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.

> This effectively means I’m paying Google more than 1000 Euro per year for their services. 1000 Euro per year is 1.5x what I’m paying for my internet access. It’s roughly what I’m paying for my notebook per year if you assume I use it for three to four years. When my internet breaks, someone drives to my house and fixes it. When my notebook breaks, someone drives to my house and fixes it.

Couldn’t have said better. We all allowed it to come to this.

Receiving 1000 euros without having any real work or accountability is the epitome of free profit. No wonder these platform gatekeepers are fighting so hard to maintain it (at the cost of you, the consumer).

And yet people (in general) just dont care, because they don't truly feel the pain until it's too late - issues like privacy and such are like that.

It makes sense to leave, but it also seems like the overall sentiment would be more positive given the “it paid my rent for many years” part.

You should just be able to give them secure access to your git repo and they can get an LLM to do a code review.

I've used an Android phone for about 10 years now, and I have never once used Google Play.

Yes, Android is a rather Google-ified experience, but there is life outside of Google. Let's live it.

> Fuck the gatekeepers.

And the rent seekers.

"Fortunately, I’m no longer economically dependent on Google Play Store revenue. Google doesn’t deserve me and my money anymore. I’m done. Fuck the gatekeepers."

+1.

It's called "Rent-seeking" when a powerful entity extracts wealth without providing any commensurate value.

Google wants you to believe the only way to get an app is through them. They have programmed society to believe this - despite the fact that you have never needed Google to download and run apps on your laptop. Apple also wants you to believe this, which is why they keep making it more impossible to run Mac apps without the Apple Store. They too want to extract your wealth and control you.

FOSS was created because people didn't have a way to cooperate and share the source code for their programs, to let users fix their own problems. Like the "right to repair" but for software. But Apple and Google wouldn't exist in the forms they do today without our FOSS. Our own software is being used to manipulate us, take our money, and take away our freedoms. Ironic.

Maybe it's time for a new software license that does discriminate against the rent seekers. Not because we deserve money when someone uses our free software. But because our freedoms are being trampled by the companies who use our software.

I think we should define that new license, abandon the old projects using the old licenses, and start using new ones. We already did this for Rust tools, I think we can do it for new licenses too.

All these stores, Apple Store, Google etc... must be opened up. They constitute an illegal monopoly. Why does the US government protect monopolies? This is against the core tent of capitalism, aka more competition in a free, open market, to have prices be as low as reasonable possible for the customer. The USA shifted towards de-facto monopolistic mafias. Financial kickbacks to the US government must logically exist here - otherwise one can not explain why the US government works for the interest of mega-corporations only now.

Open ALL stores.