Apps need to exit the Play Store. I have a whole slew of apps which haven't been updated for a while now because Aurora Store isn't working because of whatever Google of doing. Meanwhile the ones installed via FDroid and other means are perfectly up to date. It's a crappy state of affairs as Google continues to close the boiling Android frog.
On my end the experience was more pleasant on f-droid than on Google. On f-droid I had to manually push some things, in repositories. That I solved in a week or so.
On Google end I had to verify my account. Which was not easy feat.
- had to provide my ID several times, because it got rejected multiple times
- I uploaded driving license
- the verification process was stuck
- only after help ticket google employee pushed it forward
- I had to provide many more details, also had to use banking to pay substantial amount of money
- I currently trying to create app, but it requires 14 testers, and it can still be rejected, if their involvement was too poor
I am wondering what more things Google will invent to make my life worse.
From a user perspective I think F-Droid is really good too, mainly because it only allows FOSS apps by default, which cuts out a lot of the BS you see in Play Store apps.
You can go download a random, no-name app from F-Droid and be very confident it does what it says on the tin and won't be riddled with ads or spam you with notifications.
I am a little wary how many of the newer apps on F-Droid seem fully vibe-coded. there's only so many 'brain training' games and 'fully offline notes' that one really needs
I wish there was a 'ranking' feature that periodically (maybe daily?) pulled down star/contributor numbers so you could at least look at projects that are more likely to receive continuing support and have basic hygiene like Dependabot alerts
that said, migrating off so many of the Google-native or phone manufacturer apps has been such a liberatory feeling. I do some community organizing in my free-time and am a huge FOSS evangelist in those spaces. there's so many similar values, namely anti-surveillance, and but for resistance to change and preference for hyperpalatable UX, it's such a natural fit
Thats the only reason for at least me to use f droid and I have for the last decade I think.
It "just works".
As opposed to play store apps requiring "play store services" meaning having to sign into play store. It refuses to do so on a FOSS principle so I am literally cut off from a lot of apps.
Aurora store helps but apps that "require play store services" don't work.
> "play store services" meaning having to sign into play store
Not necessarily. Most apps that require Play Services should work fine even if you’re not logged into Google. You do, however, have to have the “gapps” installed. (Some apps would also actually check whether you’ve installed them from the Google Play store and not, say, Aurora, but from my experience most don’t bother.)
Also, perhaps look into microG? It reimplements the Play Services APIs, but is FOSS and only connects to Google servers when it’s necessary for some functionality (e.g. if you enable push notifications): https://microg.org/
I’m using microG without signing in. Could you tell me a bit about what apps you’re using that you’re having trouble with?
A good way to sidestep all those issues is getting your “everyday” apps from F-Droid :-) I’m only using Aurora Store for things like banking, taxi, or food delivery apps, and those are usually working great. Some banks are more trigger happy (shame on you, Revolut) while others seem to be okay. I really only miss Google Wallet.
On the user side my experience with F-Droid is auto updates dont work and I constantly get a "repository not reachable" f-droid error every now and then popping up on my phone (that little small middle-of-screen toast) when im doing something else completely unrelated. Might be a regional thing.
I get the F-Droid toasts once every few weeks or so. To me, it's worth it. Finding a tolerable weather app on the Play Store is impossible nowadays. Finding one on F-Droid is easy.
F-Droid is a nerd solution and will be used by 0.00001% of the total market. There are more people that will use Linux on desktop than will use F-Droid.
We need governments to mandate both Apple and Google to allow web installs of apps. No requirement for Apple/Google pay, Apple/Google login, or Apple/Google services.
Total freedom for users, for developers, and for competitors.
This duopoly has fucked over America and the EU by training us to think only these two companies have the right to decide what gets to be on your phone that you pay for.
They've created a moat so strong that it's impossible to compete with Android/iPhone, so the market cannot even have healthy competition.
F-Droid is not the answer. Regulation is.
And I'll have none of this fangirl/fanboy "but my grandma will fall for scams" nonsense.
Google and Amazon and all the platforms have scammy ads on their platforms. Nobody's doing anything about that.
Technology can be sandboxed, permissioned, signed, fingerprinted, attested, scanned, and blacklisted. It's easy to make this safe in the year of our lord 2026. Don't pretend we don't have a million ways to make this safe for your meemaw. She's more likely to fall down the stairs or get a scam call.
Regulate Google. Regulate Apple. Make our phones free.
