Google Play store bans polyamory dating app
vice.com
vice.com
I've been banned from Google Play Developer portal since 2015 because I had an app that accessed an undocumented API of a 3rd party service: "we have determined that your app interferes with or accesses another service or product in an unauthorized manner." I had two different apps using the same API so I got 2 strikes at once and was immediately banned.
I've tried multiple times to contact Google to get my account restored, several times in the past few years since it's been so long, but they don't even respond and it's impossible to get a hold of a human.
If you've got the supporting docs to that story it's a good one for any journalist who has an interest in silicon valley market power. Silicon valley monopoly power into a search engine will link up a bunch of newspaper stories about it. Start with the author of the one you think is the best and send them the docs and it may well be there as supporting evidence the next time they write about the abuse of monopolistic power. In general it's a bad idea to "trust" journalists so exercise usual amounts of caution.
I feel pretty helpless as ultimately Google has the power to decide who gets to play in their sandbox.
Right now it's totally unsubstantiated and i wouldn't even bring it up in a discussion about Google market power abuse.
Up to you. That kind of choice kinda sucks if it is actually yours to make (ie you have the docs) both options have significant downside for you. I'm sorry it happened to you. I'm sorry you're in this position. Good luck with whatever you decide.
For digital service/content providers Play-stores are a must-have.
For this kind of companies these platforms are a government like power, except that you cant really appeal.
We managed to reach a person. He indirectly threatened that we could lose our developer account if we continue to insist.
Also in our case similar apps were allowed to remain in the store.
Then, having and raising children “properly” requires an even higher level of pair bonding magic.
We could be living in a world where no open web ever existed, where everything would be filtered through app stores and closed environments like Facebook (AOL).
We need to preserve the open web, it is our most precious ressource.
I believe that putting everything online is not sustainable. It might be very difficult to believe for people who earn so much that they can afford 24/7 stable and fast internet anywhere they go, but there are places where even good old broadband dsl is unstable, in the west.
The reasoning of "appstore bad -> lets not use any appstores" is flawed. There are "appstores" like the ones on FOSS systems like linux (discover on Arch/Manjaro comes to mind), which show that you can make an appstore yourself.
All we need is to build a cross platform, community managed app store, which allows foss and non-foss apps, with a payment system. Thats the solution, not "make it a webapp".
Visit site. Click download app. Click install.
This pattern has worked for 20 years. What changed?
Nothing. Google and apple just decided it wanted a walled garden and ya'll said ooo shiny.
That would be a problem if we would have no choice, but that is not the case.
Then again, app stores haven't solved the malware problem, and neither have solutions like trusted publishers / signing executables / etc. I look forward to seeing a solution that isn't worst-of-both-worlds.
If we’re being honest, some barriers were crossed and the threat evolved
Cryptocurrency might have made it easier, but such scams are older than that. Just look at the whole range of tech support scams based on voucher codes.
That’s the opposite of my experience. I remember lots of malware - toolbars, search engine defaults, using malware bytes, ccleaner, antivirus programs, and a bunch of other crap I can’t remember to de-malware my older relatives’ computers when I was a kid. There was no way to prevent my elders from getting malware on their Windows computers, because they just had to click on everything.
Then iOS came out and I never spent another minute dealing with uninstalling and scanning for malware. Any software problems were solved by deleting the app, or turning the device off and on.
Software repositories? Still not perfect in terms of security but better than manually searching for installer packages, deciding between the official download that requires some account registration or a slightly questionable download site and then hoping for the best. Same for updates - the way many third-party programs on Windows expect me to basically download and reinstall the whole program again unless the developer built their own custom auto-updater is ridiculous.
And for the average user I'd say technologies between flatpak and Snap are a decent step in the right direction - easier installation and updates, less trouble with dependencies(in theory), a bit of isolation and file access limits. Unless you want to explain relatives how to setup Qubes OS this is probably the next best thing within the near future.
