So long Google, and thanks for all the nudes
lecaro.me
lecaro.me
The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers. -- Princess LeiaIn fact, Google is making alternative stores even less convenient with their latest 'side-loading' hurdles.
Regulators need to wake up, issue record fines, mandate equal access and a 'Choose your app stores' screen on device setup.
Otherwise competitive third party stores and a fair market are going to remain a pipe dream.
They appreciate this sort of political nihilism where everyone seems to have collective amnesia about the current status quo vs. just a couple years ago and so lament "nothing ever changes, voting is pointless".
You have a clear desire for change and exactly one of the two parties you mentioned has proven to take action in line with that change.
Yes it's hard and annoying and it shouldn't have to take a bunch of good people sacrificing their time and energy just to hold the jerks at a stalemate, but that's the way it is. Apathy is a powerful weapon when the motivated few are opposed by the unmotivated many.
I also wish we had fairness and antitrust and I pretty much do nothing but whine online. I need to dedicate significant time and energy if I want to see things not get worse and I recognize I'm not doing my part so don't take this as admonishment from me, just sympathy.
I'd also love it if we also enforced existing regulations with teeth. Like of your data center doesn't have a permit for a gas turbine and you run them anyway instead of saying "oh well, you can run them until we settle in court" we toss the CEO in jail to think about their lapse in ethics
If there's a way to do that that doesn't require arbitrary thresholds that won't stand the test of time or in any way screw over regular people's investments, I'd love to hear about it.
Just a plain rate.
It comes with funny side effects, eg companies will suddenly want to make simple things in-house again to save on taxes, and it necessitates tariffs as every other nation is following the current scheme where taxes are only due for the last trade.
The whole tax advisor profession vanishes - only book keeping and accounting would stay.
But let's be real here, it would massively impact the market, it sounds fun on paper for armchair analysts like myself - but real human life's would be ruined from the upheaval
And "the rich" for the most part are paying their fair share.
It's very few which employ highly intelligent tax advisors that skirt them. Same with companies, most play by the social rules. It's just large multinationals like Google, Apple and similar which get around paying taxes. And they're mostly paying some taxes in the US too, just in eg Europe they don't at all.
In addition to the usual tax dodges, and the lobbying for loopholes/preferential tax policy, companies push a lot of harm onto the rest of society so that it becomes everyone else's problem. "their fair share" should include all of those externalized costs. Tax companies for the air and water they pollute. Tax companies for every employee who isn't paid enough money to support himself. Tax companies for every time one of their products makes people sick. Tax companies for data breeches and security failures. Until companies don't leave everyone else on the hook for cleaning up after their messes, they can't be said to paying anything close to their fair share.
the latter is just something to do the former
> should include all of those externalized costs
if you actually want to have a serious debate on that topic, you need to actually cite real examples to look at, otherwise it comes off as a general platitude to capture simps who dont actually understand what theyre being told.
> Tax companies for the air and water they pollute
how exactly? and how would that not become a complete dumbsterfire of administration, with ever increasing dystopian oversight of the state? ever more complicated tax rules, ever more situation in which they can find loopholes etc. this sounds great until you actually think about how to implement it, then it should become quiet clear, very quickly that you'd only give exactly the companies that "arent paying their fair share" an even bigger advantage then they already have.
> Tax companies for every employee who isn't paid enough money to support himself
seriously, how. again it sounds great as an idea, like everything socialist inspired. Its just in practice to implent this, the state has to become an autocracy at the same level of a dictatorship.
> Tax companies for every time one of their products makes people sick.
isnt that already the case? thats why you get endless legalese on all purchases pointing out all the things you may not do with the product. If the product makes you sick, youre usually able to sue. That this doesnt actually achieve what you want should be obvious from the status quo. unless you were seriously talking about tax there. but if you were... what would be the point? the person that was harmed would still be sick and not have gotten any help?
> Tax companies for data breeches and security failures
how do you imagine this working? does the state get a backdoor into every company so it can monitor it for intrusions, so it can throw out punitive fines? like china basically, where every company needs to have a party member on payroll so the party is always informed on all developments?
