GPSLogger has been removed from the Play Store, and development has been paused | Hacker News Reader

GPSLogger has been removed from the Play Store, and development has been paused

github.com

181 pointsNelsonMinar79 comments

The core of the issue ... has been that GPSLogger supports a lot of older devices and frameworks ... a majority of GPSLogger users are on older devices. This has led to a lot of complexity in the codebase and inevitably (and expectedly) made it difficult to support and maintain while keeping up with the latest Play Store requirements and user feature requests and PRs and issues, and giving them the attention they deserve.

I think the author is being too hard on himself. Investing massive effort to maintain a free app for people who don't invest anything themselves is not a personal failure.

Yup, if he charged a monthly subscription for it, things would be a lot more equitable.

Maybe, but the GPL license is suggestive that the author started and continued to work on this project because it was seen as a genuine benefit to others, and for many years that was enough to keep them going.

Sure financial incentive would have greased the wheels, but it might have undermined the spirit of the project in the first place

People generally pay for products in order to get a benefit. It's still genuine.

The difference is the seller gets to share some of the benefit.

The human mind is funny this way: sometimes getting small amounts of money is worse than not getting money at all.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect

FWIW the author did previously take donations.

Realistically, people who won't spend money to upgrade their phones aren't going to spend money on a subscription either. A different equitable solution is to make the app free but only support recent OSes; people running older OSes can use old APKs.

Why not charge for the app AND then with the income you have incentive to keep supporting old devices.

Of course you could use revenue from paying customers to support moochers, but there's no real incentive to do so and it's arguably unfair.

Because the money earned vs old devices probably isn't worth it. At some point you have to cut support on old stuff unless there is some financial pay off or you're retired and want a hobby to keep you busy.

This is actually supported by the Play store itself where you can serve older APK to phones with older OS.

I’ve no way to upgrade iOS beyond 11 and miss the stock software and more. Video editing currently not possible with stock app, nor SoundCloud. No OTA upgrade nor iTunes, until I have clean cheap power and strong Internet access. Used to get it at libraries until March. Had Android, liked APK distro, glad it still works. Very cool that the store offers it, but also that there are alt stores.

Yeah not sure why he would worry about people using old devices if the old versions work fine. Just drop that code out of new releases and don't support old devices. It's not like the code will bit rot. Getting pulled from the store though that really stinks and google should be more transparent about that.

The author was pretty vague about exactly why it was removed. What goalposts were moved? I didn't think the Play Store had a policy that prohibits supporting older devices. There could be a bit more to the story, here.

If something in your life becomes overwhelming, and you are receiving no compensation or recognition for any of your effort .. what, would you say, would be the smart move?

Totally! I had the same experience maintaining an iOS app (eventually abandoned), which is why I was curious and asked the question. Every new version of Xcode produces more warnings, deprecates more APIs, removes previously deprecated ones, and "strongly encourages" changing your code in all sorts of ways. Yuck! I was wondering if the same was true on Android.

Contrast that to Microsoft, who (at least used to) really get backwards compatibility. I bet I could dig out a Win32 program I wrote 20 years ago for NT4 and compile it today, and it would run on Windows 10.

I believe the record in 2015 or so was running Windows 1.01 calc.exe on Windows 10 32bit... Which was first upgraded all the way from Windows 1.01

Probably target- and minimum- android version requirements in the manifest, which affects available APIs. IIRC they get bumped up again next month.

It feels as if that (vagueness) is exactly the point: they would have to invest time in finding out how the goalposts have moved.

As is, their app got pulled and they said f-it, I don't care enough anymore to invest that time.

Uneducated guess: probably the app just work for wide range of devices and versions, like notepad.exe does, and changing ANYTHING is against its value.

And perhaps that kind of app that are well regarded, needs no maintenance, AND not growing X% YoY IAP yadda yadda is unsightly in their eyes, so they remove it.

Google removed it or the developer?

Once again another small independent publisher is driven off of a Google platform because Google's complete inability to provide even the smallest amount of customer service.

I'm sad this app has been removed because A. I use it semi-frequently, and B. The play store is FULL of malicious software/spamware.