And what happened? Did we all die? It's not just the security promise that's unfulfilled, it is also the threats that are way overblown.
Think of a web browser as the ultimate App Store -- you navigate to any "app" by using your search engine of choice or by passing around links to the "apps" via email / messaging. Then, you bookmark your "app" so that it's available with one click.
Offline storage, offline compute, notifications, etc. are all things that we can do via web APIs just as easily as proprietary vendor code.
Sure, some things might need native experiences, but those are definitely the exception, not the rule. Even games and navigation and real-time video can be accomplished via web-only APIs.
You can have a choice in both.
There is nothing anywhere that would stop Google just adding websites it doesn't like to the SafeBrowsing blacklist. It's just a social convention that they don't. Yet, social conventions have been repeatedly ripped up over the last 10 years or so by political activists who abuse the word "safe" to mean "ideologically acceptable to us". SafeBrowsing is thus a very dangerous thing because Google's management has shown no ability so far to get a grip on the activist wing of their workforce.
Fortunately, there are two mitigating factors.
One is that Chrome at least on desktop lets you disable SafeBrowsing. Of course, they can change that just as easily as they can change the social norms around how it's used.
Another is that Microsoft has built a successful fork of Chromium. I'm using new Edge on macOS right now. It's not merely using Blink, it's actually Chrome but modified and is very serviceable indeed. In fact they just added vertical tabs. Microsoft seems, at least so far, to have avoided the worst of the culture wars and suspicions of bias. If Google did start to abuse Chrome, people who understood what was happening could quickly switch to Edge. Of course, iOS users are out of luck, as always.
However it may be too fatalistic to assume Android apps cannot be distributed outside the store. I've been hearing "people don't install apps anymore" for years now and it's never motivated with real data, just intuitions and anecdotes. People install apps all the time. The biggest breakout hit of the last decade was Minecraft which violated every aspect of hacker groupthink at once: desktop-first, no mobile version, distributed outside app stores, written in Java, no VC backing. I think people talk themselves into believing this isn't possible, but if people want to install an app, they'll do it. Companies that believe they can't survive without app store distribution are typically offering something completely undifferentiated. I don't know how many dating services there are for the polyamorous but I guess there can't be that many. All it takes on Android is to tick a single box and you can install apps (I'm not sure how they can self-update, but nothing stops you dynamically downloading code into your app on Android).
We could be living in a world where the App Store never existed, where everyone could install the software of their choice on the devices they own. Using the web instead of real apps is not the solution.
Are you talking about the PC? Because that sounds a lot like the PC to me :)
You can download apk files and install them. Windows users used (and still do, I suppose) to just download and install programs for decades. It's not ideal, but it works.
As for windows it's rather surprising that Microsoft hasn't tried harder to get more of a walled garden going given they were never shy of anticompetitive behaviour and mostly stems from expectations grandfathered in.
Actually for some of them the main difference is that the webapp will push very hard for you to install the app with various popups while the app won't. You're basically being harassed into installing the app.
With this setup though you miss out on the 'benefits' of the notifications :)
But also the official mobile app is atrocious compared to third-party ones..
Before smartphones, I was a "tech savvy" computer user. I would install lots of software on my computer from the internet. But I wouldn't necessarily recommend the same for people that looked to me for computer advice. Many people would go to a store and buy a box with a disc in it, which was something you could trust because incentives aligned. Stores would prefer to only carry trustworthy software (in a box) to maintain their reputation as a good store, competitive with other stores. But similarly, I would look to web sites I trusted for my software. The most sophisticated users would look to peer-reviewed, open source software, but this involves knowing either how to review it yourself, or knowing who else to trust as having reviewed it.
Smartphones could've evolved to work like the above, perhaps relying on a USB port for software installs, with options to install directly from developers on the internet, but Apple had already learned from iTunes how to use control to both ensure a pretty good experience for users while also getting a lot of money for it. Google may never have gained enough traction with Android if they didn't build the Play Store and introduce convenience and a sense of trust in that store.