On Youtube just now I got hit with an ad whose first 5 unskippable seconds were an AI person saying "Did you know the cure for dimentia is in the Bible!?!?" - considering who that ad is targetting, Google can F off with any stance about protecting people from scams.
That's good, but don't forget that the point is that Google's pearl clutching about security doesn't apply when they are making money. They'll sell you straight to scammers if it makes them money.
> Technology can be sandboxed, permissioned, signed, fingerprinted, attested, scanned, and blacklisted.
Many of the things you're listing are the exact things the platforms would have to be banned from doing by the regulation you're proposing because they're the mechanisms used to exclude competitors.
If you put all apps in a sandbox then they can't perform certain operations (e.g. install other apps) which inherently means they can't compete in the market for doing those things. If apps have to be signed by the platform then the signing fee becomes the vig they charge to everyone even if they're using a competing store, and both that and scanning/fingerprinting provide a mechanism to revoke competing apps under arbitrary pretexts and otherwise grief their developers and users.
Attestation is the thing you would have to ban the most because it's not just subject to abuse, its very mechanism of operation is to prevent existing apps that use it from running on a competing new system at the point in time when the new system has too few users for all the apps to explicitly add support for it, thereby preventing the competitor from getting enough users for that to ever happen.
But attestation doesn't prevent grandma from getting scammed anyway. When the scammer calls pretending to be the grandchild who needs money for an emergency, they use the official signed bank app on the attestation-passing device to transfer money to the scammer. When the scammer is using a fake bank app to steal the user's credentials, the fake app doesn't require attestation.
The actual problem here is that you want to have someone vetting apps for grandma, but you don't want the platforms to be able to insist it be them rather than F-Droid or Aurora etc. Which the platforms will try to claim is chicken and egg (how do you know you can trust F-Droid?) while hoping you don't notice that they don't actually get you out of it -- how do you know you can trust Google?
> Many of the things you're listing are the exact things the platforms would have to be banned from doing by the regulation you're proposing because they're the mechanisms used to exclude competitors.
And they should still be banned from forcing apps to do it under their arbitrary judgements in order to participate on their platform. That isn't the same thing as preventing them from doing it. Some people honestly think they love walled gardens (they don't), but some people honestly need walled gardens. There should even be competing walled gardens. Let me install the best kids app store for my kids, and the best grandmas app store for my grandma.
I'm also not sure that attestation should be banned at the app store or platform level; it's a service. I'd ban it at the bank and merchant level. Attestation should be a tool for the user of the device (just like everything else on the phone they own.) They should be able to get it to attest to whatever they want to get it to attest to - if I'm a company and I issue my employees phones, I might want to make sure those phones haven't been tampered with. If I'm a parent and I issue my children phones, I might want to make sure those phones haven't been tampered with. The problem comes when arbitrary people are using it to make sure that the user hasn't tampered with their own phone since it came from some official list of blessed companies.
Let me install the best kids app store for my kids, and the best grandmas app store for my grandma. Let me be able to use attestation to make sure their phones haven't been altered since the last time I checked.
> If apps have to be signed by the platform
I'd like to get back to apps being signed by upstream, so we know they actually come from the author. I couldn't care less if the platform offers a service which verifies those signatures, and if almost everyone uses that service. That's just DNS. If your platforms service becomes hostile, there will be cheap/free competitors, just like DNS.
Just agreeing loudly. But the problem with F-Droid is that it is to be a store that has been blessed by Google in order to avoid legal questions. I know that this is not their fault, and that they hate it. I exclusively use F-Droid and don't even have a Google Play account, but if they started making decisions that I couldn't stand (they haven't, ever) I wouldn't have any alternative.
I remember the bullshit settlement of Microsoft antitrust is that they had to place a modal popup do select a default browser (that I never saw, once, in any context.) No reason why the platform's store can't be demoted to one of a number of stores other than that it is a profit spinner.
> And they should still be banned from forcing apps to do it under their arbitrary judgements in order to participate on their platform. That isn't the same thing as preventing them from doing it.
If they do it and it's enabled by default then they still get to grief their competitors because by default anyone who tries to use the competitor gets a big scary red box that deters adoption and has to jump through a bunch of hoops to get past it. It also thwarts adoption of competing signing alternatives because >90% of people will use whatever the default is even if the alternatives are at least as good.
