Google's Switch to Android Is on the App Store | Hacker News Reader

Google's Switch to Android Is on the App Store

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81 pointsnateb202246 comments

First negative review is hilarious:

>Downloaded it to give it a shot and it ask you for everything! All your private data! Pictures, private messages, etc..

It's an app to move all your data, but you're surprised to see it asks for your data? If you're trying to switch to Google anyway, then they'll have your new data anyhow...

People is really stupid sometimes...

I still recall the outrage when Apple published their first app on Android and it turned out to be Move to IOS. It seems strange that it took so long for the opposite service to appear.

It's not strange to me. iOS is far more restrictive in the type of programs it allows you to run and distribute, whereas Android allows sideloading and rooting.

It's a variant of popper's paradox I suppose.

>iOS is far more restrictive in the type of programs it allows you to run and distribute, whereas Android allows sideloading and rooting.

True, although lately they've been under more regulatory scrutiny so I highly doubt something like this would get disallowed, especially if the equivalent app is allowed on Android.

Depending on the government to step in and regulate corporate control is a fail-deadly system for freedom and should be avoided.

The likelihood of the ruling government to support the interests of its citizens is dependent on the power (negotiating leverage) that the individual citizens have over large government-controlled institutions (inc. coporations). Authoritarian systems produce generally compounding effects, so the idea that we should just sit around and do nothing while they compound is dangerous. When the time comes that protesting surveilance, censorship, etc. is dire then it already be too late because government will have the powers of surveilance, censorship, etc. on its side to squash dissent.

It is better to depend on systems (like FOSS) that are fail-safe for freedom. That is- they naturally err on the side of individual liberty. This is because authoritarian societies are non-recoverable and have to be rebooted by adjacent (free) societies.

pauper

the meek shall inherit the earth!

Pretty sure they meant Popper’s Paradox. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

(Here, so the paradox would go, the tolerant society Android, gets hijacked by the less tolerant Apple.)

TIL. Thank you, I stand corrected!

Sideloading has always bothered me as a term. It infers an insidious process when you want to get out of the shackles of the gatekeepers. Pure marketing genius from the Apple folks who want to maintain their monopoly.

The term has been in existence since way before iPhones were a thing[0], and it doesn't generally have the connotation you are prescribing to it.

We use that term at work right now on my team all the time, and it has nothing with app stores or gatekeeping or anything like that.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sideloading

When you download Firefox from firefox.com and install it on your Mac, it wasn't common to call that "sideloading" in the past.

Making it the popular name for the same thing on mobile was the marketing.

> sideload /ˈsīdˌlōd/

> 1. install (software, especially an app) obtained from a third-party source rather than an official retailer.

> 2. copy or transfer (data) from one device to another directly, typically by means of a link such as a USB cable or wireless connection.

The Google Ngram for “sideloading” shows, like you mention, a measurable uptick in usage after the iPhone launch in 2007.

Looking closer, there is a steep increase in frequency after the year 2000, with the steepest slope from 2005 - 2009. [1]

[0]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sideloading&ye...

[1]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sideload_*&yea...

It wasn't common to call that sideloading because it isn't sideloading.

> monopoly

A word reduced to meaninglessness by surveillance capitalists and useful idiots who are furious at people being able to hire a large company to protect them from Facebook.

>It seems strange that it took so long for the opposite service to appear.

Apple wouldn't allow it on App Store. And accessing those information likely requires lot of approval at different levels. The only thing changed was the Anti-Trust issues going on where Apple continues to claim people could switch to Android. So now having Google's App on their Store is part of that. And I would not be surprised if Apple intent to use it as their PR later along with shit loads of submarine articles.

> I would not be surprised if Apple intent to use it as their PR later along with shit loads of submarine articles

What is a submarine article?

Basically a PR piece that looks like it was written by a journalist but was actually fed to the media to promote a product or political push.

http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

> Apple wouldn't allow it on App Store.

Do you have a source for this? Offhand, I can't find any source -- not "reputable" source, but any source, period -- that confirms there was ever a "Switch to Android" app that Apple blocked from the App Store. The Register's story on "Switch to Android" from April of this year says, "Google, which supports sideloaded apps on Android devices, also wants people to buy an Android phone and, after a year or so of planning, has finally deployed its own iOS app to help that happen." The Register is hardly the kind of publication to softpedal stories to keep Apple (or anyone else) happy, so if this "year or so of planning" was 2015 and they didn't get to actually put it in the store until 2022, it's real hard to believe that wouldn't have been mentioned.