So it's really hard to picture a way that this could've evolved without those stores, such that critical mass was reached on these platforms. It's also hard to envision a strong, competitive alternative. The "masses" choose convenience the vast majority of the time, and they also largely want to trust one source for their software needs. They do not want to figure out whether to trust lots of software providers.
There will always be bad actors who take advantage of concepts like "the open web", so how do you keep things open, but safe and trusted? Can you create a federated system that has "experts you trust" and "peers you trust" and then can go to their recommendations to see which software providers to trust? And wrap that into a pretty tidy interface that everyone can easily adopt? And have the trust system and the device platforms work nicely together to prevent "middle man" attacks?
For a counterexample, Apple has a walled garden that has the properties you want - curated by experts, no sideloading etc. Out and out viruses aren’t common but you still have various kinds of malware that’s hard to remove (and obnoxious in-app adds and dickish dark patterns)
Very reminiscent of the language of the US Comstock Laws which started 148 years ago. One hundred and two years ago, a judge called those laws "haphazard and capricious".
Those words seem to fit in this case. And this is not the Victorian Era. I imagine Google would rather not be called to D.C. again to explain its behavior to a Congress that is unwilling to explicitly define it's expectations.
then you see this poly site kicked..
and I wonder if tinder and grindr are handing over a large enough chunk of change where the sex rules do not apply.
I mean a sex chat app is mostly about chatting when little chance of a real world meet up. However tinder and grinder are basically 'let's have real world sex tonight' apps right?
Someone from big G please tell me how to get an app in the store where people can talk about sex. Need a funny name? Need to be able to hand over a ton of money and location data?
I sometimes jest that it's a kind of conspiracy. Especially if being in the store is a ranking signal for any search results.
Of course I don't know, I just ponder these things. I've made a few bookmarks and screenshots with some research a while back, but no time to share today.
Tried to see if it's back in - but from their site that is linked from vice, the link to the play store shows:
The site at https://twitter.com/hashtagopen/status/1369022572671733769?s... has experienced a network protocol violation that cannot be repaired.
Is twitter going further down the block / ban route now?
I also ponder if twitter really does ban everyone that has ever talked about violence how many others will be booted in the weeks ahead. Then where will people go to vote up their favorite songs.
Just some occasional pondering.
edited to add some ' ' - and fix a mispelled word.
Most profiles I came across on tinder specifically mentioned that they were not on it for a short term thing.
My understanding of the app comes from several guy friends and many girl-friends that seem to use the app for finding sex tonight.
Also running around as a part time lyft driver for a year or more, in a city that has rampant tourism, I have been quite amazed at how many people were meeting up with or leaving hotels/airbnbs with stories of just got in town and got on tinder and ... with some person from some other random state with same kind of story.
Even though we are bachelorette capital (unofficial) of the country, I have yet to hear about an upcoming wedding that started with a meetup via tinder.
I understand I am a small data point in millions, so this proves nothing - but my limited understanding.
Maybe my add in point would be that it very much depends on where you are as to the expectations of said app usage. And now that I think about this along with your statement and some of the other dating info I have learned from reading HN over the years.. perhaps time of day and location are very important factors.
Certainly tinder usage in a town of 500 is different that the options in a city 3 million. I am now considering that tinder usage at 1am leads to a different type of meetup than say the desires of someone getting on there at 6pm as well.
I'd love to see some stats from them like okcupid use to share.
What ever the percentage, I think we can assume that most people who meet up via tinder probably have sex before wasting too much - as say compared to a dating app like Devout-Christian-Family-Singles or such..
It's been a fairly shared knowledge I think in these parts anyhow, that if you want a relationship go for something like match dot com.. if you are in anything alternative dating wise okcupid, willing accept a percentage of dates will be with seriously crazy people; plentyoffish, really want to meet up tonight and see what happens, Tinder / grindr..