> some people honestly need walled gardens
"Walled garden" is an Orwellian term. It's meant to imply that someone is curating what's inside it and not letting in things you don't want, and that is indeed a useful thing. But then people use the same term to mean a "garden" that locks you inside of it rather than locking bad things out. The only people who need that are small children and adults with mental illnesses severe enough to justify them having a guardian assigned to make their decisions for them.
> I'm also not sure that attestation should be banned at the app store or platform level; it's a service.
It isn't a service at all. The device contains hardware to sign the state of the device using a protected private key. Solving the problem is very simple -- you ban the device from coming with any private key already installed that the user can't freely extract. Then the root of the chain of trust is the customer's public key, not the vendor's, and whether a device is authorized comes down to whether the user's public key is authorized rather than the vendor's, which in turn makes the system vendor-agnostic.
> That's just DNS. If your platforms service becomes hostile, there will be cheap/free competitors, just like DNS.
DNS is actually a pretty terrible model because the "competition" is a fraud. There are registrars and registries and the registrars compete with each other but the registry still sets the price the registrars pay and the registries have a monopoly over every name in that TLD, so the competition can't actually get you a lower price than the monopoly registry itself sets. And the registries only compete with each other to the extent that you think that example.dental is valid substitute for example.football (no, sorry, those are both the same registry anyway) and to the extent that example.co.uk is a domain you could get instead of example.com rather than needing both. Meanwhile ICANN charges an extortionate amount to anyone who wants to become a registry and the entire system is set up to encourage squatting, to the point that the registries are now doing it themselves rather than making any attempt to impede it.
In general if you want something to work well you need to make it a protocol rather than a service. As soon as you allow a central chokepoint to exist you'll have a troll jumping out from under the bridge and trying to collect tolls.
Actions speak louder than words, and there has been no real action for my entire gray-haired life. Politicians can talk all they want about anti-trust reforms, but both parties equally have lots of members with vested interests in these cartels and who profit from the status quo. I think that ultimately overrides the will of the people more often than not.
She didn't "take too long," she did all she could as long as she could, and is still doing it. The problem is that she was opposed by both political parties and the administration, for whom she was a token to hand to the Bernie and AOC people so they could sell out without being called sellouts.
If Biden had promoted Khan not only would she have had vastly more success, but he would have won the election - demented or not. Instead, if you listened to his press conferences, you would have no idea that she existed. He did not support her. He was a tool for financial scammers his entire career. His tiny little state was to domestic financial scams as Ireland is to worldwide tax dodging.
> Both the Democratic and Republican parties have lots of members who are fed up with big tech.
Few members, with no power. All of the leadership is on the big tech payroll. It's the population which hates big tech, and their opinions don't matter.
The public are also easily movable over time and under great pressure. The public have become aggressively pro-Big Pharma and Free Trade globalists in a single generation. Libs have become militantly pro-FBI and CIA anti-Soviet warriors. They literally revived the 50's anti-Commie language to describe everything they didn't like, and worship The Lincoln Project, David Frum, and even goddamn Bill Kristol which I never thought would work. It's literally the same generation that reviled them and anyone who would tolerate them just 20 years ago.
They didn't even have to die for success of the submissiveness revolution. They just had to keep watching, and consuming. And you had to threaten their jobs, all the time.
Having a theory of power that doesn't unrealistically imagine a control over government which one demonstrably doesn't have is not "defeatism." Limiting yourself to only one impossible way of doing things is more insidious than learned helplessness, because they can give you a dramatically scripted mini-game to fool yourself into thinking that you're progressing. See slacktivism.
The trouble with controlling the government is that nobody actually does. Nobody will ever get it to do everything they want, or everything it "should", or anything like that. It's a giant uncoordinated bureaucracy full of inefficiency and perverse incentives. Relying only on the government is a time-honored way to die with regrets.
This is not the same as being unable to affect it at all. It can very easily go from being hot garbage to being flaming toxic waste in a tornado when the only people who show up are the ones trying to steal from everyone else.
90% of my apps (all except for banking, streaming and ev charging app) are installed without play store. Beyond FDroid with custom repos, I actually came to like Komi-Store in combination with obtainium. I really wonder what will happen when Google enforces their own registered developer signatures. I hope there is a crucial mass of apps outside of Play store until then to generate some heard protests.
>Corporation like Google should have been fined to the edge of bankruptcy for such predatory behaviour.
Google has an alternative at least (can download other app stores, apks, and have been able to for 15 years), I have no idea how Apple has been allowed to get away with what they do.
