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Comment by KirinDave | Hacker News Reader

> No single entity should wield this much power. And we should rewrite the laws to make this so.

I think in fact a lot of people do want them to do this. Folks complain the Play store is full of malware and spam, and that there are data leaks and deceptive ads.

Then Google or Apple goes and removes them, and then folks are mad if that process has errors.

It seems like a business where you make everyone mad no matter what you do.

[edit: Just to be clear, I'm not a fan of the practice. But an awful lot of folks seem to think Apple and Google SHOULD wield editorial power, if only to stop outright malware. And of course, certain politicians want to make sure that the internet refuses to show content unflattering to people in power]

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It is absolutely possible to do this without making people mad. The solution is simple: educated, intelligent customer service for developers. Heck, make them pay a developer subscription fee to make the customer service cost-neutral. Or make them pay a refundable deposit to escalate a situation for manual review by a trained developer, at the cost of a market salary for however long that developer would take to review the situation.

But this cuts into the gatekeepers' profit. Why have a cost-neutral program when you can not worry about having that program at all, and (in Apple's case) still charge people for access to the store and documentation?

I shouldn't have to pay for that customer service if Google or Apple's cut is 30% of app revenues.

I'm pretty sure that 99% of apps on the store make so little revenue that it's not worth it to pay someone competent to review them, especially with all the ad supported free apps. So a very low percentage of apps pay for the cost of running the app store.

A fixed filing fee would level that imbalance.

Developers pay $25 or so on sign up.

Which barely covers a competent person sipping a coffee whilst glancing at the title of your app.

And after paying those $25 they are free to spam the review team with hundreds of submissions? Doesn't sound sustainable to me.

If App Stores charged a fee per submission, that would drastically cut down on spam submissions, and free up resources for those of us who actually put a lot of effort into our apps.

Once you set a fee I know apps will be updated less often, it'd be sad for open-source apps - which I'd say are the most useful of all apps on Google Play.

So a fee on initial submission... updates not charged. Will still put a crimp in the spam-app floods.

If you spend hundreds of hours working on something, paying a reasonable fee to publish it is not going to stop anyone.

Realistically, if you spent 20 hours developing the app, you're already $3000 invested on this project. Another $100-$500 isn't THAT big of a deal when you look at it in those terms

You're assuming 20 hours is worth the same to everyone. When I was a college student, even $100 would have turned me off from publishing an app.

That’s why most edu addresses get huge breaks

> The solution is simple: educated, intelligent customer service for developers

In reality, even uneducated stupid customer service would be better than the current state of affairs. And it's not just play store developers - these youtube takedowns, etc, costly people real money.

These large platforms are markets in their own right, and should be seen as such. They are simply too big to be covered by existing laws.

I think what Google and Apple should do is to add support for a "premium" upload feature. Leave the standard process as it is, but add a "premium tier". For a fee of 100 EUR, you get to upload an app, and you get a competent review from a real human within a certain time frame, with a list of all things that you must change to make it compliant.

The problem is that right now a spammer who creates hundreds of low effort apps gets the same service as someone who spent months or years on an app, only to get it banned over a minor issue.

I know that reviewing apps and quality control costs a lot of money for Google and Apple, and I'm ready to pay for it, as long as I get some peace of mind that they don't kick me for accidentally violating some policy with a feature that thousands of other apps have as well.

It already costs $100 to be able to upload an app to Apple's App Store - I feel like that sort of support should be included in that price.

$100/year to upload unlimited apps.

Also, iOS developers can reach people at Apple.

I meant 100€ per review.

> I think in fact a lot of people do want them to do this.

I, the engineer, do not want them to do this. Before Google and Apple, I didn't have this problem. I didn't have to pay their tax or march to their beat.

You might argue that it's their platform and that's the cost for us to pay. But it wasn't always this way! These companies leveraged their advantages to steal eyeballs away from an open web and lock them in their own platform.

They could have spent money making the open web work better on mobile. Or designing a portable app framework and runtime for all devices. But we know why they didn't and what the outcome has been.

I want them to pay back the negative externalities they've leveraged onto us.

