riscy

The Play Store takes exactly same 15%/30% commission from their developers as the App Store that everyone here is venting about. The key thing is how their payment processing discounts work.

The Play Store offers a 4% discount on the commission for alternate payment processing only in India or South Korea [1]. In comparison, Apple is doing a 3% discount, but only in the US. Perhaps this will expand further to compete for discounts between the two stores?

[1] https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

> The reason I'd characterize it this way is that changing phone platforms is nontrivial.

I'm sorry, but how is it "nontrivial" to change phone platforms? Google says it's easy and all you need is a cable to get the best experience: https://www.android.com/switch-to-android/

Amazon forces their users to leave the app, not Apple.

Then all it takes is one person with a guessable passcode for their apartment and strangers can get in and steal packages, etc.

Yeah the "OS" appears to be their backend that boils down to your login credentials + something like Selenium WebDriver + ChatGPT. The R1 device is just a thin client.

I'm sorry, but we're never going to fix unhappiness. Nor eliminate addiction entirely. Making it difficult to access the most dangerous, addictive drugs is the only practical method of harm reduction for drug users. I don't see dead people on the sidewalks as a result of their porn addiction.

I won't stand for your right to become a meth head or fentanyl addict. Addiction is a dangerous disease and we should protect everyone from falling into that trap and harming themselves and others around them.

Living in a society is by definition not about granting total independence and freedom.

Please explain how interoperability between messaging apps is possible if two different, proprietary E2EE schemes are used atop RCS.

Google's interop "solution" with the Samsung messages app is by not using encryption. Apple has that same level of support coming to iOS next year, and has also announced plans to work with GSMA on adding standardized encryption to RCS.

I'm glad it's happening. RCS finally got widespread carrier adoption (minus encryption) and it's a big improvement over SMS!

> One thing that isn’t part of the [RCS standard ratified by GSMA] is the encryption standard Google is adopting. It’s building it on top of RCS right into the Android Messages client.

> If you are texting with somebody who isn’t using Android Messages (say, somebody using Samsung Messages or an iPhone), the fallback to either less-encrypted RCS chat or SMS will still work just fine.

Sounds like Samsung users need to separately download Android Messages to get E2EE.

Quotes from https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/19/21574451/android-rcs-enc... which is cited by Wikpedia on RCS.

Google's RCS encryption extensions are proprietary and not standardized. The limitations of "green bubbles" also apply to Google's actions. Apple has at least announced that they plan to develop a standardized end-to-end encryption extension of RCS with the GSMA. It'd be great if Google also worked together with Apple to put this nonsense behind us.

I don't see Google making it easier to communicate outside of their kingdom. AFAIK Google's RCS (with their encryption extensions) is not an industry standard or available for 3rd party apps to use. Why is the expectation only on Apple to make such changes?

Same reason I don't use Gmail: I don't want all of my emails on a big tech company's servers. I pay for Fastmail.

I just want to know what Android friend groups are doing to talk to that one iPhone user? I get that iPhones are more popular in the US but in Europe where Android is dominant they (supposedly) all use WhatsApp, which is also not the default messaging app.

Are Americans just too lazy to download another app?

It’s not just that: for email providers, they’re responsible for storing messages that their customer has received. Your server you pay to maintain holds your messages.

On iMessage, all messages are stored on Apple’s servers (at least in-transit), even those that would be destined between two Android users communicating via iMessage.

At least with email it’s a bit easier to filter out spam, but iMessage is also E2E encrypted so automatic spam detection is much harder.

Then Android users have to download a separate iMessage app for groups involving iPhone users, since they can’t use their default Messages app either and the cycle repeats.

Why can’t everyone in these situations just ask everyone to use one app like WhatsApp? If having good experience was important everyone would be on board.

That’s not how email works. Your email provider maintains servers to send and receive messages on your behalf, and your email client checks in with your provider for messages. iMessage not like email.

I never said the Messages app was free from spam or bad actors, only you did.

SMS and iMessage spam that is handled by the Messages app are considerably less of a problem precisely because they’re less open protocols. They’re not at all comparable; the vast, vast majority of email is spam.

> You could make a somewhat similar argument about an email provider sending emails to iCloud email addresses

No. They don't work the same way. Your email provider has to maintain a mail server to send and receive emails on your behalf. Your email client connects to that email server to do all its work. Beeper Mini directly connects to Apple's Push Notifications servers to do all send/receive.

People arguing for an open iMessage system like email are completely forgetting how much spam and bad actors have ruined the openness of email. It use to be the case that you could run your own email server, but due to spam, many major email providers like Gmail will reject emails from untrusted IP addresses, for example.

Probably if people traveling for the Super Bowl in early February are happy with it. Might even be why they chose Las Vegas.

Even if this bizarre claim were true, that wouldn’t make them “incels”, as they voluntarily chose to use Android.

Desperate men blaming everyone and everything for their own dating shortcomings is nothing new.

There is a lot more money to be made if you claim to have the secret formula for superconductivity, than discovering some evidence of ancient wooden tools/structure.

That's exactly what the announced RCS support for iOS provides. Just not the blue color of iMessage.

I was really hoping for a video with sound. I’d love to hear a cacophony of floppy drives saving that .mp3 !

After reading this blog post, that hands-on video is just straight-up lying to people. For the boxcar example, the narrator in the video says to Gemini:

> Narrator: "Based on their design, which of these would go faster?"

Without even specifying that those are cars! That was impressive to me, that it recognized the cars are going downhill _and_ could infer that in such a situation, aerodynamics matters. But the blog post says the real prompt was this:

> Real Prompt: "Which of these cars is more aerodynamic? The one on the left or the right? Explain why, using specific visual details."

They narrated inaccurate prompts for the Sun/Saturn/Earth example too:

> Narrator: "Is this the right order?"

> Real Prompt: "Is this the right order? Consider the distance from the sun and explain your reasoning."

If the narrator actually read the _real_ prompts they fed Gemini in these videos, this would not be as impressive at all!

Before, there was an Apple ID or device that could be banned for spamming. Here, there is no account required at all, just a phone number.

Surprised to see so much use of FPGAs and not ASICs for cheaper mass-production of the missiles. I wonder if they went with the FPGAs for secrecy reasons (no need to hand over chip designs) or if they simply wanted the ability to patch bugs in the hardware. For the estimated manufacturing date of 1998, I would have imagined FPGAs were quite a bit more expensive.

Yes, they’re assuming electricity is free.

This is the Washington Post saying they spoke to sources confirming these details. I do not think they are Russian propaganda media.

arithmetic is implemented as bitwise operations so i’m still confused. the lower the precision / smaller range of values you choose to represent means fewer bitwise operations are required.