quambene

The first time you deal with Google's customer support, you wish you had never dealt with Google in the first place.

Their decisions are slow, arbitrary and often inconsistent. Regularly, they are not answering at all.

We are fighting with Google for 8 months already. Our app was suspended 5 times. We re-submitted 3 new apps in order to comply. They approved our appeals request, only to suspend the app one week later. A process error as admitted 3 months later by Google. Our app was even in quantum state once: both approved and suspended at the same time. The story still goes on ...

All other app stores, like Apple App Store, Huawei AppGallery, and Samsung Galaxy Store made a thorough check once, but all approved the app months ago.

When I started a startup, I was afraid of bureaucracy in Germany. Turns out that in fact the greatest threat is Google's (non existing) customer support.

To be clear, I don't blame the customer support itself. They are doing their best. It just seems that Google is seriously understaffed in this area. It's outrageous that the 30 percent fee is not invested in sufficient man power.

Sad stories about Google always cheer me up. Thanks

Or alternatively,

"timestamp without time zone default (now() at time zone 'utc')"

is fine as well and does make the time zone explicit in the type definition.

Currently, there are four (more or less relevant) android app stores as far as I know:

- Google Play

- Huawei AppGallery

- Samsung Galaxy Store

- Amazon AppStore

But Google Mobile Services (GMS) are so widely spread and often pre-installed on the devices that there is no real competition for Google.

Currently, the most promising alternatives for GMS are:

- Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) [1]: more widely used now because GMS was banned from Huawei devices since US-China trade wars

- Amazon + Microsoft [2, 3, 4]: Microsoft is planning to serve android apps in Windows Store with Windows 11 in cooperation with Amazon

[1] Huawei Mobile Services: https://developer.huawei.com/consumer/en/hms

[2] Amazon in-app purchases: https://developer.amazon.com/docs/in-app-purchasing/iap-over...

[3] Amazon push notifications: https://developer.amazon.com/docs/adm/overview.html

[4] Windows 11 and android support: https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/24/22548428/microsoft-window...

For Huawei this has only been true since the US-china trade wars. There are still a ton of Huawei devices with GMS pre-installed.

A service like GMS would be important for Samsung, too, as there are quite some Samsung devices out there. However, with GMS pre-installed on all Samsung devices, the Samsung Galaxy Store is completely useless as everybody and his brother will use Google Play for app and in-app purchases.

Yes, you are right. The real problem is the ubiquity of Google Mobile Services (GMS) though, rather than the app store itself. For example, GMS are pre-installed on all Samsung devices, but Samsung's equivalent is not installed on all Google devices.

This means, that everyone will still use Google Play for in-app purchases out of convenience.

As much as like F-Droid, it is only for open-source apps, isn't it? However, the majority of apps is still closed source. I would like to see an alternative android app store, which can also serve closed-source apps.

Another problem is a missing alternative to Google Mobile Services (GMS), which are installed on virtually all android devices. For example, if you need push notifications or in-app purchases you are dependent on them as well.

IMO, it is the widespread distribution of GMS (and a lack of alternatives thereof) that make google a quasi monopoly.

A lot of banks are offering photoTan. You get a special device just for generating your photo tan. It's more secure than sms tan and you wouldn't need a mobile phone anymore.

An open sourced AppleQEMU would be great. I would like to build and distribute iOS apps from linux without the need of a MacBook.

IMO, Windows 11 is going in the right direction. Android apps and progressive web apps for the windows store could be both developed from linux now.

But it seems this standard is not adopted widely?! To be more accurate, I would have to reformulate my question: Why is there no widely adopted standard for api documentation?

I'm welcoming any competition to the app store duopoly.

I'm excited about Ubuntu Touch [1] as well. It's open source and hopefully does integrate well with Ubuntu Desktop. Would like to see a "Ubuntu App Store" as well.

