. So we're screwed.
And it's guards are fairly inept.
Even accepting your premise that there is no longer a "level playing field", there's no legal reason to expect Google to help you publish your app anyway. Hence they have not taken or vioated any rights you think you have.
I do think there is a case here against apple because they do gatekeep what the user has access to, but people love to fine Google way more than they do apple, even tough apple is infinitely more anticompetitive and anticonsumer IMO.
You could argue that they take advantage of the desire of app developers to access their market, but that's not "anticompetitive". It's unfair, but life wasn't meant to be fair.
IANAL but I think it's an unfortunate result of how the antitrust laws work. Because Google provides a free OS and works with partners to make handsets, etc, they fall under extreme scrutiny. But apple doubles down on being a walled garden where you must use only thier hardware, software, and app platform. Because they don't have any partners like Google does, there's no interactions that apple has that can be taken as anticompetitive, even though the way they force thier users into thier ecosystem is very anticompetitive imo.
Of course you can. This is America and anybody can sue anybody for anything (with few exceptions).
Winning the suit is another matter. Unless you have smoking-gun evidence of discrimination or some such, I'd say the case would be DOA.
Of course, the costs of the suit would likely be prohibitive as well. I don't think that many lawyers would take a case like this on contingency. Maybe pro bono.
1. I create a business that operates inside a marketplace that you own. 2. We have an agreement that says you will allow me to operate as long as I don't violate your terms of service. 3. I am kicked out of the marketplace but did not violate the TOS.
If there was a line in the agreement that the either party could terminate the agreement at anytime for any reason, I guess the TOS doesn't really matter. But is that what exists right now in these app stores?
In that world Mozilla wouldn't sell your data to Pocket or Stranger Things or whoever knows a bizdev at Mozilla?
No single entity, except the laws of course ;)
The DMCA outsourced due process for copyright infringement.
SOSTA did it for illegal advertising (really, for policing morals, in general, but even the title of the bill agrees it was outsourcing sex trafficking law enforcement to private entities).
The CLOUD act did it for illegal domestic searches and also foreign espionage.
Caveat emptor — the big internet companies that lobbied so hard for these bills (or built businesses on them) got some short term platform lock-in, but they also guaranteed that their business models would be morally reprehensible moving forward.
We’re starting to see the fall out with Facebook, but they are not the only bad actor in this space.
No, it didn't. What it did was protect online service providers from liability for either hosting or removing allegedly infringing content if they took certain action when notified of potential problems from either side (to the extent the results seem asymmetrical, it's because the pre-existing legal risk was asymmetrical.)
> SOSTA did it for illegal advertising
SESTA/FOSTA was kind of the opposite of DMCA; instead of creating a safe harbor that protected firms from existential risks that were starting to drive them out of hosting user content, it creates new holes on an existing safe harbor and drove providers out of carrying broad categories of user content around the area legally targetted.
If that had never come to be and it was decentralized instead, no one would be lamenting that corporations weren't in charge.
For example, few people think it would have been good if a corporation had beat out the WWW.
On a side note, it's important to appreciate where companies didn't win and not take it for granted: online encyclopedia, email, many programming languages, anything where an open-source solution won.
* providing infrastructure for the store etc.
* worrying about sand-boxing arbitrary native code (instead just needing to concentrate on work separating the one app, the browser, from everything else)
* maintaining a public API instead of one they can change at a whim without backlash because only they use it
I don't think they quite saw the scale of the revenue stream potential of the App Store at the time, IMO people give Apple too much credit for that.
There was a big push from developers for native apps because:
* the web APIs were not particularly ready at the time (arguably some things still aren't now)
* a combination of lower CPU power than we have become used to in more recent years, and JS & layout engines not optimising as well as they do now, meant that there was a more significant difference in performance between web-app & native, particularly for games
It's my garden, my choice. You are still allowed to publish your app on the web.
Unless (in the EU) the company holds a significant market position, which Google does. In that moment they become subject to antitrust and monopoly laws, and can’t choose with whom to do business anymore.
