![]() ![]() However it may be too fatalistic to assume Android apps cannot be distributed outside the store. Of course, iOS users are out of luck, as always. If Google did start to abuse Chrome, people who understood what was happening could quickly switch to Edge. Microsoft seems, at least so far, to have avoided the worst of the culture wars and suspicions of bias. It's not merely using Blink, it's actually Chrome but modified and is very serviceable indeed. Of course, they can change that just as easily as they can change the social norms around how it's used.Īnother is that Microsoft has built a successful fork of Chromium. One is that Chrome at least on desktop lets you disable SafeBrowsing. SafeBrowsing is thus a very dangerous thing because Google's management has shown no ability so far to get a grip on the activist wing of their workforce.įortunately, there are two mitigating factors. Yet, social conventions have been repeatedly ripped up over the last 10 years or so by political activists who abuse the word "safe" to mean "ideologically acceptable to us". ![]() It's just a social convention that they don't. There is nothing anywhere that would stop Google just adding websites it doesn't like to the SafeBrowsing blacklist. However their behaviour currently when banning websites is considered to be a legitimate use of power, so it attracts no attention. The same companies that can ban apps from an app store can also ban websites at the drop of a hat, and do. The problems here are not technology related and it's a mistake to look for technological fixes. This is a point I've been hammering for a long time now. ![]() There will always be bad actors who take advantage of concepts like "the open web", so how do you keep things open, but safe and trusted? Can you create a federated system that has "experts you trust" and "peers you trust" and then can go to their recommendations to see which software providers to trust? And wrap that into a pretty tidy interface that everyone can easily adopt? And have the trust system and the device platforms work nicely together to prevent "middle man" attacks? They do not want to figure out whether to trust lots of software providers. The "masses" choose convenience the vast majority of the time, and they also largely want to trust one source for their software needs. It's also hard to envision a strong, competitive alternative. So it's really hard to picture a way that this could've evolved without those stores, such that critical mass was reached on these platforms. Google may never have gained enough traction with Android if they didn't build the Play Store and introduce convenience and a sense of trust in that store. Smartphones could've evolved to work like the above, perhaps relying on a USB port for software installs, with options to install directly from developers on the internet, but Apple had already learned from iTunes how to use control to both ensure a pretty good experience for users while also getting a lot of money for it. The most sophisticated users would look to peer-reviewed, open source software, but this involves knowing either how to review it yourself, or knowing who else to trust as having reviewed it. But similarly, I would look to web sites I trusted for my software. Stores would prefer to only carry trustworthy software (in a box) to maintain their reputation as a good store, competitive with other stores. Many people would go to a store and buy a box with a disc in it, which was something you could trust because incentives aligned. But I wouldn't necessarily recommend the same for people that looked to me for computer advice. I would install lots of software on my computer from the internet. I've tried multiple times to contact Google to get my account restored, several times in the past few years since it's been so long, but they don't even respond and it's impossible to get a hold of a human.īefore smartphones, I was a "tech savvy" computer user. I've been banned from Google Play Developer portal since 2015 because I had an app that accessed an undocumented API of a 3rd party service: "we have determined that your app interferes with or accesses another service or product in an unauthorized manner." I had two different apps using the same API so I got 2 strikes at once and was immediately banned. Meanwhile other similar apps or developers of similar apps that got you banned remain in the store. They won't hesitate to remove an app or your entire account and once they do it's impossible to talk to anyone. While I don't agree that they should be policing this content at all I think the inconsistency at which they do it is even worse. ![]() Just a quick search in Google Play Store shows several apps that are similarly named including "Threesome Dating App for Couples & Swingers: 3rder". ![]()
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