> I, the engineer, do not want them to do this

Eh, you are but one person, amongst billions. There's a good chance that what you don't want != what others want.

That's the problem with targeting the lowest common denominator. Since that LCD is mindless consumption, that's what the ecosystem evolves to. If you have stuff to actually do, you're increasingly out of luck.

> Before Google and Apple, I didn't have this problem. I didn't have to pay their tax or march to their beat.

You still don't! You don't have the play by their rules, and you can still target everyone who has a non-Google or non-Apple phone, which as a target market is appreciably no one, much as it was before Google and Apple entered the phone market.

You can target them if they have phones produced by your hated manufacturers anyway by making your app a webapp instead of a native app.

You don't want to do those things, and that's fine, but you're yearning to go back to a time that never existed.

FWIW you can target Google phones outside Google Play too. You just need to tell the user to enable some settings and download an APK.

What could possibly go wrong....

https://fox5sandiego.com/2019/01/17/fortnite-security-flaw-e...

> back to a time that never existed

Personal PCs were just this back in the 90's and 00's. Microsoft tried to create a walled garden, but it failed due to the world wide web.

Google and Apple saw how Microsoft failed and decided that the app store would be a first class citizen on day one and that the mobile web [1] would be an afterthought. They learned from Microsoft's mistake and used their positions to make app stores the new status quo.

It could have easily gone a different way, but I understand how the business interests got us to where we are.

[1] the mobile web wouldn't have been nice without more money and research poured into it. The web stack could have been supplemented or a new one could have been developed. These companies obviously had other priorities than to pay for something that netted them nothing, but individual developers wound out worse for it.

Actually, you've got that history a little backward. The original iPhone had no App Store and had only web apps; that was the promoted way to develop for the platform. It was only after the phone's release and the mad clamor from developers to be allowed to develop native applications that an SDK was released and the App Store created.

My mistake. Thank you for correcting me.

I think you are accidentally retconning current status quo onto the past - early mobile internet was terrible, low bandwidth enough that mobile was about /fitting/ the page down the pipe instead of user interface, and also expensive with far lesser adoption such that wifi-only tablets/PDAs were more of a thing.

Google still has complete control over how well your web app is ranked in search results and they change rules and criteria all of the time, sometimes with little notice. Google search console is infuriatingly vague. Google is inescapable and opaque and I’m glad politicians are finally seeing these entities as monopoly powers that need to be addressed. They have a monopoly market share in web search and mobile devices so how is anyone supposed to NOT play by their rules?

You seriously overestimate their both their automated and manual control if you think they are capable of passive aggressive actions to non-entities. They closest they can come is hiding autosuggest when too many people complain or it becomes too sensitive like say "Ted Cruz Zodiac Killer".

They have much much done more than soft-censor autocomplete.

Google search for: women are toxic

Their SERPS will only return quotes on toxic MASCULINITY. Do the same thing in Yandex and they'll give you the correct results. Google uses AI to identify "non-PC sites" and push them down in the SERPS.

Well, at the same time users had to deal with adware, viruses, etc.

Your needs as a developer don’t trump users needs.

They could have spent money making the open web work better on mobile. Or designing a portable app framework and runtime for all devices. But we know why they didn't and what the outcome has been.

And write once run everywhere worked so well with Java applets.

AFAIKT, Google indeed pushes Progressive Web Apps pretty hard.

> I, the engineer, do not want them to do this.

You don't matter, consumers matter.

> Before Google and Apple, I didn't have this problem.

And you didn't have distribution either.

> But it wasn't always this way!

Indeed, there wasn't even distribution. Do you actually remember what was shipping mobile software back in 2005?

> I want them to pay back the negative externalities they've leveraged onto us.

Again, you as an engineer don't matter, only as a consumer. And consumers have never had so many options and at such low prices.

I don't entirely disagree with you, but what do we call the web if not distribution?

The web didn't disappear, quite the opposite.

Now you have the web AND the in-device app stores. Even more choice.

But they're not equal citizens on mobile devices. Web often feels sluggish on mobile, and it doesn't have the same access to device and hardware APIs, nor does it allow low-level control of concurrency and allocation. (I don't want to get off topic about HTML/JS. It does a lot of jobs well.)