Seriously, you didn't think any of those things through. If you got what you wanted, you get a society akin to the USSR. Thats not something any sane person would want.
The EPA already has the means for on site tests of emissions, industrial discharge, etc. They are also capable of monitoring and investigating to locate the source of problems.
> Its just in practice to implent this, the state has to become an autocracy at the same level of a dictatorship.
What are you even talking about? The government already knows everyone who gets welfare benefits. They also already know who employs those people and how much money they were paid. If a company pays so little that their employee still needs food stamps, the government knows how much it cost taxpayers to subsidize the labor expense of the employer.
> isnt that already the case?
No. It isn't. Same with data breeches and security incidents. Some small percentage of the people who are harmed might join a class action, but most people won't get any compensation for their losses (which may include death) and those that do get something don't typically get anything close to fair compensation, just a few bucks and/or coupons. DuPont poisoned you. Knowingly. How much money did they compensate you for that? People should be directly compensated when possible, but often there are harms that impact everybody, even if not directly. Sometimes it's not possible to track everyone down. It'd be better to invest that money into the society that was harmed than allow companies to profit from it. It's not just about compensation, but also giving an incentive to avoid or limit the harmful behavior. Crowdstrike's fuck up in 2024 cost the economy tens of billions. Do you think they paid that all back? Even the shareholders got screwed (https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/14/crowdstrike-defeats-sharehol...). It sure didn't take "a backdoor into every company" to figure out who was responsible for that.
The idea that companies should pay for the harms they cause isn't "socialist inspired" and doesn't require turning into "China" or the "USSR". It's something that any sane person would want. There are lots of ways to get that result. A Pigouvian tax is only one of them, better suited in some situations than others.
It's an arbitrary threshold for the start point but it ramps up slowly and uses marginal rates so normal people won't get screwed, and the adjustment makes it time proof. If it ends up catching small business owners then raise the limit until they're safe, or do it as a minimum tax rate instead of adding on to existing taxes.
The other option is limiting total comp inside a company to 5x or 10x median, like they do in the Nordics. But then you would also have to regulate the cash/stock mix, so a fast growing company can't pay its executives in shares when normal workers get stuck holding cash.
Or "just" have strong unions and enforced antitrust laws, we need them anyway but IMO they would take too long to reverse the inequality we already have.
For example, borrow, spend, die is effectively a financial instrument to cash conversion.
Inheritance: Get rid of the inheritance taxes and treat it as cash for tax purposes and have the estate pay the tax.
Make stock buybacks illegal.
I can see there would be an advantage to storing the income averaging part of the tax code so that if someone like us mortals gets a big windfall (inheritance, IPO grant), you can spread the income out over time.
Competition is what stops the exploitation.
Epic Games has always offered lower fees and their CEO has been advocating for small developers for years.
There is no reason why Google and Apple get to bundle their stores, and these other big names have to collect the scraps from users who care to look up alternative stores and go through scare screens.
And they created the hardware and software to make all this possible.
It was Google that lied to the public about Android being an "open" ecosystem that allowed you to do anything you liked without interference.
My point is that "users installing anything they like" is, or ought to be, a legal right. It's an intrinsic part of ownership of a general-purpose personal computing device.
But Google has agreed to distribute app stores (in America anyway) for a modest $5000 fee + $5000/year fee + transaction fees.
And more importantly I didn't ask what the user is picking or not picking, I'm asking: why is there an app store out there that's better than the main one? Is a 3rd party app store going to spin up a CDN, a transactions system, handle the customer service involved there, etc. and then just... not do all the evil shit Google and Apple are doing now, which is why their app stores make so much money? You're asking businesses to enter a market with established competitors with solid and wildly profitable business models, and to just have them make less money for the principle of it. Which like, I agree with, but you're gonna have a SHORT list of investors if that's your pitch.