So I think my questioning of these policies is still fair, we don't have a list of explicit lines that google gives app/site makers. We know these things are being used for 'immoral' things - fornication, frequently, likely by the millions.. and it would be easy for google and match group to know when they are illegal as well (adultery) - so it's not a legal or moral thing they are drawing lines with.
It's got to be the money (?) or a small group of googlers that are choosing to be a level or prude in some places and level of give the finger to the church and the gov in others or something.
I remember some years ago when cell phone companies had actual lines drawn on a woman's butt showing how small a bikini could be for premium sms messages - when a tiny bikini was too small or not to not violate - at least those lines were drawn and shared with other for a level playing field.
These days it feels like the big money incumbents have little to fear from google and it's easy for smaller niche apps / groups of people to be shunned and told to open a browser instead.
Which is fine, just some things I think about once in a while.
Threesomes especially have become too linked to pornography.
"Polyamory ...is the practice of, or desire for, intimate relationships with more than one partner, with the informed consent of all partners involved"
Sounds good, and has been the case for thousands of years.
But modern dating apps and social media are pushing us back to this practice in quite a big (and informal) way.
Its innate female nature for women to choose the best men (height, fitness, wealth, status, strength), and that's a good thing for the species!
But before the advent of social media and dating apps, they would settle for just average guys too.
Dating apps and social media has made it so that all women can now access that top 20% of men quite easily and completely ignore the bottom 80%.
This has lead to the counterculture rise of red pill, incel, mg-tow, etc.
I'm not on this one side or the other.
I'm just noticing there are more Polyamory type apps and behavior out there now, driven by technology.
Do you notice it too?
now that access to people with these traits is no longer based on who a woman’s guardian knows, but what’s available in the market a lot of dudes feel left out.
i really think this is an issue men caused, entrenched into our society, and then shot themselves in the foot when they lost control of the market supply.
if you don’t want the 80/20 thing to exist, stop furthering the narrative and push for non-physical traits to have the greatest value. i think an emotionally available, driven and focused, and caring person is way better for a partner than a hot rich one. as long as most people don’t feel that way we are stuck in the system we built ourselves
The idea that we have the ability to "push" for what's desirable makes no sense at all and it's not possible.
take weight for instance:
in late feudal/early industrial society a heavy set person was seen as very attractive. access to the resources to become fat was hard, so a fat person was rich and the weight conveyed power.
in the same feudal/industrial time pale skin was also seen as very attractive, because it meant the person didn't have to labor outside for a living.
now thin tan people are all the rage, but you're saying we don't decide on what is attractive as a society?
Yes. There’s no “we” who gets to make a conscious decision about these things. Attractive people are not attractive because of some narrative that was constructed.
And that’s just for long term partner preferences. Sexual attraction is almost entirely dependent on biology.
And have men ever not appreciated a nice, big ass?
For that matter, there's variance in what people like today; presumably there was before. And yet there are invariants- clear skin, symmetrical face/body plan.
Some of the differences in what's attractive (which breast/ass size is most attractive) also have to do with the life history strategy of the man in question. Pump and dump-oriented guys are more likely to find larger breasts most exciting (you have 10 seconds to pick the most genetically fit woman out of this lineup and 10 minutes to inseminate her; then you'll never see her again. What strategy works? Select for oversized secondary sex characteristics, female equivalent to peacock tails- costly signal of excess resources), whereas slower life-history strategy men will find smaller breasts more attractive and care about women's intelligence more (slow strategy- order, planning, division of labour, stability).
There is also the disease angle. STDs, including common ones like herpes, are a major factor in cognitive decline, early-onset Alzheimers, etc.
The West is about to get a major lesson in this.
As I said, i'm not on one side of the other. I'm just noticing the social situation happening.
Nope, not in my circle of friends and I didn't even know about Polyamory apps until this article. I've no doubt there are many of them but it is not something that interests me or something I've ever talked about.