Probably there is C: same or similar apps naming (especially if general name of such software chosen as particular app name, e.g. "Notes", "File Manager").

JFTR, There are actually 2× apps with very similar names:

- "GPSLogger" (mentioned in this thread);[0]

- "GPS Logger" (I use this one).[1]

[0] https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/com.mendhak.gpslogg...

[1] https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/eu.basicairdata.gra...

This problem really runs across all their services. Google does not culturally or institutionally care about customer service. Humans are sort of an annoying middle-man between them and their ad revenue. With the market position they have, investing in customer service is superfluous.

Great comment and great point that is often missed by most but shouldn’t be.

Google will drive legit apps off the store but allow malware to linger for months or years. If there was ever a public failure by a company then this is it.

Where is the failure occurring in Google? I know it to be their outsourced India workforce. Some disagree. If not India, then what is the reason?

I don't think the gist of what you're saying is wrong, but it reads like this is someone who really wanted to support older devices, on a platform that ... doesn't support older devices.

Maybe they (google) should support older devices but the author chose to swim upstream to some extent here. Admirable goal but perhaps as a decision, one that comes with a lot of hassle and inevitable conflict with the platform they chose.

> If the motivation and energy ever return I could consider moving to normal F-Droid, which will require stripping out GDrive, Dropbox and a few other proprietary features.

Switch to F-Droid!

- Remove GDrive/Dropbox and other proprietary features;

- Add Nextcloud/ownCloud/Syncthing and similar open-source features;

- Fully move to F-Droid;

- Remove page from Google Play Store.

Unfortunately, Google prevents F-Droid from competing with the Play Store on feature parity, because F-Droid is not allowed to do batch installs, background installs, or auto-upgrading due to limitations put in Android.

But there’s still a core group of people willing to put up with that and use F-Droid, and having the app used by that group of enthusiasts is better than it not being used at all.

Considering this app is used a lot on older secondary phones, it’s actually very likely people who want to use it would go to the little bit of extra effort required to use it via F-Droid.

I agree, I just wanted to point out Google's anti-competitive behavior regarding app distribution on Android.

Note that you can totally do all of those if you root your device. Highly recommend.

or by having Privileged Extension (for background installs & auto-upgrading) and a personal repo (for batch installs)

Well the privileged extension requires root, which is what I was alluding to in my post :)

Not necessarilly. One can enjoy Privileged Extension on an unrooted phone by using a custom ROM, LOS for example.

edit: typo

The privileged extension does not require root.

You _can_ install it with Magisk (which also provides root) but it can also be flashed as a regular flashable ZIP (which just requires an unlocked device).

Last (and best) of all, it can be added to an unrooted ROM. RattlesnakeOS[0] for example includes it.

[0]: https://github.com/dan-v/rattlesnakeos-stack

Ah I was wondering what was going on. The newest version of F-Droid updated all my apps with a single one-click update prompt. I remember the pain of previous releases where you had to manually update each and every app.

Rooting is great, where possible. Many cheaper devices though are still unrootable, usually because it hasn't been possible to build a version of TWRP for them.

Many non-cheap ones too, notably Samsung and LG (in the US).

If you want rooting and a bunch of storage, your non-cheap options get harshly limited. Looking for such a phone over the last few months, the options for my carrier were Motorola or bust. Which means getting an Edge, which are goofy and expensive and have defective screens.

So I gave up and got my first unrootable phone, from Samsung.

auto-upgrading is not a good thing and the play store tries to force it on you

They've recently announced they're planning on making 3rd party store experience better in Android 12 (next year's version). They haven't shared any specifics.

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2020/09/listening-...

It's on "Izzy's F-Droid"[0] although, I don't know why there's a separate F-Droid repo...

[0]: https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/com.mendhak.gpslogg...

> I don't know why there's a separate F-Droid repo...

You mean why there's a separate "Izzy's F-Droid" repo?[0]

[0] https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/info

I've had a merge request open to add an app to F-Droid for 4 months now.

It's gotten some attention, and I've addressed all the requests for changes I've gotten. But still, no resolution after 4 months.

In contrast it took me a few days at most to publish to Google Play and the App Store, which I did at the same time as I submitted to F-Droid. And I've shipped numerous updates to both since then.