Wouldn't be surprised that the conversation is happening behind the scenes, and Google doesn't want to make a public fuss about it.

Happened before with Kindle, for example (that originally had a store built in …which Apple blocked so that they could release in-app purchasing a few months later)

The Kindle change wasn't behind-the-scenes, though. Apple made a change to their publicly-documented App Store policies that made the Kindle Store against their new rules and the subsequent back and forth between Amazon and Apple was widely reported on.

And that's kind of what I'm getting at. It's not that Apple doesn't do petty, vindictive, and greedy things. It's that if Apple had been blocking Google from submitting an app for five years, it's very hard to believe there wouldn't have been an "anonymous leak" from someone on Google's side over it -- this is the sort of story that tech reporters would eat up, and Google would have good reason to want it out there.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Google has channel for “pre-reviews” - some mechanism by which they would run proposed apps by Apple so they could avoid wasting developer time on apps that have no chance of being approved.

I imagine it's more a bundling of services that already exist. You could achieve much of the "move to iOS" functionality through using Google apps on iOS - Google Photos, Contacts, Chrome, and so on will gladly accept your local/iCloud data and upload it to a Google account. Apple doesn't make iOS app analogs on Android so you need to actually convert from Google data to Apple data explicitly.

I cant believe this was approved!!

In past Apple has rejected apps for _mentioning_ Android in their about page (things like "we are also available on android").

---

A recent example by u/SpaceHonk:

"I have two apps that are accessories to the physical, analog card game "Android: Netrunner".

Updates got rejected regularly because mentioning other operating systems is VERBOTEN, even though I explain the necessity and the origin of the name in my review notes."

I find it strange that it doesn't show up in search results on the App Store at all. I searched "switch to android" and scrolled for a good few minutes and never saw it. Even if you search "switch to android google", it shows a single third-party app. It seems the only way to actually find it is by going to Google's developer page.

The app store search function often needs up to 24 hours to index newly published apps. Check again tomorrow?

Though let’s add that the AppStore’s search functionality is worse than anything I can think of. Unless you literally enter the exact name of the app, there is a good chance it won’t list it.

It took 1 month or so for my app to be indexed in App Store searches…

Apple has the same thing on the Play Store - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.move... - so really seems only fair.

now each walled garden has an escape hatch into each other

Is android a walled garden? There are open-source distributions of Android like CalyxOS (https://calyxos.org/), LineageOS (https://lineageos.org/), GrapheneOS (https://grapheneos.org/)

Its a walled garden with a relatively accessible door. And the garden's pretty nice too, nice enough that most don't leave for the perilous world outside of it.

Unfortunately, some of the security related moves lately have also made living outside of it a little more difficult.

Android isn’t the walled garden. The Play Store is.

More generally its Google Play Services as a whole and how it gobbles up increasingly large parts of OS-level functionality into closed source and EULA guarded code

They are neutered by threats from Google. Lineage had to remove the ability to spoof permissions to appease their overlord.

Wow I didn't know that, do you have a link?

>Is android a walled garden?

I would say that devices that are Play Protect certified are a part of a walled garden.

No company could sell an “Android” phone in the US in any significant number that didn’t come with Google Play Services.

Needs IOS 12 :P If you are on an iphone 5 it ain't happening.

It drives me nuts that folks create marketing copy in the screenshots of app stores. Why even have the screenshots enforced for the size of the phone if they don't enforce them being actual screenshots.

Unfortunately data shows they convert better. Same with scenes that span multiple screenshots.

Wouldn't a real-screenshot requirement be quickly and trivially worked around by adding demo modes with the marketing copy within the app?

It doesn't list what information is transferred.

Does it also download all the Apps I have on iOS if the same App is available on Play Store? ( Probably Not ).

Doesn't support Whatsapp. The biggest lock in problem on Smartphone platform. Not that I think Google cares or Apple would allow it anyway.

Google recently with Android 12 added a way to transfer whatsapp from a iOS to Android (12) device [1], you however require a USBC to lightning cable. I don't know any details of how it works.

1. https://blog.google/products/android/whatsapp-chat-history/

> It doesn't list what information is transferred.

Sure it does, it's in the first screenshot:

> Contacts

> Calendar events

> Photos

> Videos

> small text that says it only copies photos that are on the phone, iCloud instructions are shown later

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