Better framing in their lawsuits- being a ‘market’ is less a thing in a monoculture- i.e. the market for Apple phones vs the market for all Android phones from a variety of makers.
Also in the worldwide market it most definitely isn’t a monopoly in phones at all- which is exactly why the EU had to reform their laws (DMA ect)to get regulatory powers over them.
"It's not a monopoly" is exactly the framing. Antitrust isn't inherently concerned with monopolies, it's concerned with market power. It's just that a monopolist has no room to move in claiming that they don't have market power.
They also play this trick where they pretend the only market is "phones" and ignore all of the complementary markets they're tying together with their phones, like app distribution and browser engines etc., since the market definitions for those shouldn't be the same as it is for "phones" when an app store that can be used on Google and Samsung phones can't be used (and therefore doesn't compete) on Apple phones and vice versa.
I never understood the argument that Apple's hostility to developers was unfair. The business proposition is simple:
"Buy our overpriced hardware with our famously inflexible and invasive software and sign this massive, legally-binding contract agreeing that you understand all of the above to extract further value out of the Apple ecosystem."
The "App Store" is just a natural extension of the club. As far as I'm concerned, they can gatekeep and sloppify as much as they want. Apple users agree to this.
I've never felt slighted that I couldn't hack apart my iPad - though I will absolutely do it once somebody cracks the code and gets a proper Linux kernel running.
We Americans collectively voted for this for decades. Virtually everyone who has cast a ballot for a national race has voted for this state of affairs.
Especially in the software community, overwhelmingly self-described libertarian, all voted for this.
It takes a big government to stop this from happening. (It also takes a big government to stop structural racism, etc., which means higher taxes, which means there's no such thing as a fiscal conservative who is also socially liberal. But I digress.)
Of the last 10 Presidential terms spanning 40 years, Republicans have held the office for 5 and Democrats for 5. Each party has likewise held around half the seats in the House and Senate. This has nothing to do with the voters, it's the structural outcome of a FPTP voting system. You get two parties and they each get around half the votes/seats.
The US federal government has also played a major role in causing this by passing laws like DMCA 1201 and the CFAA which incumbents use to threaten competitors who attempt adversarial interoperability.
Moreover, the DoJ budget is ~$33B whereas e.g. the military budget is ~$1T, so arguing that the only way to allocate more resources to antitrust enforcement or similar is to raise taxes would imply that all of the existing spending is critically necessary and Congress never e.g. buys tanks the Army doesn't want or otherwise poorly allocates existing funds.
The US Government spends a preposterous amount of money, and the number only ever goes up. It doesn't need to be bigger, it needs to be less inefficient.
This just should not be the top comment here. HN being HN, it's way, way too bent out of shape about the company name attached to the app store and not the minutiae of tax policy, which is what this is really about.
The app in question declares itself this way: AnkiDroid is a free, open-source flashcard app for Android with over 10 million installs, used worldwide for various purposes, primarily in medical education and language learning.
But it's registered as a 501(c)(6) non-profit, which is a designation for a "business league or industry association". This is what you use if you're a Chamber of Commerce, not a flash card app!
Obviously we're all reading this expecting that Anki is a 501(c)(3) charity, like most open source organizations, and it's just not. And the distinction is definitely impactful for tax purposes, something a payment processor is going to care about. Both organizations are exempt from tax themselves, but charitable donations are also deductable, and Anki isn't a charity. Likely Google isn't set up to record the distinction in an auditable way.
The bottom line is that Anki's lawyers messed up. Or plausibly are running some kind of scam (e.g. they take the "donations" and then hand them over to a for-profit "member" company). They need to fix their registration if they want to take money from people, this isn't how you do it and this is surely not the only problem they'll have. Seriously, my Fraud Meter is dinging at about 19.6% here...
> The bottom line is that Anki's lawyers messed up.
Anki and Ankidroid are not the same entity and they have different owners, if you want to call it that.
Anki is owned by Nicholas Flint, a physician who sells med school-related decks online under the name AnKing, which controls Ankihub, which now controls Anki after the original founder (Damien Elmes) gave them control about six months ago.
Ankidroid is a non-profit project that arose when there was only an iPhone mobile version of Anki. Completely unrelated to Anki except that it was blessed by the original creator of Anki.
It's also just some nerd programmers who ported Anki to run on Android. It's not some org with a revenue stream and attorneys.