So "Switch to F-Droid!" rings a little hollow for me.

Maybe you're interested in SkyDroid (it's decentralized and publishing only takes 10 minutes): http://skydroid.app/

> The core of the issue (why it gets removed) has been that GPSLogger supports a lot of older devices and frameworks, whereas the Play Store is always trying to get everyone onto the latest versions.

The enforced obsolescence is infuriating. Whilst you can argue the security implications of older devices, an offline task like being thrown in the top of a backpack recording a gps trace is a great use of old hardware. Google making it difficult for devs going out of their way to support this is upsetting.

Why not just use an older version if you have an older device? Supporting years of ever-changing APIs is evidently painful. As a macOS user I’m kinda used to seeing “latest version for macOS 123 is a.b.c”

Because hardware shouldn't be considered dead if it can easily support new software, and the only hindrance is the profit model of marketplace in which it is distributed

> if it can easily support new software

Judging by the author’s comment, it's not easy, that's the whole point.

The hardware is capable of easily supporting the new software, but only if it gets OS updates. The problem isn't the hardware, it's the manufacturers.

It can be difficult to find older versions of apps from reputable sources, and often as difficult to know what OS version/architectures/screen sizes an old app will work with, at least on Android.

"removed from the play store" makes that difficult. Yeah there's probably an APK floating around somewhere...

Regardless of the current status of the specific app, yeah, I think the issue is the inability to download "the latest version supported by your device" directly from the Play Store.

The changes here are not just security but privacy related - new Androids now have permissions like "only allow location while the app is open", which was loudly requested even in HN community (and rightfully so).

This does mean that apps now need to take such new features into account and not horribly crash when users want to use them on the phone.

Requesting compliance with all new privacy features on Android 9,10,11 is not unreasonable for a store IMO. Especially when sideloading exists.

If it’s an issue with newer devices, just don’t show it for newer devices.

Or, since it’s a self serve platform, let the author decide not to show it to new devices.

Delisting seems rather extreme to me.

For privacy violations I think delisting is reasonable otherwise everyone just ignores it. We developers usually get more than a year of warning to fix the apps which hasn't been too onerous.

It does suck for abandonware apps though.

Surprised to see GPSLogger here on Hacker News. I've been using it for 8 years now, basically ever since it's been possible to track location on a phone all day without recharging. This app is a gem.

Besides Google Location History / Google Timeline, GPSLogger is pretty much the only way to have records of your location. I've used it for research (we mention it in an academic paper on location-based memories), for my own records to see where I've been (like "how many times have I been to this area before"), and statistical analysis of my everyday habits. If you want long-term location history, GPSLogger is probably the only way to do this.

The alternate, Google Location History, has only been really reliable for the past few years, whereas there was a long period when GPSLogger beat it hands down in terms of accuracy because it would do GPS with cell tower fallback, which is probably the best setup in terms of battery-accuracy tradeoff. The author implemented this in 2013 (it was an issue I filed [0]), and combined with the configurability of when it should try to get your coordinates, you can get long/lat records for almost no battery. If you want to own your own data, and export data automatically, GPSLogger is also the only way since Google doesn't let you automate data export as far as I know (plus if they did, you'd have to rewrite that code every year). My instance of this app has run in the background, syncing data hourly for months without needing a restart.

GPSLogger is one of the reasons I stick with Android. I'll keep using it even if I have to sideload the APK. It's really sad that the author has had to go through all this stress. But it's also worth noting there isn't a way to collect location records on iPhone at all, or sideload an app (ipa/apk), so Android is still the more open of the two platforms. The buffet of apps that used to do this type of location tracking (Moves, Gyroscope, Foursquare, and a bunch of indie apps) are basically all gone or pivoted away.

I'm disappointed that there's such a mindset here that apps should have subscriptions / revenue to be worth maintaining. Freeware and "indie" open source supports the long tail of usage. The popular apps can only get to 80% of the use cases out there. This also shows the inadvertent double-edged sword of privacy/security of indie apps, as they often use more hack-ey techniques which are the first to get blocked out. The most private/secure app is one that does nothing more than a website.