There could have been an open, cross-platform native app stack if Apple and Google and a consortium of other companies had joined forces and made it so. There's no technical reason preventing this. The economic incentives got us to where we are.

Devices should be easy to target. There should be the option to use multiple app stores right off the bat, and you shouldn't have to bundle to get access to Gmail. Or even better - point your browser at gmail.com and get the native app installed on your mobile device. Distributed updates from gmail.com sans app store. The OS would still control permissions and guard against malicious apps.

The world wide web era was truly unique and special, and it's a shame the same principles didn't carry into the mobile world.

You can do all of that, just download the apk. What you seem to want is that app stores should be forced to accept any apps?

The rest is just saudosistic nostalgia. There wasn't mass access to the internet, you're just missing the times when a small elite had access to the internet.

Consumers are far better now than they were.

There was open access to the internet when aol started giving away cd-roms. Rich and poor, educated and less educated roamed different sites often clashing.

The interest wasn't massive because things were not super easy. Phones bridged the gap. Fast forward to today you have less choice but bigger buy buttons.

> rich and poor

You seem to have a mental image of the internet that doesn't correspond to reality. Poor didn't have access, they couldn't afford a computer, much less an internet plan.

Step out of the Hacker News bubble for a bit.

> Poor didn't have access, they couldn't afford a computer, much less an internet plan. Step out of the Hacker News bubble for a bit.

I was very, very poor. So were most of the kids I grew up with. Most of us couldn't afford new computers; that's true. So we bought old ones. My father - tears in his eyes - lugged in something ancient that he'd picked up for $50, having no idea how to use it but hoping that putting it in front me would do me some good. AOL had been mailing everyone in town (Detroit). Some kids got PCs from the nearby churches, some got them from the school (others still only ever used them in school). We collected and hoarded the access disks, and would go ringing each others' phones or knocking down doors to share websites we'd found. Imagine my embarrassment when I realized the AOL search results page was not the entire internet, and that I could click on any text with a blue outline.

> doesn't correspond to reality

I know there are people who managed (or didn't..) to grow up poorer than I did. But even poverty is a spectrum.

Very poor where? In the US?

The "very poor" in the US are rich in most of the developing world.

I am aware of this, anticipated this response from you (as you’ve repeated in this thread), and addressed it at the end of the comment you’re replying to. I do not believe that a global perspective diminishes the argument in any way.

Oh, it does. Only 5% of the global population had access to the internet in 2000.

If that doesn't qualify it as a product only available to the elites, I don't know what will...

Given the nature of your position it feels ironic to be saying to you that if you feel my family was amongst the worlds’ “elite” just because we lived in the US, then I believe you may need a more nuanced outlook on people. Also, there’s a tent-city of people outside my building who’d like a word with you.

Oh, if you could afford a computer, even an used one, in the 90's you were definitely part of a global elite.

Heck, in 2000, just under 30% of the global population had access to properly built sanitation services.

And about 28% of the global population live with under a $1 (in PPP) per day.

Respectfully, I think you are lacking some context about life in other countries.

> Respectfully,

I’m not though, and I have already said so. My original “poverty is a spectrum” comment still firmly addresses everything you’ve said, so if we still disagree, we can agree that’s ok.

The implication of “Consumers are far better now than they were” is that they are better, because of the App Store. This is false, completely illogical, and a straw man argument (as no one suggest users of tech have it worse in 2019 then 2005). Consumers are better off now, because technology has gotten better, not because App Stores have made things better. App Stores have actively caused harm to the consumers through lock in and through a compression of imagination amongst end users of how much better things could be.

You’re also factually incorrect about “a small elite had access to the internet”. That may have been true in the 80s, but by 2000 usage was at 50% and climbed to 75% by 2010. I mean the dot com boom was predicated on wide user adoption, so I don’t even know why you would even think that stat made inuitive sense.

https://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/

> The implication of “Consumers are far better now than they were” is that they are better, because of the App Store. This is false, completely illogical, and a straw man argument (as no one suggest users of tech have it worse in 2019 then 2005).

