VLC: App Stores Were a Mistake
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And another tangential issue is how search in Google Play is a ridiculous mess lately. It would show you WhatsApp and some other popular apps for literally any search query, while not finding the app you're actually looking for, even if you enter its exact name.
I think this applies to any Google product's search these days. As a company that started with a business in search, it is quite ironic.
To be fair this is also a behaviour the stores could regulate. (If they cared at all...)
Runs everywhere, plays anything is not an understatement.
It's a unique piece of software.
App Stores were a mistake. Currently, we cannot update VLC on Windows Store, and we cannot update VLC on Android Play Store, without reducing security or dropping a lot of users... For now, iOS App Store still allows us to ship for iOS9, but until when?
Edit:
Windows Store - https://twitter.com/videolan/status/1759688788232523788?ref_...
Android Play Store - https://twitter.com/videolan/status/1771102415279763909?ref_...
There is no meaning of having a private signing key if is not private. Why does Google need me to upload a private key if they are then free to use it on their own?
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
If they want to maliciously modify the VLC apk, there isn’t anything you can do to stop them.
Oh, I can get a person to “respond” to a problem with a paid support incident. But the person responding is clearly hired only based on their ability to respond to an English email, once a week, with either, “thank you, I will forward that to our engineering team” or “thank you for your patience, our engineers are still looking into that issue.”
Severity, impact, paid support, none of that matters. Heck, it’s impossible to tell if it’s an actual person or just a sophisticated shell script.
Like most thing on the internet that are designed to make the end user's life easier while boiling the frog behind the scenes, centralizing control and taking away end user freedom.
Story as old as the world, if you think about it: relinquishing control and freedom in exchange for comfort and ease of life.
The list is endless (iOS, Android, App stores, Windows, censored search engines, YT ...).
Just yesterday there was a HN story about gitlab taking down the source code for some game emulator.
Exact same premises, exact same outcome: you can either be free or be lazy. You can't be both.
They should have spent their time browsing the internet, reinstalling Windows over and over, and reading HN, hopefully learning the signals that can ensure they won’t have some program steal their login credentials to their bank accounts.
So lazy of them to do other things in life such as cooking, cleaning, raising a family, and building a business as immigrants in a foreign country.
As a bonus, they could make the app curation system extendable, so other groups could run vetting programs. By default your device would only have Apple as a trusted vetter, but as part of a management profile or something you could also trust apps vetter by some security research group, or Epic, or Valve, or whoever. That way security isn't all-or-nothing.
And of course, if anything slips through and your layman user OKs all the warnings and installs a malicious app, it's still operating in a sandbox, and can't do much more harm than clicking a shady link and ending up on a scam website can.
And yet the choose one scenario is the one that has worked best for me. My dad would fill up his Android phone with malware regardless of scare screens. The solution was simple, and allowed at least him and I to spend more time doing other things.
Just like I how don’t spend my time learning how to fix a tractor that my grandpa knows how to fix.
What about not having to deal with malware?
Absolutes and dichotomies make appealing phrasings, but rarely in life is anything that cut and dry.
Everything is a matter of perspective, and that's why neat sounding phrases that try and distill complicated things into if else statements are misleading.
Which App Store would we say is the “open” one? I don’t know that one truly exists.. and I feel confident it would be hard work to make such a thing (but it might be worth it).
There is none, and no matter how much you aren't lazy, you can't have one because Apple won't let you. Which is why that statement 'be free or be lazy' is nonsense.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/24107581/doj-v-apple-antitrust-mono...
The original iPad was a 32 bit A8 single core CPU that topped out as 1Ghz and with 256MB Ram and used the ARMv7 instruction set.
How do you expect a modern day OS with requirements to deal with real world sensors, and user requirements that didn’t exist back then, to run against that?
The latest iPads have 2GB Ram, are 64 bit, run multiple cores and have embedded motion coprocessors and neural capabilities running a much later instruction set.
Let’s be reasonable here - that device is now about to be 14 years old.
And, if “the hardware works beautifully” how is it “pretty much a brick”?
iPads are not the same as laptops or desktops. Sure, you can still run some Linux distros on older 32 bit hardware, but everyone who does knows of the limitations of doing so and realize that they lack the horsepower of modern day computers and use them accordingly.
Yep. They are the ones that chose to end software support for the device a mere 2 years after it was released. Or did someone else make that decision?
> And, if “the hardware works beautifully” how is it “pretty much a brick”?
