Hey Google, what happened to all the fun?

One way to avoid this is to embrace open standards.

If you're going to put your stuff into one of the proprietary phone/tablet app stores today, it is important to make sure you can look yourself in the mirror and say, "I know this is probably a bad way for society, but I think I can get more money this way, at least in the short term." So at least you know what you're doing.

The longer that people sell out, the harder it will be for society to dig itself out.

Any company that gets big enough to start having policies for everything is automatically no longer fun. The people who get hired to make policies are not fun people.

Google is a conventional company. They may not have intended to become one, but now they are among the most conventional of all companies - layoffs, cost cutting, offshoring, killing products left and right, I could go on. It's a goddamn shame.

Google deleted a guys app that he wrote 14 years ago that tells you if it's Tuesday

I would have fought the "has no function" angle instead of suggesting it was "just for fun."

In actual fact, it does have function. I have personally asked "is it Tuesday?" more than zero times in my life. This app functions perfectly in helping answer that question.

Seems no different than a weather app in terms of its function - it communicates real time information about the day.

I hope that this is having an opposite effect where people are starting to step outside of the walled gardens to look for "the good stuff". Google pulled this shit with us too a few years ago by attempting to force us to share our signing keys. We ignored them and told our users to download the APK from our website instead which they happily did. Then, Google bumped the minimum API version and new versions of Android refused to launch apps that were not updated. Our users found workarounds before we did, by using some kind of obscure adb command. The new API bump introduced some needless asinine changes that seemed to exist just to please some PM at Google. Enough is enough.

The solution is to create a separate section called "the magic forest" and put all the silly things there so that it doesn't clutter up the video games, corporate garbage and the other 5 apps everyone uses.

> You should ensure your app provides a stable, engaging, responsive user experience.

What does this mean?

Just another example of huge companies ruining platforms that used to be nice. Maybe I can make a suggestion: the open web has always been there.

If you make apps for Google, they get to ruin your day at any point in the future. If you put up a website, you own it. You control it. It will work as long as the code still runs, and you never need to update a “manifest number” or whatever.

If you want it to be an icon, create a bookmark and drag it onto your phone’s Home Screen. In fact I do this anyways with some websites that do have apps because the website works and that’s good enough.

The same goes for Twitter vs the Fediverse. Do you know what already is a network of media servers that connect over a common protocol? The internet. Create a blog. It works forever.

Consider publishing on F-Droid; the platform is open and decentralized, plus it's already gaining some traction outside tech-centric communities.

Great and fun read, thanks.

Should have added adversiting. Then Google would allow it.

But, yeah, I miss the old Google too.