No, it isn't false. Buying and/or installing an app today is orders of magnitude easier, safer and cheaper than 2005.

You clearly don't like it, and you probably are part of the little elite that had access to the internet before the general public did.

You can still do online everything that you used to in 2005, nothing was removed.

> That may have been true in the 80s, but by 2000 usage was at 50% and climbed to 75% by 2010.

Sorry the break the news to you, but the US isn't the world.

Maybe you should step out of the hacker news bubble for a minute.

> There's no technical reason preventing this. The economic incentives got us to where we are.

What's the difference? There's also no technical reason preventing you from developing your own cross-platform native app stack that beats Apple's and Google's with no conceivable return on investment, constant PR disasters, and time-consuming negotiation with bad-faith or incompetent partners. The forces that stop you are mostly economic.

Someone still has to at least pay for the bandwidth though...

I agree it's not an Apples to Apples comparison, but it always strikes me that people forget they used to have to pay for distribution too.

I remember one piece of software I was working on would cost the company around $5K per release in download costs alone.

Why can't mobile follow the same model as desktop?

It does, you can download an apk and install it on Android.

Don't you have to enable some kind of global special access right? So it's not the same thing.

Yes, and its super hard now. When I installed the new android version the only way I could get fdroid installed was flashing it as a system app in the recovery.

You have to do that on Windows and macOS now as well...

I haven't had to enable some global setting to allow unknown programs on Windows 10. What are you referring to?

Last time I did a fresh install of Windows 10 Home I had to go into Apps & features and disable "Allow apps from the Store only" in order to install Chrome. Didn't seem to have to do that on Windows 10 Pro.

The desktop distribution model was awful. I wasted many many hours in the past cleaning crapware from family PCs.

To be fair, complain about your family, not the desktop model. Its like babyproofing, the equivalent of no one beeing allowed to buy a steakknife because some people are not grown up enough to handle one carefully.

edit: Its ofcourse a difficult subject, like with your parents getting too old to drive and not recognizing it, but after all not a technical but a societal problem.

And society fixed it by voting for the vendors that baby proofed the devices.

From talks with colleagues I concluded that these issues were widespread enough to conclude that problem was not my family but the desktop distribution model.

Its definitely widespread, I didnt want to imply it was just your family. There is a large group that cant handle admin rights responsibly. I just dont think general restrictions are in order here. We should much rather educate this group instead of giving up ownership over our devices. Especially since we dont have the appstore model out of security considerations, but because monopolists want to keep people in walled gardens. Ownership of your device is to great of a good to give it up in the name of security.

Because people don’t want to spend hours uninstalling malware their devices.

Your premise is sound. But it's in your conclusion that you miss the point. The point is its not 2005 anymore. Today, if Google didn't do it, someone else will and can. Except that a certain brand of monopolies set things up in a way that a rather worrying number of people think that without these monopolies there's no other choice. You think that it's Google that's enabled and empowered all of us. That, my friend, is where you are wrong.

Sure, someone else might have done it, but that's irrelevant. It doesn't matter if it was Google or Apple, or someone else.

What matters is only the impact to the consumer, and the consumer is far, far better off than in 2005.

Please, you engineer, do your best to make the app usable from a browser.

I dislike apps. Sometimes they make sense. Fine.

Often, they do not, or offer less functionality than PC or web does.

If you need payment, make that easy, same. Cancel easy too. Just because that is nice, and we all could use nice. You like nice, I like nice. Let us be nice.

If you need profanity, whatever, I get it. Let's be adults.

I don't like the gate keepers and do not trust them. I do not expect you to trust me, nor you me.

Clean, open, portable web for both of us as much as can be managed.

I support you, you support me, us.

I can be a user on linux, android, iOS, Windows, BSD, whatever I can get on the web.

Sometimes dependent stuff is needed for the job. I get it. Please try to avoid that stuff, and I will try and run more relevant systems.

I really do avoid apps, really do try and be a good user, really do prefer web and really do run a bunch of OSes.

We both are rare. I do advocacy every chance I get. Maybe you can too.

Stick together in a figurative sense.

