Excuse my ignorance, not a native English speaker, what's sharecropping? Google's description doesn't make any sense to me.

Sharecropping originally refers to a process where a landowner would let people farm their land in exchange for a portion of the yield. It has negative associations with post-slavery exploitation of black farmers as well as poor farmers in general in the 1800s and early 1900s. In this setting, it's being used to compare the practice of hosting and selling your app on someone else's platform, with those same connotations of exploitation.

Basically they are saying to stop putting your app on the app store and letting google take a large % of the app and letting your business be dependent on another business.

In this case the landlord is Google, and you are the sharecropper, giving a share (30%) to google to be allowed to use the play store.

More importantly: a share whose figure is chosen by the owner, not by you.

Not sure why the downvotes, this is exactly what's happening.

It's a throwback to a painful point in history, so while it is accurate, some people will kneejerk downvote out of internal distaste to it.

It's a bit hyperbolic to compare the experience of a Reconstruction era sharecropper to the plight of a 21st century app developer.

Yes—the developer can simply move into a different line of business, that doesn't require having a mobile app.

The situations have more in common than you might think. In both cases, you accept the non-negotiated deal offered to you unilaterally by your owners, or you accept zero revenue.

They're very different scenarios, because throughout history sharecroppers have almost always been "stuck" in their situation with no hope of relief, whereas app developers can realistically just go do something else.

When I lived in Asia as a white guy I was regularly the target of "racism": inflated prices (I was earning local salary), you're automatically "in the wrong" in any conflict even when you did nothing wrong, being a target of theft and government corruption, sometimes just general hostility. But it's not really the same "racism" in the same sense that, say, a black person in the US experiences it, as I can just choose to leave, whereas a black person in the US can't really. In spite of the similarities, in the end the experiences are not the same at all.

This makes all the difference. I'm not saying that what Google is doing is right, but it's just not the same thing at all.

Any of us might or might not have obligations that make other options infeasible.

> a black person in the US can't really

Bigotry of low expectations.

My dads family were sharecroppers in the south.

The system definitely was not confined to Reconstruction

No, it's not "exactly what's happening."

At the best, it's a thought-provoking analogy. At the worse, it's a tasteless comparison between software engineering (overwhelmingly lucrative, mostly filled with otherwise well-off people) and a legal loophole for slavery.

SC is not slavery, and why it is a different word.

Sure, it’s just the thing you do where you take all of the former slaves, keep them working on the same land, and pay them a pittance so they can’t leave. Hum.

That’s one fraction of the definition. You might consider other perspectives.

What substantively different or alternative facet of the definition of "sharecropping" should I consider?

Countries and even states not your own. Not to mention the successor to the underground railroad was a thing, people can move when sufficiently motivated.

One thing I hate about HN is that you can’t state inconvenient truths. Flagged, gimme a break.

Do you think their attempts to make a living would be less stressful if they started releasing only on f-droid?

They could release on their own website. The Google store is not the only game in town - unlike on iOS.

I've owned an android for years and have never once installed an app outside the google play store. There's no way this is a viable business option

What you lose then is the auto-update. You can of course make the app nag about installing a new version when available, but it works much, much worse.

The app can auto-update itself without nagging.

By being granted very broad security permissions that an application shouldn't need on a phone, yes.

Clearly the application does need it, else it wouldn't need the permissions to auto update itself.

https://developer.android.com/reference/android/Manifest.per... doesn't seem overly broad to me. How would you make it more specific?