Do your friends talk about it? Do any of them use these apps?
> all women can now access that top 20% of men quite easily
How? Surely, many of them are already taken and most will be faithful; after all that has got to be one of the attributes defining them as "best". I don't think its any easier for women than it is for men.
Like many things usually dismissed as deplorable because they’re uncomfortable, incel culture is built on some kernels of truth, but the whole edifice is shaky, not true as a whole and not helpful psychologically. It’s really best not to dwell on these things, try to expose yourself to social situations and try to be happy. I’m not genetically arranged so to be a top runner but running is fun. Losing is fun if you just go for things without expectations.
This allowed you to have separate accounts searching as a solo, double, or as a couple as well as built in chat and matching systems, traditional apps and forums are not exactly well poised for searching nor focused enough for these sort of relationships especially as most people are against* polyamory in most cases. Most typical forums on the subject only cater to the sexual aspect, even if not intended, and tend to bring in less than stellar users. This was an attempt to focus more on the relationship aspect (definitely more than the approved Grindr)
There certainly needs to be an app in this space.
Yes. No smartphone will make people think you're a creep. /somewhat s
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Apps like that are always a little clunky, especially if you want to use native features like the GPS or the camera -- both of which a dating app will want. They are accessible in the browser, but it's not quite seamless.
The experience isn't a forum. You want something a bit more tailored to dating. But it's entirely within the realm of a browser.
So why package it as an app? More than anything I think it's because people expect it. The experience is tuned towards interactions on a mobile device. That isn't a huge difference, but you're trying to compete in a tough market, and they want to feel perfect.
Like the difference between Tinder's "swipe" interaction (left for no, right for yes) versus a couple of buttons. The usability difference is small, but it's iconic. You could mimic it with a browser, but you really want to nail it.
Similarly, having the app right on your front screen rather than as just another bookmark... it makes it feel important. Small things that make a big difference when you're trying to sell an experience.
Experience is critical for a dating app. It's kind of a winner-take-all (or most) situation: the more users you have, the more likely a user will find somebody they want and who wants them. The better it looks, the more likely you'll be the one people want to spend time on.
The problem is that the extra few steps to install a PWA (which is really just a webpage bookmark you put on your home screen plus some local caching) are a lot of friction. The hilarity after Parler got pulled was non techies trying to describe installing a PWA to each other and failing at it.
You also lose a lot of "organic" search results with a PWA. You don't get the app marketplace searching/related results like Google Play or the Apple Store has if you aren't in the marketplace. If you do both marketplace apps and encouraging people to install PWAs instead of your app, that's now less downloads in the app store and therefore lower rankings. It's doable to make a PWA instead of or in addition to an app, and that means you're still a usable service if you get pulled from stores, but it's not straight forward or perfect right now. The push to make Google and Apple let apps stay in their stores is the wrong push -- instead the push should be for more straight forward PWA support.
With Parler, for example, I remember reading tons of posts in support of taking the app down. But that same process can be easily used to silence apps like these.
It's also a gross overreaction to shut down Parler because the vast majority of people using Parler or supporting Trump did not participate in the riot. Tens of thousands were in DC that day for various rallies and protests, and thousands stayed outside the barricades at the capitol. A few hundred went past them as protesters (rioters?), but committed no additional crimes beyond trespassing, which is the same as past incidents at the capitol like the riots at Brett Kavanaugh hearings (https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/405500-212-protesters-to...). Ultimately only 10 were associated with the Oath Keepers (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/29/us/oath-keepe...).
And on the balance, Parler had 20 million users (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parler) and Trump had north of 70 million supporters. It's not justifiable to stop all those people from having a voice. How was it at all justifiable for AOC to demand Parler be shutdown, for tech companies to immediately fall in line by banning the app, and for other companies to also participate in a seemingly coordinated deplatforming effort? It's also chilling to consider that a sitting legislator can call for the shutdown of the speech of private citizens - that amounts to the government coercing bans of speech from private organizations, and is a first amendment violation.