And yet trivial little alternatives like idk maybe you ever heard of Steam did actually happen, or the entire Android ecosystem itself when there was already an immense Palm app ecosystem that was like desktop apps where you got apps all manner of ways from physical sd cards to web sites to various curated stores. Or idk Epic, over a single app. They are back on the traditional stores now only because they called everyone's bluff and were suceeding, so the old stores caved rather than be seen to lose to someone so much smaller and newer, even in a small way that was more appearance than material.
There is no such thing as unthinkable. It's all not only thinkable, it has all actually already happened before and multiple times.
If something seems unimaginable, that only says something about your imagination not the reality.
This is very unlikely to change without regulatory intervention.
F-Droid is not doing too bad. And yet, the vast majority of people will never ever use it after Google Play implenents their developer verification scare screens.
None of your examples succeeded in an environment that was even remotely as hostile, neither Windows nor Palm could have done what Google does today, without risking a fatal user backlash.
It's one thing for something to be thinkable and imaginable. Of course you can imagine Google Play getting dethroned. It's just so incredibly unlikely to happen without regulatory antitrust intervention that it is pointless to consider seriously.
But as time goes on and software tools become more powerful, there is just not much moat. I don't even mean AI, I just mean the ordinary power annordinary computer and the gobs of highblevel languages and frameworks and automation that just grows and grows all the time. It's not that hard to port an app to a new platform, or a new distribution mechanism, or a new clone source for an existing platform and distribution mechanism.
Big universal things with 100% capture get replaced overnight all the time. Everyone switched from MySpace to Facebook in like an hour one day. Other things like my Steam example took longer but they became at least an equal player, a real alternative that normal people could and did choose in numbers that Sony and MS couldn't ignore, pretty quickly.
Everyone switched from Palm to Android pretty quickly.
Google has a few extra levers which is agreements with all the phone manufacturers who in turn have to deal with the carriers, and google are doing the bulk of the ongoing os developement and security work so the manufacturers don't have to.
But they could just start doing that same work, or spin up a new 3rd party who's work they all share, easily, any time. They all actually already maintain half-assed backup plans they can switch to and go whole-assed if google gets that 1% too annoying one day.
There are really no easy robust moats any more. Even the biggest are precarious and have to be actively maintained through constant shenanigans. No matter how big the capture, it's never actually very strong.
Companies should be allowed to set a recommended experience while staying open. Insisting that they offer choice as part of the UI is tangential to the OS allowing them to exist.
If your app is rejected, there should be a real appeal process. Maybe developers should be able to demand arbitration for some non-trivial fee?
The first step of the appeal would be for the store to disclose to the arbitrator precisely what rule was violated and in what way. The arbitrator can uphold the rejection and you lose your fee or can force the app store to accept the submission and you are refunded.
Microsoft support used to work something like this. There was a fee to get them on the phone but if the problem turned out to be an actual bug, the fee was refunded.
Don't get me wrong, I understand why it makes sense for a company to have the ability to block spammers, scammers, and malware without proving a case in a court of law, but I feel like there's a spectrum of importance, where the more potentially harmful the action is to the user, the more process is due to the impacted user to make sure the action is justified. Examples from least- to most-important:
- removing individual content that has little real-world importance: comments, social media posts, etc.
- banning accounts on platforms that generally have low real-world value (other than sentimental value) to the user: reddit, HN, non-monetized Youtube accounts, etc
- banning accounts on free platforms that have a very high cost to the user of being banned: Gmail (keys to the user's digital kingdom, the rest of the Google account), Facebook (real-name policy means that it's difficult to start over), high-notoriety accounts on other social media, etc.
- removing individual listings/etc on platforms where the user makes money: eBay, monetized Youtube videos, paid App/Play store apps, etc
- Banning accounts on platforms where the user makes money and the account itself has some intrinsic value (reputation, following, etc): eBay, monetized Youtube accounts, App store accounts, social media accounts for businesses, etc.
- Locking up or taking the user's money: locking the user out of a bank/brokerage/crypto/payment platform account; rescinding money (or other things with monetary value): bank account balances, payment platform balances, unpaid Youtube/other monetization earnings, loyalty/credit card points, etc.
