Hacker News Reader

Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Would've been a golden opportunity to get a billion users onto F-Droid's store, but, more likely Huawei will simply launch with their own, tightly-integrated "Huawei app store". It may even be worse from a security perspective, since there is zero expectation that the apps Huawei provides through their own store should be FLOSS.

View on HN

Now app developers have a big incentive to avoid Google Play Services and run on open-source Android. That lets them run on Google, Huawei, and F-Droid platforms.

Time for a dev forum on migrating away from Google Play Services.

You could say the same about Vulkan vs Metal, or Chrome vs the world, or Windows vs the world. The bulk of developers are going to target the subset of technologies that let them do what they want to do in the easiest way possible while targeting the largest userbase. I assume this isn't going to change the playing field in a significant way.

Usually a good incentive for devs is a higher cut of the sales. But I’m not sure how much Chinese users usually contribute to a dev’s revenue stream compared to US or EU users for example.

I remember reading a while ago that iOS is an attractive OS to target because the users tend to spend more in apps than the average Android users. If the average Chinese users spend even less it may be a disincentive. Not sure if this is still the case.

Amazon tried this, developers just made google based apps. So much of the compatibility libraries are tied in with google service it was impossible. Also even with Huawei size, it's easier just to write it in Google and ignore everyone else.

This is written as though Amazon somehow failed, which I don't believe is the case at all! You can run plenty of apps on the Fire tablets.

And there are also plenty that don't run.

It only takes one critical app not working for the customer to think their tablet must be 'broken' because their friend can run the app and they can't.

The Fire tablet line seems to be doing just fine anyway.

> Now app developers have a big incentive to avoid Google Play Services and run on open-source Android.

Only for applications targeting Chinese users in China, behind the GFW, which is a special kind of a market abet a large one. If a developer is not targeting that market, not using Google services is using a spoon to dig a trench.

Anything that weens users from Google is arguably a good thing. But still, Huawei is likely tight with the Party, and that is arguably a risk. Or at least, it's a risk for Chinese dissidents, and for anyone with access to technology of interest. But for your random foreigner, probably not so much.

F-Droid is kinda a ... less friendly store though.

To me it feels like a store for developers. When looking for even something simple like a qr code scanner I ran into a lot of one off developer type apps that require specific hardware and other apps or programs installed to even function. I found even the explanations hard to describe.

What you're seeing is the low budget of ethical community-based FLO software rather than an actual bias toward developers in the design.

That makes sense, it's just as far as exposing a mass audience... I probably wouldn't.

The article mentions they already have their own Huawei App Store and developer resources. I’m sure it’s still in the early stages but this could hurt Google in the long run if Chinese manufacturers are excluded even temporarily.

> He added that the firm had set aside $1bn (£801m) to encourage developers to make their apps compatible, and said more than 45,000 apps had already integrated the firm's technology. But he did not name any of them.

If im not mistaken chinese manufacturer all run their own store in China.

That's true. Integrating 10+ different billing API is expected if you want good coverage, which is totally not fun

The biggest opportunity I see here is if they can push a youtube alternative. It's the perfect moment with the ongoing controversies and the upcoming election. With a couple of billion they can pull most of the youtube stars on the condition they simply air some ads for the company. And if they manage to get some talent in a few years they can take a stand against western advertisers.

So burn money on a bunch of people to make videos for Huavei made youtube knock off. Good luck with that.

> Would've been a golden opportunity to get a billion users onto F-Droid's store

I agree that F-Droid missed a golden opportunity to work with a company to provide potentially millions of users with more control over their devices.

As much as I like F-Droid, it really needs some improvements to be considered a competitor to the Google Play Store. First and foremost, they need a system where you can rate and review the apps.

I'd rather have a search engine on the app that provides me a relevant list of results.

I mean I know the capabilities are limited because the search is supposed to work offline and doesn't call home for help, but if you don't know the exact name of the app you're looking for, then the experience is a little more tedious.

Disagree. All it needs is a couple of curated/reliable repositories doing the rating. ( They can even be commercial. ) A scaleable and easy job because it's all "free", thus it creates a social web of trust among curators & end user alike; beating the Google Play Store due to effectively not having a ton of taurus feces apps. It has the potential to not only make money, but save a ton too.

No, reviews aren't important. Whether it's apps, books, movies or music, trusting a review only makes sense if you value the reviewer and I don't know if you've read reviews of Android apps but it's the same morons who are posting on YouTube, Reddit etc. Thanks but I'll decide what to install via other means.

There are morons everywhere, but humans are generally correct in the aggregate. See examples here: https://larspsyll.wordpress.com/2013/09/17/the-wisdom-of-cro...

Just slap a captcha on there or something or avoid bots

I stopped trusting reviews many years ago.

They are like the comment section under an article: useless.

While I generally agree that they can be useless, they can also help in searching and finding quality content. If you're getting a bunch of fake negative reviews then that is a different problem.

Fake negative are one thing.

Fake positives are much more common with products.

I doubt a manufacturer like Huawei is willing to lock themselves into F-Droid's level of FLOSS requirements.

They already have their own store called app gallery

I doubt F-Droid has the resources to deal with millions of Huawei users.

Which is a worry as I've a few Huwaai products - one of which they have yet to release a manual for and still a work in progress by their own admission on a product that has been out for nearly half a year and known about for a year from initial trade airing. Let alone bugs, design flaws and general case of great hardware, just as always let down by software oversights. Heck a full blown router today and you can't change the DNS due to some bug, this is 2019, and I've got old routers 15 years old that did more, better. Talking about the Huawei AI Cube 4G router here btw - nice kit, just needs some love on the software and...a manual.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com