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Posted by ezst 11 hours ago

Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free(gultsch.de)
607 points | 233 commentspage 2
pelagicAustral 10 hours ago|
I know this is a stupid question even before I ask it, but is there any chance at this point of seeing something out of the scope of Apple and Google for mobile?? Will the bank apps ever allow people out of these two players
singpolyma3 2 hours ago||
Why would you ever use a bank app? It's just going to end up storing financial information on your mobile which will then get stolen.
dd8601fn 5 hours ago|||
We can’t even get some of the largest banks to do competent 2 factor, after all these years. The idea that they’re going to produce feature parity on peculiar platforms does seem like a big stretch.
WarmWash 7 hours ago|||
No, because it is near impossible to compete with "free" and totally impossible to compete with "free-and-you-can-use-ad-block."

The truth is that these corps are so entrenched because people love love love the ad model. I mean, they hate the ads, but they are so sold on access being free that introducing a cost would come off like charging money to walk in a public park. Totally confusing.

And frankly the other path wouldn't be all roses either. There would be a wealth divide in technology where poor people wouldn't be able to afford to use all the stuff available to them now for free.

phoronixrly 9 hours ago|||
If you are referring to banking apps, I just don't use banking apps that don't work on my degoogled phone thus granting them the low fraud risk they so strive for with forcing locked devices.
pelagicAustral 9 hours ago||
[dead]
mitxela 9 hours ago|||
You're free to make one, and bank apps are often less locked down than you think - try them yourself instead of accepting possible FUD. Also your bank 100% has a checkbox on your account they can click to disable any phone hardware requirements on your account.
fn-mote 9 hours ago||
> your bank 100% has a checkbox on your account they can click to disable any phone hardware requirements

I was going to thank you. I still thank you if this is true.

How do you know about the bank checkbox?

My bank is huge and I’m skeptical they give a crap about me any more than Google. Their app certainly doesn’t look like it.

(I noticed your account has been posting a lot of what I consider to be “garbage comments” in this article, so I’d like some kind of claim to fact check.)

mitxela 8 hours ago||
I know that because of all the reports of people going to their bank and complaining the app won't work on their phone, then getting it fixed.
anal_reactor 9 hours ago||
Motorola is planning to release phones with GrapheneOS. So far only expensive models have been confirmed, but I assume cheapos should follow.

Of course they're not doing this out of good heart. My theory is that China wants to have a popular smartphone that is completely independent from US companies. But hey, once upon a time Google were "the good guys" too, so enjoy the party while it lasts.

An interesting point is that it's important to have powerful China around because they're a capitalist competition to the US.

stephenr 9 hours ago|||
Isn't graphene completely dependent on what Google ships though? Ok they may be able to support Motorola devices longer than Googles releases facilitate supporting Google devices, but it's still ultimately android, which is still ultimately controlled by Google.

I'm not saying it isn't an improvement but this feels like choosing centos because you don't like the direction fedora is taking.

anal_reactor 8 hours ago||
Writing a new OS from scratch simply ain't gonna work, because people rely on Android apps working on their phones.
philipallstar 9 hours ago|||
> An interesting point is that it's important to have powerful China around because they're a capitalist competition to the US.

Semi-capitalist at best. They're good for cloning things invented in the West, but the problem is that that is much cheaper than inventing, so things get commoditised and the places that can do expensive R&D have to find other ways to make money all the time.

anal_reactor 7 hours ago||
1. That's not true. More and more segments of technology are being dominated by China. China sells lots and lots of everyday objects that are wholly desgined in China, with quality beating western products. They're just small improvements over existing designs of relatively simple things, so nothing makes the headlines.

2. Lots of Chinese technology never leaves China for political reasons, rather than economic/technology ones.

3. If you want to buy a semi-professional machine as an advanced hobbyist, often your only option is China.

4. Apple is wildly known for taking existing designs and improving on them. Why is it good for Apple to do that, but bad for China to do that?

philipallstar 6 hours ago||
> Apple is wildly known for taking existing designs and improving on them. Why is it good for Apple to do that, but bad for China to do that?