- Banning accounts that are essential for the user to participate in society: bank account, cell phone plan, identity providers, etc.
> Have at least 12 testers opted-in to your closed test.
> Run your closed test with at least 12 testers, for 14 days
The funny thing is this seems to apply to recently-created personal publisher accounts. I had a very old publisher account but because I was unable to move my account owner to another email address, I closed it and registered a new one. Little did I know what this would lead to later on.
I also had my old dev account that I used during school permanently disabled.
https://cheq.ai/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/clickfarm6-1920w....
In essence, while the app stores used to be about hobbyist software to some degree, they have become a place created by big companies for big companies, much like Walmart or Target. That would be fine if customers could choose when they visited Walmart or Target, but instead, we've created a regime where you must buy everything from Walmart or Target.
This has made mobile development a wasteland for hobbyist-built and community-built software. I know some people cheer this as the removal of amateurs and crappy software from the marketplaces, but I would counter with the observation that commercial software often doesn't have my best interests at heart, and I would, many times, prefer a piece of community-built or amateur software instead. This gets harder to procure with each passing day.
So, I think developers are generally better-served leaving mobile development and instead focusing on web development, which is not gated in the same ways. While you won't have the same reach that you would get through the app stores, you do have much more control over the platform on which you're developing.
There's just no money in it for them, and a lot of support burden. Hobbyist apps are either free, or a few bucks. For Google, the income is a rounding error compared to ad revenue for household-name apps or in-app purchases inside blockbuster mobile games.
(I will be first in line to buy the first working and affordable Linux smartphone.)
But they have just become shortsighted over time and, perhaps correctly, don't think they need to keep investing that way to get the payoff any more, they can just go 100% payoff now.
Hobbyist are cool and all but I'm sure google got sick of one update publishers a long time ago and decided to only allow apps that can actually attract any sort of public.
Look, not everyone is chasing subscriptions, ads and thousands of users, and with Google constantly squeezing side-loading, the Play store is becoming the only distribution channel left on mainline Android.
But yeah, I guess it's not a big loss, most people install 0 apps per month anyway.
I don’t doubt the author, at the same time this is a serious accusation with no details and little context.
This could have been presented in a more organized way, with timelines and redacted content.
Part of the problem is Google not being transparent, having more transparency could help.
Although I must admit I've never gotten nudes from them. Up your game, Google.
This is an argumentum ad populum fallacy. "Everybody Knows" this kind of thing is true, ergo you should believe the example here without evidence.
It's also kinda ridiculous in context. I mean, no, there are no cases in the literature where Google has rejected an app due to misidentification with NFSW content and then sent screenshots of said content as part of the review. Even not in combination I don't think. Like, has either situation every been documented on its own? "Far from outside the norm" indeed.
Fair.
> It's also kinda ridiculous in context. I mean, no, there are no cases in the literature where Google...
Ok you lost me. What is "the literature"? Published scientific studies about Google's app review process? Obviously there aren't any of those. Blog posts? You (presumably) just read one, and if you take a minute to search, you'll find tons more. News articles? Perhaps harder to find, but definitely exist.
The whole nudes thing is just a funny outlier; don't fixate on that. Who cares what randomly chosen reason the Google overmind decided it didn't like you. The point is it feels like a dice roll and you have no recourse when you suddenly and randomly fail it.
A much more charitable reading would be something like: Numerous people have all made this complaint, therefore the broader point is probably solid, even if this particular example might not be iron-clad evidence on it's own.
I've certainly heard enough similar stories that I don't have much trouble doubting this one, although I'd hardly consider any one story super-convincing on it's own
He's jotting down his thoughts, not trying to be a review process to distribute software on the most used operating system on the planet
We really need an open source and funded OS for phones like we have with Linux for desktops/servers.
Also, with AI 100x'ing developers productivity it might be a really interesting time for phone OS's.