Either way, here we are, in a world where people depend on their mobile phones as utilities, but are serviced by companies that are not regulated as public utilities. They need to either stop being gatekeepers, and act neutrally, or they need to be regulated to enforce that requirement. After all, they are effectively immune to competition.
That's not what happened and you know it. AOC wasn't a singular voice, there were lots of people calling for Parler to be shut down.
I'm not going to engage with the rest of it, but this point is important because it's being used to demonize another human being. You're repeating a narrative without scrutinizing it, please be more critical.
That exactly my point, the original comment points her out as the only or the main voice. That is just not true, it paints a skewed picture. She was either joining the choir of voices or preaching to it.
The goal of that characterisation is to demonize this one person into the source of this action. (ironically often combined with an irrational faceless "the left" to dehumanize further)
We can talk about what the influence is of a person in that position and whether it's ethical to join in such a call but that is a completely different can of worms and not what I was commenting on.
Stacking "this person did it" with "this person abused their power" is irresponsible without examining each statement.
In my country, even if the party agrees, usually who makes the comments more visibly (usually on TV) gets the 'blame' or ire of people. This is pretty normal and part of their duties as government representatives (otherwise they don't go to the media when they don't want the scrutiny of their words)
edit: Suppose the entire democrats are for doing something, but she tweets to her millions of followers about it, which creates social pressure from her followers for a company to do something, even if the entire democratic wing agrees, she as the 'inciter' shouldn't she also get the brunt of the ire? Or it is only for the good things you get credit (AOC defends better minimum wage, or student debt cancelation) but the bad ones no (democrats want to shut down parlour) ?
This is something I saw on US and European news. If 'America' did something 'bad', headlines would say 'Trump did this', if it was 'good', headlines would say 'America did this'. You can see this today, now a bit reversed, on cnn politics website. There are two positive headlines, both mention Harris and Biden by name, while the negative uses White House.
That seems different (and significantly easier to justify) than blanket bans based on some algorithmic analysis of an app’s name.
Sort the difference between banning one person from your store for being loud and disruptive and banning all people that meet a certain criteria.
I’m not saying google is or isn’t within their rights in either case, but they do seem different to me.
To me, finding and installing apps is one piece. The most important piece, however, is updating the apps. For me, at least. Aurora handles this, and uses the play store as source.
It's reasonably userfriendly and out of the way.
Some examples:
Ban app even when competitors are similar - https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3vdpj/google-play-store-ban...
Ban due to wrong wording - https://twitter.com/hermaritz/status/1371383715381805061
Terraria banned - https://twitter.com/Demilogic/status/1358661840402845696
New project banned - https://medium.com/@amton15127/why-you-should-not-use-fireba...
Google bans company - https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8kvias/tifu_by_gettin...
Google bans mail - https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-serf-on-googles-farm
Ban app for communicating changes during covid - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221447
Adwords ban - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23224791
Serverpunch bad support - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17431609
Delete app - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20826618
Google bans game with pandemic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229073
Google bans dev with no recourse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15197357
>David Epstein
Why am I not surprised
Companies are not people, they don't have "rights". My car or my computer don't have rights. Call me humanist.
Platforms can't deny service. Freedom depends on individual choice.
The ACLU defended Parler. Most of the Capitol Hill planning happened on Facebook, anyway.
I'm a Democrat and voted for Biden/Ossoff/Warnock, but we can't censor Republican and conservative websites. That's letting power get to our heads, and baking in this sort of status quo will bite us down the road when other entities want to censor us.
Speak ill of foreign governments? I could see a world where that's prohibited. Let's not let it happen.
Freedom of speech, freedom to run your software on your own device, and rules for the platforms that enhance both of these liberties.
The difference with the things you're likely defending is that this app does no harm and is only being blocked for puritanical reasons. Ethically they are similar but not the same.
