shimfish

Anecdata: I've pushed out dozens of small code fixes to My PlayHome Plus over the past month and none of them took more than a few hours to be reviewed.

As an app developer, I'm looking forward to having to answer all the emails asking for me to transfer their purchases to Google Play.

Roger Penrose wrote about this decades ago, arguing that computers cannot contain consciousness and neither can anything in currently understood physics.

https://www.amazon.com/Emperors-New-Mind-Concerning-Computer...

Carmack explicitly addressed this in his keynote last year https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnSUk0je6oo at around 43 minutes in.

Which is another non-discussed aspect to this.

People are already upset that their digital purchases are controlled by Apple. Wait until the startup that they bought stacks of software from goes bust and all of their app purchases are gone.

So why are we doing this then?

And these services would all take a 15-30% cut. It wouldn't be profitable otherwise.

I still end up with one more app store to deal with. Unless this 3rd party becomes a de-facto monopoly, there's no way you could afford to leave money on the table by not also dealing with Apple and Google.

It becomes everyones user experience when every big company only offers their software on their own app store so they don't have to pay anyone else a cut.

Oh goody. I get to manage my own payment system. And have to worry about being tax compliant in every country and state. And deal with logins, and refunds and fraud and uptime and customer support.

Where do I sign up?

So you're suggesting that either Google or Apple will just step aside?

And the point of this monopoly busting legislation was to create a bigger monopoly?

As an indie dev, I'm really not getting this.

Android has had alternate app stores for years. I don't recall any of them being a panacea for poor struggling devs held captive by Google Play. I stopped offering my apps on any of them as it was never worth the bother.

What problem is this trying to solve for who exactly? I don't see any way this ends up as a win for small devs.

The CGI got better for each movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib2v8atzt5c

I don't think there's anything wrong with how he looks but the subtle over-fluidity of his movement. It's especially bad in the first shot when he's just swaying around most unnaturally. He's completely out of focus so there's nothing the rendering is doing wrong but the motion immediately alerts the brain that this isn't real.

Anecdata:

https://twitter.com/simonpegg/status/276131329140215808

That's not it.

We buy puppet Yoda as being real (or at least suspend disbelief) in a way we simply can't do with CGI Yoda.

I think a large chunk of the problem is that we've been concentrating on improving the rendering, which is clearly now phenomenal, and seemingly totally ignoring the animation, which is still abysmal.

CGI characters still move too smoothly. It's all spline curves and jelly physics. CGI is instantly recognisably unreal due to the overly fluid motions and it seems remarkable to me how little progress has been made on this.

Animated characters still look animated, except they dive straight into the uncanny valley because of the incredible rendering. I guess mo-cap only gets you so far before you have to smooth out the noise of the motion signal.

Anyone with actual knowledge of CGI got anything to say about this? It seems weird that everything else moved on while this got neglected.

Came across this Gen-Z humour explainer video recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVlspd9hxFA

In a nutshell, I think he's saying that it's funny because it's not funny.

Or maybe it's what happens when there's a global shipping shortage and a breakdown in the supply chain.

Or maybe it's a combination of a lot of things.

But chances are it wasn't because of stimulus checks.

Where do you get the idea that the spirit of the law is not to consume more energy? Is this something you've studied?

Why not be honest to yourself and admit you've literally no idea what the laws are?

If we're being nerdy about this then there are other considerations to worry about apart from just not pressing buttons.

For example, if the elevator is going down the passenger weight could increase the speed of descent marginally. This would mean the light indicating the floor number would change quicker than it would have done without the passenger being there. Therefore some authorities will only permit the Sabbath Elevator if it shuts off all indicator lights also.

I used RevenueCat's API for Apple and Google just to avoid having to do all this crap myself and it's free up to $10,000 of monthly revenue.

I was less happy with their Google implementation, mostly because of their bizarre insistence of treating every IAP as consumable but overall still less painful than having to roll my own code.

Why 42: https://groups.google.com/g/alt.fan.douglas-adams/c/595nPukE...

I've always been uncomfortable with the idea of advertising to children directly in an app.

For my latest app, which is free with in-app purchase area unlocks...

Google Play: 10 times the amount of downloads than Apple Store

Apple Store: 2.5 times the income of Google Play.

Reviews on Google Play frequently mention how everything should be unlocked for free. Apple reviews seem to focus more on what extra content they would like to see.

Piracy on my paid apps seemed to be way, way higher on Android.

From 2015. No reason to believe things would have got better since then.

https://venturebeat.com/2015/01/05/monument-valley-developer...

Why is that a simpler theory than "why pay when it's incredibly simple to download for free"?

https://venturebeat.com/2015/01/05/monument-valley-developer...

Google Play (unlike Apple) allow you to set prices by country.

I don't think the precise pricing is so much the issue though. It's more free vs not free.

I make kids apps.

Firstly, I'm not sure the struggling to survive demographic are the ones giving devices to their children.

Secondly, kids (and adults for that matter) have been conditioned by the market to expect software for free. You can read all my reviews on Google Play to see how offended they are that stuff isn't free, with some even moaning that there should be video ads that will unlock the app for 30 minutes.

Thirdly, I've seen YouTube videos made by kids specifically giving instructions how to download my apps for free. In fact, generally you just need to sideload just one "alternative app store" and you're good to go. This isn't rocket science. It's following a few simple steps that aren't hard to find.

Finally, I'm making broad generalisations about the vast majority of app store activity. The existence of fisherfolk isn't relevant here. I know people are enabled by the App Store existing. I've been lucky enough to live comfortably for the past decade entirely because App Stores exist. I'm merely offering a few thoughts from the perspective of a long term app developer that some people may not have realised.

I'll also make more because of it. I'm just saying that it won't make that much difference to the vast majority of developers.

What's also not being said here is that ~99% of apps on Google Play don't make money this way either.

Due to a combination of Android user's reluctance to spend money on apps at all and the rampant piracy that Android's open model makes trivially easy, most developers only way to make money is through in-app advertising, which this change obviously makes no difference to.

Google Play is mostly a pyramid scheme. Developer's can only make money from showing ads and at the same time can only get downloads if they place ads on other people's apps. And Google just happens to own all the mobile ad companies.

This 15% cut ends up "costing" Google virtually nothing.

And as for Google "helping developers build sustainable businesses", the only times they've ever reached out to me were to offer me the opportunity to have someone help me spend thousands of dollars a month on mobile ads. Never, for example, to actually take down all the scam apps that use my app's name, icon and screenshots.