My development is small, embedded systems and or specific purpose programs. Enough to get the engineer speaking here.

Hopefully, you are a user enough to do similar things.

I happen to prefer the exactly opposite - I don't want to run the browser (or a browser-wrapper), I want app to be native.

<rant>Websites lack solid, consistent and platform-native look-and-feel. They are always limited, they aren't integrated with the operating system (i.e. task switcher), they are slow on almost anything (because modern web browsers are ugly giant behemoths. I've recently built myself a very beefy machine (16-core CPU, 128GiB RAM) and even now _sometimes_ sites are still choppy. On mobile, lots of sites are performing poorly.</rant>

Perhaps the best features about the web, though, are the share-centric nature of being able to pass around a link, the control we have over the client, and the distribution of apps and info that's least encumbered by gatekeepers.

For example, let's go all the way to the other end of the spectrum where the web as we know it didn't take off and everything was siloed into native apps that you had to download from the App Store before trying something new.

That seems pretty grim to me. I think we're in a sweet spot and lucky to have both.

Both are just fine.

For me, on mobile, it takes a LOT to bother with an app. Any alternative, even close to reasonable, gets the nod every time.

On a PC, this is less of an issue. Applications will often have great, or superior functionality. No worries.

On mobile? No. The opposite is nearly always true.

Should have been clear.

As for solid platform look and feel... depends there too. If the UX is really optimized for the task, I will take it. Have used so many now. Almost non issue there.

Generally I dislike app stores. This favors PC too.

Haha nice one. I shall too advocate :D

It all adds up.

> Folks complain the Play store is full of malware and spam, and that there are data leaks and deceptive ads.

They have trouble with false positive and false negatives. This does not make me want to give them more power.

The problem and solution are one and the same. Google is trying to automate tasks that are nowhere near ready for automation.

This doesn't even really make any sense either. You might argue its because they're huge, but the numbers don't add up. Google netted about $31 billion in 2018. It's hard to tell exactly how many apps are published on Google Play per year, but it seems to be in the ballpark of 200,000 [1]. Let's hire some low wage employees to spend just 1 hour per app which is generally enough time to determine if an app is at all legitimate. That's obviously 200,000 man hours. Creating these jobs in the USA could be done for about $10/hour, or $2 million, or a minuscule fraction of 1% of their their annual net income. Problem solved, happy customers, happy developers, jobs created.

But Google gonna Google. Though even here if they really wanted to Google, they could even hire these guys in e.g. India or wherever and pay a fraction of even that fraction of what they'd have to pay if they created these jobs in the US. But I'm certain they've Googled that the $ cost of pissed off customers and developers is less than the $ cost of providing a decent solution.

The one confounding issue here might be that the 200k is lowballing the number of apps. After all that's only the apps that are published, not the ones that are refused publication. But all of the above holds true even if you push it up to 2,000,000 apps trying to publish per year. Perhaps the more salient point is that Google also charges $25 before you can even try to publish an app. Why not direct that money to a human being and actually have a half decent review process? That same human being might even be able to answer complex questions like, "Hey, I don't even have any ads in my app. Why was my app removed for deceptive ads?" in a timely fashion.

[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/266210/number-of-availab...

Apple doesn't automate it and it's difficult to make a case that it's better. They've certainly made errors and bad decisions. So... I'm not sure automation is to blame.

What's more, you could make an argument that any process will have an observable error rate at scale. Would we be having a different conversation in a different universe where this same post exists, but Google didn't automate? I'm not so sure.

> Creating these jobs in the USA could be done for about $10/hour,

Uh, minimum wage is $15 in most places. $10/hr isn't even above the poverty line. It's less than $20k a year pre-tax. If you're appropriating the language of socialism, at least do it in a way that doesn't fall apart to someone with mental math skills.

- The United States is not California. Here [1] are the US poverty lines. For 1 person, it's $12,490.

- $20,800 a year puts you ahead of 26% of earners in the US. [2]

- The guy making your $5 latte gets on average about $9/hour [3].

- A private company engaging in behavior to create jobs and offer increased value to their customers is not the "language of socialism."

