The Windows App Store Is Full of Pirate Streaming Apps
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
There are so many weird, on demand, maybe you need a cable package, maybe it's just all you can eat, maybe it's just a 2 month free promo, services out there that it's really hard for the average person to know what is legitimate.
The shrinking release windows and ongoing push for day and date digital releases just makes it even harder.
Case in point: TubiTV just randomly showed up on my Roku recently - It's available on XBox and streams a bunch of different stuff. Should/do I need to verify that they've correctly licensed their movies before watching?
I don't think that's your responsibility. If it is brought to your attention that the app is infringing copyright, maybe it's your responsibility to stop using it.
But it's not your responsibility to verify that every service you use has the rights to all the content it uses. How could you possibly do that?
Copyright law prohibits those who have copy of something from making and distributing unauthorized copies. But if you receive one of these copies, I don't see what law that would break or why the receiver would be responsible.
Interesting position, Most of the lawsuits however have sued over DOWNLOADING and uploading, not just uploading or "distributing" infact in some cases it has been shown the copyright owners themselves were distributing the content to catch people "illegally downloading" the content.
That would also mean downloading from Usenet would be completely legal...
I'd like to know more about these lawsuits.
However, yes, my understanding of copyright law is that it only limits those who currently own a copy from making and distributing more. The relevant US Law is actually very short, take a look at Section 106: https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#106
(Edit: 106 lists what it is against the law to do, as you can see from 501 which talks about punishment etc. https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html )
Windows came to dominate because of Office. You only pirate something you already want to use.
Do you think their store is succeeding? It seems like a giant failure to me.
Besides there are actually very few apps that are regularly useful to me on my limited-OS (non-desktop) devices and those are: Camera/Photos, SMS/Messaging, Web Browser, Phone Dialer, Contacts, Google Maps, Calculator, Email, KeePass and Clock/Calendar.
Beyond that, every other app under the sun could disappear and I wouldn't miss them.
If they instituted a $20 screening fee, that consisted of a manual review (by an actual person) before going live on the store, that would curb the vast majority of the bad acting apps. I've said similar of some content sites that charge for educational content, that have pirated materials.
1. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/publish/account...
I live in Montenegro. Over here, Google and Bing maps aren’t exceptionally good. Some third-party ones are much better. Personally, I own Garmin’s Navigon for windows phone. I’ve heard 4geo.me is also good.
Other than that, Google maps does everything I want it to do, with the one exception that I can't pin arbitrary locations. I really want to be able to pin locations, the best I can do is send the location to someone else, but I can't just save it on my phone.
The difference here is that Microsoft seems to be encouraging low quality apps to boost its "app count" numbers to make its store seem more attractive. Also, many legitimate services do not have an app for Windows so users get tricked into installing fake apps or end up resorting to privacy.
Microsoft has zero quality controls and their store is full of shit, which is one of the reasons their platform failed so hard. They were literally paying people per app published regardless of the content of it. It turns out just advertising that you have a billion apps doesn't help if they're all just junk.
This and the fact that the application itself is quite terrible.
Edit: Also, for desktop apps the pricing model without paid upgrades is not viable. Compared to mobile, there are too few customers.
The biggest hurdle in the macOS App Store is the stiff sandboxing rules that make the more exotic and often useful utilities incompatible.
Nope. The really big hurdle is the 30% cut that Apple wants to take.
For smaller devs the store should provide a better marketing and sales platform, and so be worth the 30% cut. Steam, as an example, seems to work out alright for most companies but not everyone.
Google Play Store is a lot better than it was in the past, but the problem I find now is due to the sheer number of android devices, you just don't get the consistency while running apps that you get on iOS App Store. I assume this is the same for Kindle since it is android-based and Windows Store since there is so much hardware out there.
Very true. Once you delve into some of the category pages, or the search, you find many many pages of utter garbage. But the 'front page' experience is carefully curated to look like the cream of the crop.
I would much rather have to sift through garbage to find the app I want, then to have a company like apple tell me what I am allowed and not allowed to install on the device I paid them 100's or over a $1,000 to "own"