Monopolies are subject to restrictions on their operation specifically to protect competition. Unfortunately, around the world over the past 30 years, monopoly regulation has been sadly lacking, except in the EU.
Google could be judged as a monopoly provider of operating system and application services to mobile phone manufacturers. Apple supplies iOS only to its own hardware.
As such, google could be restrained but only in terms of how it deals with the phone manufacturers, not their customers.
Yeah, because laws protecting inefficient business are great for society and consumers.
No business "deserves" protection. Consumers do, but not business.
I'm fine paying the AWS tax. It's a generic utility more or less and I can just as easily use Azure or Google (assuming you're not baked into certain offerings, but that's out of scope and honestly is a choice.)
If you want on Android there's no choice. You play by Google's rules and pay their tax.
People get up in arms when ISPs try to pull this (net neutrality). This is the same pattern. Phones, OSes, etc. should be "dumb" pipes. (The analogy isn't elegant here, but you get it.)
That is a huge claim, thrown around by you with no backing. You could get a few economists to discuss that for ages without reaching a conclusion.
Unless you're talking about the layman's definition of monopoly, which means "whatever I want it to mean".
This is particularly relevant when there's the Amazon app store, and app preloads, and the Korean app store, and Fortnite isn't available on the Play store.
And that's before we get into the fact that iOS competes with Android, and that includes the app stores. This would be like complaining that to get a product to be sold by Walmart, you need to get Walmart to sell it.
No matter how you look at it, consumers never had so many choices, prices have never been this low, and app distribution has never been so easy.
Google have absolute monopoly of android apps in the common market, and a monopoly of mobile apps in the android market.
The EU already ruled this http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-4581_en.htm
I really don't understand app-store apologists. Its abuse of dominance, plain and simple.
And if you read the EU decision, you'll notice that they're assuming that Android doesn't compete with iOS...
Did you even read my comment? It's literally exactly what I said. I gave two examples of a market and two of a commodity. Maybe you need to go read what a monopoly is instead of assuming others don't know what they are talking about (both me, and the EU, clearly)
That completely ignores the fact that there is intense competition for developers and users between Android and iOS, and renders the point moot.
Sure, you can always define an arbitrary market for which a company will have dominance, but that's irrelevant from an economics perspective.
Maybe you should go read on what a monopoly actually is...
Here's a good interview with the economist who taught me what a monopoly is:
https://hbr.org/2017/11/as-more-people-worry-about-monopolie...
Will be a good point for you to start.
The market is the common market, the commodity is android apps. Just like I said, just like the EU said. As for defining "arbitrary markets", I am not the one who described the appstore as a 'market' - that was google.
Go try your inflated ego elsewhere, i'll just call you out on your BS.
Oh, you mean that if politicians pass a law saying the sky is red, then it stops being blue?
Seriously, if the EU "rules" that gravity doesn't exist, then it suddenly stops existing?
Don't be angry because you don't understand the subject...
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Phone OSes and app stores are a duopoly, Google and Apple are the only games in town, what the US needs to do is look at its antitrust and pro competition laws, figure out if they make sense for the information age and then apply them.
This might be happening in the very early stages now, when Trump appointed Rohit Chopra as an FTC Commissioner last year one of Chopra's first moves was to hire Lina Khan, an antitrust academic who is critical of the FAANG companies and has clashed with Google very publicly. I can only think of one reason the FTC would hire Khan, to find reasons for going after the tech giants.
Google and Apple wanted to be in the role of gatekeeper, so they should be beholden to the apps on their platform. We had a web where developers were in control of their own deployment. Everything was decentralized and required responsibility and diligence.
Now the power is out of our hands and its unfair. It isn't our choice.
One might argue this is better for consumers, but I honestly don't think so. Technology could have fixed discoverability and provided sandboxing, networks could provide curation. And there would probably be better privacy in the world where Mozilla won instead of Google.
Edit: I am so happy that GDPR and CDPA have arrived to protect consumers. We need similar laws to protect startups, small businesses, and sole proprietors that rely on these platforms to treat us fairly. They owe us that after haven taken away the nice open web we once had. Maybe laws are how we get back the web we lost.