[1] - https://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty-guidelines

[2] - https://dqydj.com/united-states-income-brackets-percentiles/

[3] - https://www.glassdoor.com/Hourly-Pay/Starbucks-Hourly-Pay-E2...

Firstly, you suggested:

> Let's hire some low wage employees to spend just 1 hour per app which is generally enough time to determine if an app is at all legitimate. That's obviously 200,000 man hours.

But folks have already been down this road, and the ugly fact is that you can't source folks to do work like this outside of metropolitan areas. This is why already this work is outsourced to areas where low wages are common but infrastructure is present.

And you'll find, as several businesses I've worked with, that the difficulty of validating these jobs is very high. Turns out, you essentially get half the work you'd think you would.

Secondly:

> The United States is not California. Here [1] are the US poverty lines. For 1 person, it's $12,490.

Sorry, I just assumed an average family of three with a single wage earner as the default, which is like $20.5k for most guidelines I've read. [0]

> - A private company engaging in behavior to create jobs and offer increased value to their customers is not the "language of socialism."

It absolutely is, and its historical success in America is exactly why capitalists have adopted it as a talking point even when it's not actually their goal in any scenario.

[0]: I googled https://q1medicare.com/q1group/MedicareAdvantagePartD/Blog.p... before I wrote my post.

> Uh, minimum wage is $15 in most places

No, it definitely is not: https://www.paycor.com/resource-center/minimum-wage-by-state...

You're right. Not sure what I was thinking when I wrote that.

But the rest stands, you're not going to be able to source that work. We already have seen how moderation ends up being done because it's essentially awful work prone to abuse. This is why Americans like to pretend it's done by algorithms while it's actually done by people in Filipino cybercafes.

And it's not even remotely clear to me that that'll do better than Apple does with more trained staff.

This just isn't solvable with "low wage employees".

If their task devolves to "run this security tool" then (a) that can be automated and (b) can be reverse engineered by the people putting this out.

If it is a proper security audit then it's not an hour of work and it's not a $10/h employee, even in India.

> It's hard to tell exactly how many apps are published on Google Play per year, but it seems to be in the ballpark of 200,000 [1]

You'd have to audit literally every version update.

The problem is the process is largely automated, both for approval and removal. If trash wasn't let into the Play Store in the first place, there wouldn't be so many issues with pulling content back out of it. Consumers and developers alike would be far better off dealing with a properly human-curated store with actual customer service, even if it meant there were less apps in it.

This is Google. If you want human-curated go to Yahoo!

We all know how that ended :)

> If trash wasn't let into the Play Store in the first place

How exactly do you plan on enforcing this without automation? There are millions of apps on the Play Store. Many are updated dozens of times a year. How many thousands of reverse engineers do you plan on hiring to prevent bad behavior without error?

There's no reason for there to be "millions on apps on the Play Store". Literally no reason. It's likely 99% of users would entirely be served by the top 50,000 to 100,000 apps. For the other 1%, there is sideloading.

As far as how many app reviewers to hire? Well, Apple manages their store pretty well. Google has about eleventy billion dollars in cash, so I'm sure they could afford to hire a few people to do the job.

If you want absolutely no competition, guild style selection, and losing people enmasse when it inevitably lacks a killer app sure - and don't mind losing money over time instead of gaining it - inflow vs outflow is what matters not cash reserves.

It’s a slippery slope for me, personally. I’ve been working in security quite some time, before that I’ve been in support and Helpdesk. (To give a little background on my anecdotal experience)

The sheer number of people who got infected with mal- and adware is disturbing and they demanded and believed that their provider or the device OEM is to be held responsible.

That’s not my evaluation of the situation, but the entry barrier for the web and its possibilities is very low, while the damage which can be done is pretty critical sometimes.

I personally don’t see any “everyone is pleased” solution, it’s a bit frustrating that the more tech-savvy folk is getting punished for straight out ignorance of the vast majority.

> It seems like a business where you make everyone mad no matter what you do.

Maybe you can spent some of your gazillion dollars to hire humans instead of relying on automated half-measures

sounds like a great time to make it a matter of legal compliance; that way, they can always blame the government for how it's done.

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