MAXS (Modular Android XMPP Suite) could also work.
http://projectmaxs.org/homepage/
https://bitbucket.org/projectmaxs/maxs/src/master/
https://search.f-droid.org/?q=Maxs&lang=en
> Version 0.5.19 (2000506627) suggested Added on Jan 22, 2025
>This version requires Android 4.4 or newer.
(Hope the author is doing OK.)
Apple did this correctly, IMHO, when the App Store first came out by both:
- reviewing all apps
- having it take 30 days to get the feedback
The 30 days seemed draconian or bureaucratic but it forced builders to be 100% sure that there app was working and ready for consumption. It probably also acted as major friction for scammers etc who figured it wouldn't be worth it.
Publishing a crap app on the app store doesn't make anyone else's app worse
We need to put more money into human alignment research.
Yes they all run in a sandbox, but there's a permissions system that they can exploit.
> I.e. why do apps need stores and websites don't? your browser is, in a way, the store for your websites. You're only as protected from the site's fuckery as the browser is. And generally modern browsers are very well protected.
That's an average of 24,000 apps per day.
With that amount of volume, it would be safe to assume that there's more reasons why google just won't accept an app even if it works fine or fits all the public guidelines.
I was able to share it on f-droid though, and I am starting to think that it may be good just to publish app only through it.
maybe in the short term, and if thier app store is a loss leader.
Millions and millions.
The cost of false rejections is generally quite low.
Okay, can you concoct some prompt-injection-like scenario where you can fool increasingly sophisticated agents about the presence of your malware? Sure, maybe. It's MILES ahead of where both major app stores are today, though, where you can find obvious scams that sailed through review just by looking at their description.
And then of course all the apps will use some kind of AI, and because humans don’t care to wade through a trillion tip calculators or whatever, they’ll use AI to pick the app. And then have AI use the app for them through a voice assistant.
Of course I understand that they are not going to spend money on improving their review process for our benefit until regulators force them to.
Apple releases numbers: 130,000 app reviews per week.
The human component to this doesn't need to do much more than verify it works, they say they churn through that with just 500 reviewers that must be costing just a few $10s of millions.
They could certainly do a better job, but maybe that means 2,500 reviewers? That'd cost them half-a-year of Roblox's commissions.
If Google needs 2x as many that's 5,000 people, their whole Roblox commission. There are more people working at their HQ, and this is a job they can distribute between cheaper countries.
Maybe they need personnel tasked solely to just go in, with the blessing of some high-up person, find any bad customer service or goodwill problem, bottom-up, figure out why it's happening, and work with the relevant teams to fix it, quickly. Then repeat.
To fit with ingrained cultural incentives for relevant teams, other managers and ICs might have to be convinced that their performance evaluations depend strongly on cooperating with this process.
A company that does not provide support to normal people and has a compulsive habit of closing services for absolutely no good reason? You don't say?
Maybe that could even be extended to browser, OS, webpages (just have a bad AI rewrite every page you read, and in the future maybe every video you watch) ... everything people use. Everything you come into contact with.
Think about it: no ads, and no way for anyone to bring them to your devices!
And, even if we assume the investments in OpenAI and Anthropic Google and maybe Apple have made somehow makes them inclined to defend their monopolies, we still have a variety of other models that can also build apps. Sure, I like Claude and Opus 5.5 is the best model for most things, but I'm not going to be severely put out if I have to use Kimi or GLM or whatever. They're Good Enough. And, I know AI companies outside of the US don't have a vested interest in the ongoing success of Google and Apple and are unlikely to stand in the way of competitors.
But, antitrust is absolutely necessary to fix this problem.
just a warning: if you're in the US, this runs afoul of 10DLC regulations the carriers self-police. carriers can and will smack your peepee if you try to use random phones for SMS marketing.
https://www.10dlc.org/en/verizon-tmobile-att-sprint-carrier-...
i do see you're using this overseas and encountered similar issues[1] running commercial GSM gateways, but just a heads up for anyone wanting to do similar in the US (even with programmatic systems like twilio).
[1] https://ciboulette.net/blog/2026-09-05-desactivation-de-l'en...