Then maybe it's time to make laws that prohibit Google and Apple from wielding this power.
We're letting the majority of customers that are okay with these decisions punish the minority.
Platforms already wield undue economic power and impose stresses on small players that the utopia of pre-smartphone web didn't have. Dealing with these fat clowns is a joke. Natural technology by itself imposes no such limits. They've enshrined themselves in market position and laws, and they're printing monkey without adding benefit or developing the features app developers are driving.
It's time Apple and Google stopped being marketplaces.
> Dealing with these fat clowns is a joke
Could you clarify this? I'm not following this sentence.
It's their constitutional right, and it's a responsibility that comes with having the power they do.
1990-2010's Internet didn't have this problem.
Nobody cares if Xbox bans your game. There are a dozen plus other platforms. But if Apple or Google say no, you're toast.
We need a bill of rights to protect us against megaplatforms.
Neither has a monopoly, or anything close to a monopoly. Duopolies are legal.
> Web isn't first class, and there's no open standard or easy way to distribute native apps.
This isn't a bad thing. People who want native apps from a source other than Apple or Google can pretty easily get them: Cydia's existed longer than the App Store has, and Google makes it easy to sideload anything.
The world doesn't owe you a business model, and you can't take away people's rights because you want a better way to sell your wares.
This shit we have to put up with shouldn't be legal! I dream for the day that the DOJ forces Apple and Google to make an interoperable native platform. Or when it forces both to spin off their app marketplaces. Or requires them to allow easy installs from the web.
> People who want native apps from a source other than Apple or Google can pretty easily get them
That's not at all correct. You can count the percentage of people that can do this on one hand.
> The world doesn't owe you a business model, and you can't take away people's rights because you want a better way to sell your wares.
The world doesn't owe you clean air, either. But thankfully we've decided to artificially limit business to make the world a better place.
You're begging for a way to enforce capitalism while taking away Apple and Google's right to practice capitalism. You're not promoting this altruistically, you're promoting it because you want to make money. Why should anyone support your right to make money over Apple's or Google's?
> You can count the percentage of people that can do this on one hand.
Anyone can do it, so long as they have access to a search engine.
> The world doesn't owe you clean air, either. But thankfully we've decided to artificially limit business to make the world a better place.
You're arguing for this as a way to limit businesses in favor of your businesses, though. You're just passing the buck! What you're advocating for helps no one aside from you (and people in your profession) and hurts consumers.
I don't like using Google or Apple products, so I don't. Vote with your wallet, don't vote for taking away rights.
Capitalism and it's benefits isn't necessarily self-sustaining and enforcing in the same way that total democracy can still have a party participating democratically to end it.
If you allow every anticompetitive market practice depending on the sector you quickly loose the benefit of open competition that one might expect from capitalism.
> What you're advocating for helps no one aside from you (and people in your profession) and hurts consumers.
If people in his profession include the countless companies developing stuff for these platforms then obviously yeah and that's not a bad thing. If Google and apple can kill competition if they enter a market on their platform then that reduces competition. If they can use their platform to prevent competition in a segment of it where they are established then that stops competition. Competition serves the consumer but is not inherent. The high fees that google can ask due to their market dominance get passed on to the consumer and thus do not benefit the consumer. The market dominance is something they can retain and enforce with minimal competition due to a mix of their clout and anticompetitive practices.
It might be easy for tech-savvy people but not for the average customer. Installing Cydia on an iPhone requires jailbreaking, I think. Sideloading is easier but you have to jump through a few hoops to be able to install apps.
> The world doesn't owe you a business model, and you can't take away people's rights because you want a better way to sell your wares.
I may be misunderstanding this but how does this take away people's rights?
Having domain knowledge is pretty helpful in everything. People who don't know what they're doing shouldn't play with explosives, for example. Plenty of ten year olds have jailbroken their devices, just check the jailbreak reddit. If they can do it, anyone can. Just read about it first. Epic Games got hundreds of thousands of little kids to sideload their app on Google's operating system.