[1] https://ubports.com/

I'm a great fan of progressive web apps (PWAs). However, last time developing a PWA, the support by Apple’s Safari browser was not yet sufficient. For example, you couldn't add an app shortcut to the home screen on iOS.

So today you can choose between the devil and the deep blue sea: Choose a PWA and get destroyed by Apple: bad support by Safari; or choose a mobile app and get destroyed by Google: arbitrary decisions in Google Play.

I was quite disappointed as well. I guess the only way to go is to use a strong password, which is NOT "memorizable" and hope that the reminder banner won't show up too often. Very sad ...

And even more importantly, external content should always be a link instead of a button. If it's a button, you can't see where you are going which is a poor user experience and security issue. Other than that, neat idea.

Concerning computer science, you can find some interesting web discoveries here: https://turtle.community/topic/computer_science

In particular, I like 'Category Theory for Programmers' by Bartosz Milewski as a great theoretical foundation to functional programming.

There are a ton of websites which are self-curated tool lists. We wanted to build a community around sharing and discovering tools instead, i.e. anybody can share tools without friction.

Just log in and post your link. You can also use our browser extensions [1, 2] and post your discovery on Turtle via shortcut CTRL+Space.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/turtle/aoegflcmicj...

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/turtle-networ...

It is advertisement: You are paying to forward traffic to your site. Think of 'Chatroulette for startups'.

Doing it on Ethereum has the advantage that you don't have to provide your credit card details, and that we don't have to integrate Paypal, Stripe, etc. Also, an auction system implemented in a classical way would be much more complicated.

Having trouble to generate early traction for our main project [1], we decided to design a side project marketing hack. This traction hack resulted in StartupTwister [2].

The idea behind StartupTwister is to register the landing page of your startup in an Ethereum smart contract [3]. The main page of StartupTwister [4] randomly redirects to one of the registered landing pages in order to generate early tration. The landing pages currently registered on StartupTwister can be found here [5]. The first 25 pages were registered by ourselves for illustration purposes. You can register your landing page in the respective Ethereum smart contract here [6]. Neither a login is required nor do you have to provide your email address.

The price of registering your landing page is determined by supply and demand via an auction system implemented on Ethereum. The auction system is based on a Dutch auction with Harberger taxes. More information about the auction system can be found at the bottom of [6].

[1] https://turtle.community [2] https://startuptwister.com/home [3] https://etherscan.io/address/0xE1f01D1f7791aD4A45ccA7697b155... [4] https://startuptwister.com [5] https://startuptwister.com/shuffle [6] https://startuptwister.com/register

I can relate with you!

However, to prevent the time-expensive and often difficult-to-answer question 'Do I really need it in the future?', I'm archiving (more or less) everything.

Concerning your archiving method, I am suggesting: Create a folder in your bookmarks called 'Archive'. A psychological trick to reduce mental burden similar to the archive button in Google Keep :)

Your archiving method seems like a waste of time if a) you don't need them, and b) you could just save a bookmark with one click in your browser.

I believe bookmarks (or something similar) have still its place in an increasingly digital world.

I am archiving many links in my desktop browser (about 50 folders with various subfolders and each with a dozen links). The problem is that I would also like to have them available on mobile devices. Sure, most of the time you will not need them again. But with increasing regularity I am remembering that I was reading something interesting somewhere and want to have a look again, but can't find it in the web anymore. Then, you can figure out more easily where you read it when having appropriate and well-structured bookmarks.

Do you know if there is a free trial for pinboard.in? It seems that you can't try it out without providing your credit card information, which is a UX no-go for me.

How do you add bookmarks in pinplz without using the third-party toolbar button?

I prefer to stay up until I'm dead tired. Unfortunately, you can only do this if you have flexible working time and can adjust your sleep pattern accordingly. For me this is working because of self-employment.

What do you think about getpocket.com and flipboard.com? What are the cons of pinboard.in over the other two?

Do you mean pinboard.IN?