Because it only runs the pre-installed apps, and not even all of them because several of the pre-installed apps rely on non-functioning cloud services. This is the fault of 1. Apple for ending OS support, 2. Cloud services ending support for old apps, and 3. 3rd party apps ending support for old devices + Apple not allowing users to download the "latest compatible version."
> iPads are not the same as laptops or desktops. Sure, you can still run some Linux distros on older 32 bit hardware, but everyone who does knows of the limitations of doing so and realize that they lack the horsepower of modern day computers and use them accordingly.
That decision about accepting the limitations and trade-offs should be in the hands of end users, not the device's manufacturer. I can install a relatively recent Linux distribution on my 20 year old PC and decide for myself whether I can live with the performance.
You’re totally correct - and there seemed be be few changes in iOS 6 that necessitated that move. That said, getting it above iOS 11 was never going to happen given the architecture change.
>That decision about accepting the limitations and trade-offs should be in the hands of end users, not the device's manufacturer. I can install a relatively recent Linux distribution on my 20 year old PC and decide for myself whether I can live with the performance.
iPad users are not even remotely in the same group as Linux users.
As a Linux user using old hardware you are making an educated decision to do so, knowing all the pitfalls.
Your average iPad user just wants the thing to run at speeds comparable to current devices and with minimal loss of functionality.
An iPad is not a full blown computer like a modern day laptop is.
I used to be an Android girl. I owned an original Xoom and later on, a Nexus 7.
They were both unusable within a few years because the needs of the OS was greater than the devices could handle: and that’s even after I rooted them both and upgraded to the latest Cyanogen versions at the time.
Like dude, a 14 year old pc would suck today. A 14 year old laptop would suck today. A 14 year old phone would suck today.
True, but neither is it up to him (or a corporation) to continue issuing free software updates from now until the heat death of the Universe.
Jailbreak it and use it as you will.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQKXN5F7dGI
(disclaimer: haven't actually tried this specific one... a web search turns up many sites that claim to show you how to do this).
The amount of hardware that's been thrown away just because they decided it's time you bought a new Mac is insane
We're about to see something similar when Windows 10 hits end of life, and everything without a TPM will get trashed
I use a 2019 MBP at work which I do all my development on with JetBrains, DBeaver, Postgre Server and Podman on.
And I also have a home M1 MBA which is my take anywhere device for when we need a full blown computer.
Even my old iPad Pro 9.7 is in use as a monitor on my work machine.
Not seeing this need to throw devices out yet just because there are newer flashier machines out there.
Which strangely means if you have an Intel Mac that Apple dropped support for, you could run Windows 10 and still be supported until next year
If Apple don’t release MacOS 15 for my 2019, even by your statement, I’d still be supported until mid 2026, and not have to change my OS.
The hardware is well built but the apple lockdown says I can't get alternate OSs on this thing. You can even go back to the original ios version - because of jailbreaking.
But yes, it'd be nice for something not quite that old too.
According to VLC there are still millions of users of outdated Android TV and I agree with them: it's unreasonable to ask all these people to buy a new TV if it's still working. I get that manufacturers don't update the OS for more than n years (if at all). I get that some developers decide to not deliver updates for OS older than n versions. But wanting to deliver updates for these users should not be impossible.
Still, that's a... long time.
That doesn’t mean closed marketplaces don’t work - they do, and well (to a point and certain scale) and are necessary, and there is an interplay between the two.
That said, open marketplaces and standards are for certain the superset of closed ones, this is where we get the interplay of public and private.
App stores as a model aren’t necessarily the problem, they are just a distribution model. The control and operation of app stores as they are currently controlled mainly as closed/private could be perceived as an obstacle. But, why not then pursue what an open App Store/marketplace might look like?
I believe the above is like physics, and some may label me a heretic for the strength of my belief in the above.
I truly believe that the sooner humanity advances to this understanding more broadly and we can more easily converse and cooperate in decentralized, federated, open marketplaces as an everyday pursuit, the better off all will be.
The Internet, and me being able to post this right now on the open forum of HN is proof of the value in fully understanding and being comfortable with the concepts.
My feeling is that an equally great “open App Store” that is popular enough does not exist (and if it did, I suspect Apple for example would actively have prevented it from being an option on iOS). Probable Google too for Android? I am not as sure in the second one.. is there an open Android App Store/marketplace/catalog?
I actually went to the link to check if this was a mistake.