> Obviously we're all reading this expecting that Anki is a 501(c)(3) charity
No, no one is reading it thinking that Anki is a charity.
Anyway, when you are going to harp on about HN not caring about the minutiae of tax policy, you should make sure you understand that you're talking about two unrelated entities run by different people as if they were the same entity.
So... why is one soliciting donations on behalf of the other?! My Fraud Meter is rising, not falling here.
> It's also just some nerd programmers who ported Anki to run on Android. It's not some org with a revenue stream and attorneys.
"Just Some Nerd Programmers" don't, very obviously, have standing to solicit tax exempt donations. Rising further still...
I think a lot of people here are operating on the assumption that apps have the inherent right to ask for money on a proprietary platform that gives them a monetization path. They don't, on any such platform, and never have. There are specific carveouts allowed by the platform vendors for cases we all agree are valuable, like charitable donations. It's just really clear that Anki is playing games here and frankly I really doubt they qualify.
> So... why is one soliciting donations on behalf of the other?! My Fraud Meter is rising, not falling here.
It's not... AnkiDroid was soliciting donations to AnkiDroid, via OpenCollective, which essentially "owns" them financially, for the purpose of soliciting donations.
This is all explained very clearly in the linked GitHub issue:
> AnkiDroid's donations go to Open Source Collective, a US non-profit which acts as our fiscal host.
> AnkiDroid is the Anki client for Android, developed and maintained by volunteers. Nothing is sold in the app and our Open Collective is the sole source of funding for maintenance and development. AnkiDroid is independent from Anki, AnkiWeb, AnkiMobile, and AnkiHub.
While some confusion is understandable, continuing to press on about your "Fraud Meter" just puts egg on your face when you're misunderstanding things through multiple replies explaining them to you.
> I think a lot of people here are operating on the assumption that apps have the inherent right to ask for money on a proprietary platform that gives them a monetization path.
no one here thinks that there is an "inherent right" to ask for money on a proprietary platform. That's a strawman.
You're also still wrong about the nature of AnkiDroid, and it's making you look silly when you're so confident and rude about it.
> You're also still wrong about the nature of AnkiDroid
So were you though, if you're still standing by "just some nerd programmers". They want to take donations through an outside payment processor, which they simply can't do and you know it. Like, seriously, give me the one sentence summary of what Google is doing wrong here that wouldn't enable essentially arbitrary fraud.
Apps can't put up donation links except in extremely limited circumstances, and this isn't one. And, again, you know it.
Genuinely sorry for being rude, if this seems rude. Doesn't seem rude to me though in context. You were the one who started with the aggressive rhetoric ("harping on", yada yada). We're just flaming, things get hot.
Do LF and Rust solicit individual donations via phone apps (or at all, really)?
Indeed, those are structured as corporate-funded consortiums of exactly the type you'd be very suspicious of if, say, your kernel or compiler logs started stuffing a donation link into the stream!
Note that GNU software does historically mention donations (not in the logs AFAIK), and indeed the FSF is a 501(c)(3).
> "Phone apps" is irrelevant, because again, Anki was not taking donations via their app but rather via a link to OpenCollective, a separate website.
...Irrelevant? That's the whole point. "Taking donation via a separate website (emphasis in original)" is explicitly dissallowed in the Play Store (and App Store on iOS)! There happens to be an exception carved out for federally-registered charities. But no, you don't get to just hold out a link to a tip jar.
Does this link count as a charity? No, per the structure of federal tax law. Also no, per the set of rules of the app store it's trying to be listed on. Should it count? Well, maybe I guess? Open source projects are like charities in some cases. We should all want to support them. But doing it like this, through a middle-man organization that isn't a charity, just plain smells like fraud to me. Who's doing the auditing that this is just supporting development and not profit centers? Is the IRS doing it? Not as far as I can see.
The 501(c)(6) in question is Open Source Collective, which is a “business league or industry association” dedicated to providing financial and administrative assistance to Open Source projects. Anki does not have lawyers, Open Source Collective does.
Since you seem to have done the research, can you link some other iOS or Android apps that have been allowed to solicit donations for the Open Source Collective? Thanks.
I mean, come on. Just read their page. They're not a charity, at all. They're a "fiscal host" (which is a weird term right out of the gate) designed to solicit donations on behalf of other projects. They're literally a payment processor in competition with Google and Apple, and taking a cut of their own.
I mean, fine. They can do that. But that's not charity.