[0] https://github.com/mendhak/gpslogger/issues/184

Check out OwnTracks. It's a different approach, but it's also really nice. I use it as a poor man's GPS beacon on my motorcycle trips.

I'm 100% with you; that's why I posted this story here. I have a log of my location from my phone going back nearly 10 years, to the days of OpenPaths. Passive location tracking is a really great tool. I actually like Google's implementation of it but I'd still rather control my own data and do my own thing (I have my own visualizer at http://wanderin.gs). Mendhak's GPS Logger is an excellent tool for that.

I had a similar experience with an open source browser extension on Google’s Chrome Store. The loudest complaints seem to be about Apple’s walled garden stores presumably because that’s where the money, but in my experience Google and even Mozilla seem to be more arbitrary in their policies/behavior. Googzilla tend to approve your app or extension and then a couple weeks later they start emailing you about various policy changes or policy updates or reviewer questions with arbitrary response deadlines such as “We will remove your extension in 7 days if you don’t send our reviewer a link to the README in your open source GitHub repo and explain again how to follow the instructions to build it. (Type ‘make build’!)

It would be nice to finish the review process before approving an app. If you have new policies apply them on the next review or ask your questions when a future update is submitted.

I made two apps and an extension. They're all gone because I got tired of the work it required to just keep them in the store. Every few months, I had to upload a new type of image preview, or confirm that the app didn't sell cigarettes in South Ossetia, or some other pointless update. The code was the same, but the requirements kept changing.

In the playstore you can support old devices by keeping the old apks available (http://developer.android.com/google/play/publishing/multiple...). This would work very well for GPSLogger.

This is why third-party app stores and alternative distribution models are so necessary on phones and tablets.

Is that so the developers can just continue ignoring new privacy and security features added to the OS?

How does putting an app on a third party app store (G-Droid for instance) allow it to ignore new privacy and security features?

I guess I am spoiled by the Windows and Linux on PC and embedded on microcontrollers where as a developer I do what I want how I want. I did entertain the idea of porting some of my products to mobile but after reading their terms and conditions I decided not to get involved in those platforms. Way too much control over what I do. Waiting for either Linux becoming mainstream on mobile (likely never happens but who knows) and lately some stuff using browser as a platform becomes viable as well.

> I did entertain the idea of porting some of my products to mobile but after reading their terms and conditions I decided not to get involved

Could you elaborate? Which mobile platforms demanded what sorts of conditions?

I'll give you one example. They are in control of your very application existence on their platform. I can't have that. Other then that there are tons of things you can not do / discouraged from doing. You are free to read up on their relevant documentation. If you do develop on mobile you probably already know all of it way better than I do.

> If you do develop on mobile you probably already know all of it way better than I do.

I don't, that's why I ask. And are these conditions only for being placed in Apple's/Google's app stores?

> You are free to read up on their relevant documentation.

I imagine there's a lot of it - I was hoping you'd spare me the effort.

You can develop what you want and distribute your application outside of Google Play Store.

Good luck convincing average Joe Doe adopting that part

It'd be nice if they would improve the search engine on F-Droid... often I have to use Google to find the app that I'm looking for

Maybe it was removed because it falls under "spying tools" category? If it's your own phone, you can easily track your movements via Google location history, but this one can be installed on your spouse's phone and will silently email you their locations at all times.

Is there an alternative app store on Android? We should maybe lobby to make this Apple Google duopoly illegal. In my opinion those companies make crazy money by gatekeeping phones and spying.

There are, but Google put limitations in Android so that third parties can't implement all of the features the Play Store has. You can't implement automatic upgrades, background installation, or the batch installs that the Play Store provides.

That's not true at all - Samsung, Huawei and other stores have the same feature set as Play store.

Is that because users are free to install a different store, or because manufacturers are able to implement their own specially-privileged store as well?

I think the distinction is not Google vs. others but preinstalled (can do everything) vs. sideloaded (e.g. Epic/Amazon, can't do background install/update).

Exactly - the store needs to be a privileged app. Unfortunately that will be fixed only in next iteration of Android :/

Next iteration ?!

Do you have any sources . Thank you

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