I'm not saying that's the case.

speckx 4 hours ago||
I've abandoned my Google apps after all the requirements over the last year or so. It's too much of a hassle. Apple is friendlier. Also, it wasn't worth justifying 1% of the income and 99% grief compared to Apple.
BatteryMountain 6 hours ago||
App release reviews take at least 1 week now. They take 15% of revenue and I had to pay $25 to create an account. And I'm sure I spent more hours on setting up my business + bank account, dun's number, google account creation & verification, app listing configuration/verification and only then getting to the review stage. My first round took exactly 1 month from having a signed app release on my laptop ready to go to it showing publicly on the store.
busymom0 16 minutes ago||
Adding to this- Apple charges me $138 per year membership and the latest app took 3 weeks for review. Used to be very fast before (under 24 hours) but lately it's very long for new apps.
dsjakupov 4 hours ago|||
Same here My build was ready like for a month and all that was stopping me is the requirement for the 12 testers being active for 14 days. When I applied to both stores, I thought apple is gonna be a problem, but google is a bigger unmovable wall
moomoo11 5 hours ago||
maybe for a brand new app submission.

my apps take maybe 1-2 days max. usually hours.

faangguyindia 10 hours ago||
Our app has 17,000+ users and has never paid a cent to Google :) With a little out of box thinking, you can avoid Google tax.
buf 10 hours ago||
How do you do it?
faangguyindia 10 hours ago|||
Very easy: offer them a long trial (numbers will show that your revenue is hurt, but don't care). Eventually the trail runs out, and they search how to renew or they ask support. The first result appears: your payment subscription page.

If a customer has used your product already for long time 20 days+, extra steps to set up payment one time, especially when you do not auto charge short trials, the customer is happy.

em-bee 9 hours ago||
so you offer a free trial on google play that is long enough to get people hooked. but there is no paid app on google play. instead people have to pay through other means to unlock the app?
johanyc 1 hour ago||
Yeah I need more details too. Does Google play trial not auto charge by after the trial ends?
em-bee 10 minutes ago||
i have no clue what features google play has but my guess is that a simple date check that disables the app after a certain time is possible without using any google play features. so it could be offered as a free app that simply stops working after some time.
atraac 10 hours ago|||
They push the user to their website where subscriptions are.
philipallstar 9 hours ago||
It's not a tax. It's you being parasitic on someone else's infra.
mitxela 9 hours ago|||
it's actually Google being parasitic on all the apps' infra. I paid for the app store infra when I bought my phone, and every time I open it and see ads, and with my tracking data for the NSA. They don't need to be allowed to quadruple dip.
philipallstar 9 hours ago||
> I paid for the app store infra when I bought my phone

How do you know that?

mitxela 9 hours ago||
Money was deducted from my bank account.
philipallstar 9 hours ago||
[flagged]
moooo99 9 hours ago||||
Good thing the companies that participate in the current AI craze would never ever behave in any way parasitic.
philipallstar 9 hours ago||
Whataboutism is just so pointless.
moooo99 7 hours ago||
pointless, yes. Entertaining, also yes.

Regardless of my whataboutism, I still think tax is an very apt description of what the Google Play and App Store fees effectively represent. I would be happy to call it a fee if the stores would actually allow effective competition. But as it stands right now, the "government" like behaviours make the wording tax fairly accurate.

philipallstar 6 hours ago||
As long as they can lock you up for not paying it, it's a tax.
pmlnr 4 hours ago|||
Given what google search/AI/data tracking is, there should be no shame in using their infra for free. Hell,it should all be free by default.
asim 9 hours ago||
Unfortunately google is now a massive juggernaut that has 20+ layers before you can ship anything, and thats bled out to the users of their services. I wish we had better alternatives. In fact, I now just focus on shipping a PWA.

Btw thanks to the author. I got Conversations to work with Micro (https://micro.mu), the personal assistant I'm building. Its a nice XMPP client. Now just need to figure out how to do encryption for queries going into the model itself.

thenthenthen 10 hours ago||
Conversations is pretty nice for self hosted xmpp. Wish there was an iOS client!
zaik 3 hours ago|
Monal is decent on iOS.
entropyneur 7 hours ago||
I've tried to publish an app in Play recently to get a taste of the experience. And I must say the taste was sour. Contrary to the experience of many I was able to reach a real human about my problem, but the human was less helpful that an AI pointed at the documentation. The AI was at least able to unrestand the issue, while the human simply talked past me.
NKosmatos 7 hours ago||
That's the problem with all big billion dollar companies, they don't have enough people for support! You can't talk to a real human to explain your problem anymore :-( The only thing these CEOs, managers and noards care about are profits, they don't care about their users.
Cider9986 4 hours ago||
With accrescent.app you will be able to sell apps or distribute closed source apps in a privscy-focused way.
wg0 8 hours ago|
At least in Europe - these rouge corporations need to be reined in or just leave the market.

Google Play's app registration is so much more complicated now that Good Luck getting to production ever.

And even then the same thing on every update. If you're a small business and your livelihood depends on that then it's a nightmare to deal with.

And no, kicking them out won't be a problem. No sky is going to fall. Vacuum would be filled in very quickly.

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