Posted by drewfax 16 hours ago
There is a clear legal asymmetry where allowing competitors on your platform makes you liable if they complain, but blocking out everyone except for yourself is a totally ok and legally rosy way to do business.
https://www.eu-digital-markets-act.com/Digital_Markets_Act_A...
It remains to be seen whether the EU decides that this measure is strictly necessary, proportionate and duly justified. They sometimes do the right thing but I'm not getting my hopes up.
We've accepted that OS vendors can do this for decades. I think that was our mistake: relying on Google as the only available vendor. We can't make a law that punishes Google for having been open all these years. Yes, of course I (like any 'HN' hacker, I'd think) would be in favor of forcing Apple to be open as well, but then it seems that the powers that currently run the EU (and a lot of voters) kinda likes their remote DRM attestation for this digital identification project that you'll soon need for anything not suitable for toddlers and not reachable via a darkweb
It's as hostile as they can make it because people apparently keep buying that, even when there's no semblance of the freedoms we have on Android, Windows, Linux, BSD, etc. Google saw that this suffices for the EU and does half a step towards it and people are, unsurprisingly, appalled because the whole FOSS community is here now. I still think it started with Apple demonstrating how successfully hostile you can be in a duopoly where the cards have been dealt.
Few commercial entities will happily re-implement their apps for a third, new, upcoming platform. Google and Apple will never get outcompeted so long as their software ships on the hardware that people want. Even Microsoft (Windows Mobile predated both OSs) threw in the towel, I wouldn't know who else stands a chance. Regulating these entities seems the only path when Google has evidently decided there's no point trying to compete on openness (also demonstrated by the widespread acceptance of GrapheneOS in the FOSS community: people would rather be kept safe than be free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48758146)
HNers (especially Americans) are super naive and think the EU is some bastion of freedom. no. it just wants to be a huge nanny state but in a wholesome way, where you can do whatever you want as long as it's approved
But then, Librem 5 Phone was just failed few years ago, telling the story that people who care about their rights are still sensitive to how much they would pay (which is a form of rights too).
Also but, there is the thing, making a phone is not easy. If you reach deep enough, you'll eventually reach the layer where you realize how solid the monopolization has become. The global telecom standards if you read them is in the hands of few companies, Boardcom, Motorola, Huawei, Nokia and such. They'll control whether or not your phone can access the network. Then there's telecom companies who runs the network, and they might have to approve your device/modem as well since they got their channel allocation from the government.
It's not easy, and it's not just the software problem.
Oh and yes, we also have the software problem. Linux, if you want to go that route, cannot be used as a mobile OS, as least not for the public, because the average people don't know how to properly secure their system, and Linux is not a restrictive-by-default system. It will be a malware nightmare if you ship Linux on a phone as is.
The best hope for now I think is for geek vendors to make more mobile/4/5G enabled Fairphone or uConsole-like product to the enthusiast market, and then you can load whatever OS on it as you want.
1. People are conditioned to ignore warnings. There are way too many benign warnings in the world; you can't read them all.
2. Even when people wouldn't ignore them, in cases where they are being tricked by scammers it's easy for the scammer to talk people into accepting them.
3. Those sorts of warnings aren't actionable. You're installing a new app. It appears legit. You want to use it. You get a warning like "this app hasn't been verified; it might be malware!". What can you do with the information? Absolutely nothing. 99.9999% of users have zero way of doing any deeper check to see whether it actually is malware. Their only options are to give up and go home, or just hope that the warning is wrong. Even I - a highly technical user - get zero value from things like Windows' smart screen. "The app you're running hasn't been signed! It might be malware!". Err yeah sure. I'm not going to reverse engineer it to check am I?
I think their solution of allowing you to disable the restriction with a one-time one-day delay is actually a really reasonable solution. As long as they don't go further than that - the risk is that it is just a temporary placation and they'll ditch that option in a few years.
We can't keep catering to the lowest common denominator of user. We have lost many computing freedoms over the decades as a result of this. Sorry, but its unacceptable.
If they really want such locked down experience to be the default, they could also just as easily put out a ROM everyone else can flash that has no restrictions. You still get to cater to the lowest common denominator but without taking freedoms away from anyone else that wants to keep them, with official support. No scammer is going to convince someone to plug their phone into their laptop and flash a new ROM in order to scam them. If they can, there's no protections that would have helped in the first place.
You can't possibly convince me that Google couldn't develop something like that if they wanted to.
How do you determine/enforce whether an app is a "payment app" without a centralized developer program? They don't require any special privileges. After all, most banking apps have web equivalents.
You could probably restrict "risky" APIs like draw-over-other-apps, but tbh I think that would be a worse solution than just making people wait 24 hours once.
Did it take the world by storm ? No.
But it exists, has users & is building the case (together with Sailfish OS and others) that having an abusive mobile OS duopoly is not the desirable state of matters.
Linux is a kernel. A Linux-based distribution decides what the defaults would be. Why, in your opinion, would a Linux distro targeting phone-ish ARM64 hardware be problematic? Why would it be a "malware nightmare"?
all it takes is one guy who gets too mad for some reason
and it's gonna be a lot more costly for you to do anything about it vs. that guy who gets to be completely anonymous about it
But yeah, you could have a loony turn up.
They can sue you and Google will give your address to the court, clearly. But swat? Send packages? How?
I can see why your address is shown if you offer something for sale. Ads, that puzzles me.
I can see?
FairCode B.V. marcel+play@faircode.eu <redacted>
Anyway, ads are just a sidechannel for purchase. There is a product advertised, someone buys it and developer gets the cut from the seller of the product. This is how ads work.
With that policy, Google encourages stalkers and put developers in danger.
I would have been fine just preventing Californians from downloading my app, but that wasn't an option so I just let my app die.
The irony of Chinese vendors providing a breath of fresh low-DRM air.
https://developer.huawei.com/consumer/en/arkts/
And now they are adding yet another one, AOT compiled, Cangjie
Using Android fork has been a transition step.
Another example that microkernels actually do have market share.
- they're among the most expensive (I could afford that if needed though)
- they don't allow hardware unlock (ehh.. what's the point, then, if I get a locked-down device with Chinese surprises!)
I do not need Google Play (a collection of spyware, covertly collecting Wifi points and cell towers location in my country and sending them abroad), I do not need bank apps (I have a laptop for that) so I guess I will be fine. Obviously there will be no developer verification on my device as well, and I mostly use apps from F-Droid anyway.
Good thing about F-Droid is that they build apps themselves and you can always get the sources - unlike Google Play and Apple Store that provide no sources and unlike PyPi/NPM which allows sources to not match the binary distribution.
AI also says that it is possible to have push notifications without Google.
Does this somehow also apply to developers in China? Are Chinese OSs (Vivo/Honor/Oppo/etc.) entirely forked off of Google's Android?
Is the solution to just a Chinese phone without the Play Store?
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47935853 (2 months ago, 889 comments)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47139765 (4 months ago, 378 comments)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47778274 (3 months ago, 68 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48730729
More and more sites require you to use it be it github, or even fdroid (via gitlab).