> I may be misunderstanding this but how does this take away people's rights?
Forcing someone to host something takes away their right to free speech.
Maybe even the full "The world doesn't owe you a business model, and you can't take away people's rights because you want a better way to sell" even though that invites unproductive sidetracking about to what extent a free market is a right.
We force companies with dominant market power to do all kinds of things that normal people and even normal companies aren't forced to do.
And it's not "you must host this" but "if you want to keep the overwhelming level of power you have then you must host this"
it still can happen, but it is illegal for good reasons
You have 2 choices:
1) Decline to recognize thst Google is in any way a special case, and so treat Google like any other private business, like your brother-in-laws little one-man coffee shop.
2) Recognize that Google is in any way special and different from some other random small private business.
Let's say you subscribe to 1) :
On the surface level, being denied service in the app store because your app caters to people who are poly, is like being denied service in the general store because you're black, or Chinese, Or Jewish.
Your freedom as a business operator is that you are free not to operate a business if you can't stomach the thought of having to sell flour to black people.
So, if you think Google is just a private business like any other and with the same rights as any other, then they must offer flour to the black people too. They can't mysteriously be out of flour just for some people based on race, religion, sex, etc.
But of course, whether anyone subscribes to it or not, 2) is in effect. Google is not just a private business like a motorcycle repair shop or a hair salon.
A marketplace owner doesn't just own a business that must service everyone equally, they actually own the street that all possible businesses and all possible customers must use. That makes the marketplace owner an order of magnitude more liable for their actions, in the way that the state is for the ordinary phyical street.
Now their decisions not only abuse an individual customer (an app developer) but exert control over entire populations.
It is ENTIRELY reasonable and rational and fair to have strict limits, high standards, and onerous even draconian oversight on anyone in any such position.
The state weilds that same sort of control over ordinary streets and businesses and customers, and because of that, the state is actually very limited in what it can do, and must always be able to justify why it does anything. (in theory anyway, on paper anyway). If the state wants to say that some business can't operate, it has to be prepared to defend that decision legally.
Google and other large operations have set up environments where they have state-level control over state-level populations with corner coffee shop-level autonomy.
No it's not! Your race is innate, sexuality is innate, that isn't.
Your argument is so transparently ridiculous that I highly doubt you're operating in good faith.
You want to rent a new appartment. You have your money and job and credit score and reputation as a good tennant all good to go. But the owner needs to know what color your toothbrush is, and apparently yours is the wrong color.
I wonder what whether you consider religion innate or a choice? I somehow just magically predict that you currently benefit from the fact that other people allow you something you don't allow other people.
Using your clearly not ridiculous and clearly good faith argument, I should be free to, say, run a motor vehicles office in your city, and deny you a drivers license because I consider any sincere belief in any religion to be evidense of mental incapacity, and for everyone's safety we can not have irrational people operating vehicles around other people. They might decide that God told them to run someone over, or they might not value life properly because they don't think dying is really dying.
I suspect you don't think I should be allowed to make that kind of call over other people.
Tell me more about ridiculous arguments. It's truly fascinating.
They've knowingly entered other markets and if they fail to follow the law there, they're on the hook for it - even if they decide to leave after the fact
I understand you support Google's right to choose where they do their business - I support that as well. Do you also support sovereign states to pursue legal action against a corporate entity, that willfully breaks their laws?
If Google would rather leave than uphold my rights, then I'll be happy to see them leave
Both the right and left get targeted by abuse of corporate/monopoly power. Both Democrat and Republican state Attorney Generals have filed antitrust lawsuits against Google.
I understand that the media coverage of Parler's ban in particular was huge and that's why so many people suddenly give a damn, but it's honestly more than a little frustrating to see people talk and act as though it's the first thing that's ever been cracked down on for moral reasons.