Hacker News Reader

Comment by spinchange | Hacker News Reader

Sergey said that Apple and Facebook are a threat to freedom on the web, but I submit that commercial 'app stores' like Google Play and Apple's AppStore are the real threat. They have all the control and solely get to decide what is acceptable or not (while reserving the right to change their mind later). Google Play won't even let you rent a video from the store if it detects your phone has been rooted. This sucks. We've gained all this freedom and control with free software and the web, etc, and now we're going to give it all away to these stupid commercial app stores.

View on HN

I disagree regarding Google Play.

Appstore is a threat because if you want software on your Apple phone then it is the only legal method.

But with Android you can install software from any app store you like, or directly. Google provide an app store as a service, but it's only one of many.

Yes the fact that you can add extra apps is better than the 'our way or the highway' approach of the apple app store, but defaults matter. 99% of people think the play store/app store/android market is the only way to do it. You remove it from there, it's gone.

http://martingryner.com/on-alternative-android-app-stores/ "In first week, Number Game got about 360 downloads on Google Play. By that time, Number Game on SlideMe had been downloaded about 700 times…in 3 days. SlideMe is the number 1 source for Number Game downloads adding over 100 on better days. If you also happen to update your application and get to “updated” section, you could pick up as much in few hours. SlideMe has less applications than Google Play, but a huge user base. Also it has a decent review process (it didn’t take 2 eternities like Amazons) and the best developer interface. If I had to choose just one market to publish my apps on in the future it will be SlideMe, not Google Play."

So the only reason it's not a problem is that it doesn't work?

"Your Honor, yes, I shot at him, but I missed!"

The objection to Google Play was that even though it wasn't theoretically bad, in practice it caused problems. The parent demonstrated that the postulated problems don't show up in reality. What is the point you are trying to make? If it doesn't cause ill effects, no, it's not a problem!

What matters more is the fact that if a family member of mine wants me to make a personalized app for their iPhone, it's not doable unless the great big Apple approves of the app. (or we jailbreak).

That's just ridiculous in so many ways. Even if you want to wall in your hardware to your own appstore, you should always provide SOME way of letting users install their own software, even if it's some hidden obscure option.

This is actually not true. You can create a new "ad-doc" provisioning profile and install it on your friend's/family's phones and they can install the app manually through iTunes or via a service like Testflight.

You have to pay apple 100 USD per annum for this privilege and despite that the app once installed will become unusable within the year.

On the other hand, it's far less likely that "a family member of yours will want you to make a personalized app for their iPhone and you'll need Apple's permission" (the problem the App Store creates)

than "the general no tech-savvy population will have problems with malware and/or malicious apps they install without knowing what they are doing" (the problem the App Store is supposed to solve)

It is possible (without jailbreaking) with an enterprise certificate.

But I agree, its ridiculous that you need the manufacturers approval to deploy software _you_ have written on a device _you_ have bought and paid in full.

The Free Software Foundation have been talking about this for years. It's Freedom 0. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

I'm afraid this part of a larger trend - people are trading freedom for the promise of safety left and right.

Until your carrier decides you don't need the ability to install non-market apps and disables the option. Oh, and the phone in question is not yet rooted. This is a matter of time if it isn't already happening. Google can do the open and free dance all it wants but with the carriers standing between you and Google...

If a carrier is being evil I can switch to another carrier though. And if enough people avoid carriers because they lock you in, they will take notice.

There is nothing like this for iPhone. You can't go to a different company than Apple to buy your iPhone on different terms.

I'm rather skeptical of this. Perhaps because I live somewhere where there's only 3 different carriers and they all started capping mobile internet in the same month. And they all dramatically raised prices in the same month. Etc. For now, you're able to buy a vanilla Android phone from a third party, but what happens when carriers start to only allow IMEIs sold through them or their subsidiaries on their networks? Carriers have way too much power right now, partly because Google caved in and allowed them to butcher Android phones.

We need to be vigilant as a lot of consumers don't really care about these kinds of things.

I'm not the most knowledgeable within mobile geekery, but couldn't you in buy an android phone with no contract over the net and get a sim card for it?

The point regarding IMEIs was that if carriers get antagonistic enough, it would be possible to change the blacklist that (some) carriers use for stolen phones into a whitelist that disallows any third party phones.

Outside the US, governments take the promise of being able to take a SIM and put it into an unlocked phone very seriously, so I'd say this is a strictly local problem. In fact, I'd wonder how Deutsche Telekom's regulators would react if T-Mobile (DT's US subsidiary, at least for now) started doing something like this (that they probably wouldn't permit in Germany).

Well, carriers' policy regarding apps in US held mobile market back for years comparing with Europe. For example, here in Russia once there was enormous number of free and paid J2ME apps (usually paid by sending sms to short number). My friends at university read ebooks on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_S55>Siemens S55</a> (I used Palm). I know of several companies that were started at this market and later moved to Win Mobile/Android/iPhone etc.

I read all those horror stories about US carriers. Here in Poland my gf bought an Android and:

+ alternative markets option was on

+ no google apps at all (umm, maybe youtube was there), no gmail account setup, etc.

- some map/satnav crapware but nothing standing in the way

So... not everywhere in the world carriers are monopolized by GOOG. (and I'm not saying that maybe we dont' have some carriers who put google setup by default, I don't know)

In the US, AT&T used to restrict things this way. They quit doing so quite a while back. I am unaware of any other carriers doing this.

It is worth noting that AT&T quit restricting non-Market applications (back when it was the Android Market) because of the Amazon Appstore. People kept asking how they could get it (because they wanted the Free App of the Day and the like) and AT&T eventually gave in.

Jailbreaking your iPhone is NOT illegal.

For now. There's a DMCA exception that hasn't been renewed yet. Did you comment in support of it?

The App Store is the only out-of-the-box method to get natively-compiled code on your phone, but the things that web apps on iOS can't do seems to be shrinking all the time.

Javascript web apps on iOS can have home-screen icons, and "loading" splash screens, and persist data to a local database, and even support multitouch and the accelerometer, all offline.

A lot of the iOS apps I use could have been written as web apps. Is this true on Android, too? Maybe it's time for somebody to write a "generic mobile app store", for the apps that don't require fancy things like 3D graphics.

For Apple this is a problem since the app store is the only source of software for non-jailbroken iphones.

Regarding Android, we can always use another marketplace, but then the problem would be security and good quality apps. And so we would again be at square one. Does anybody have another idea?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com