This is why software should not be subjected to an "app store" type distribution system, where a monopolist retains absolute control of what software can run on your devices, and can capriciously deny distribution to developers for whatever reason it likes.
You can install from other stores (AnkiDroid is on F-Droid, for example), or from direct file download on Android already. The problem is rather thay most users just use the store preinstalled on their phone as part of Google's deal with OEMs to bundle Google Play Services. So either you follow Google's rules, or you lose all the users who don't want to leave the walled garden, even though they can.
Android moving everything to playstore - there's always FDroid.
How many of these are still true and for how long?
If someone's country is a dictatorship, it doesn't help to tell them that there are 100 other democratic countries, just move. Not everyone can emigrate or want to emigrate for any number of reasons.
Imo if you compare what Google does to the one other mobile OS manufacturer with any users, claiming Google should be fined is something like the cop pulling you over for going 8 over the speed limit while Apple is doing triple digits and just ran two people over.
'Why not both' is an argument, but clear as day what Apple does is worse. There's no alternative.
Your reasoning shows why it's so much harder to fix a duopoly than to fix a monopoly. If there was no Apple then Google would get its comeuppance. If there was no Google then Apple would get its comeuppance. But because we have both Google and Apple, we can't punish either.
The mathematician in me wants to solve the problem of the duopoly by first reducing it to a monopoly, which we have known solutions for.
We both agree that there is a speed limit and it needs to be adhered to, regardless of who it is.
The problem with Google is that it may have started at 8 over the limit, but it advertised itself as sticking to the limit but always hovered slightly above it pushing the boundaries. This has skewed our perception into believing that Google's was acceptable and we have been gradually raising our threshold itself to a dangerous level.
Now Google is not too far behind Apple that it can't catch up.
Give it up. Stop defending your position when it's been pointed out that you are holding the two companies to two different standards. It's all right to admit you were wrong and learn something, even on the internet.
On the contrary, defending Google by bringing up Apple in this context is about as cut and dry as whataboutism gets. What Google is doing is wrong, full stop. Anything else is in addition to and also irrelevant.
I don't think Google is moving to disallow them, it's more that the EU said that it's fine for Apple to still own app notarization / developer verification even outside of Apple's app store. Google saw this and said, cool, we'll add that to Android too so we can also get our (undeserved) cut outside of the Play Store. I can install F-Droid or anything else, but if they dont submit papers to Google, I get a big scary warning when I install it (I get the same scary warning if a developer distributes apps through F-Droid, but doesn't verify with Google, which is ridiculous too). On iOS if I don't submit to Apple I cant do anything.
It all sucks, and I'm not saying this is a good thing. But Google and Apple are both trying to position themselves as not having monopolies on store fronts, while still forcing notarization and verification to run through them independent of the store being used. And the EU seems fine with this for some insane reason. Google isn't trying to be worse than Apple, they're trying to match Apple.
Google are trying to match Apple's worst behaviour.
Next will be USA deciding that it's illegal to use the new Chinese offerings that will pop up to work around Google/Apple shittiness, because unconstitutional market manipulation goes hand-in-hand with USA's Russian-style oligarchy.
How long before Linux is added to the USA regime list of software that 'shows someone is a terrorist'.
I noticed that reddit was setting a use_redesign (I might have the name slightly wrong) cookie when I explicitly visited the old.reddit domain, and this caused old reddit to persist. Since I do occasionally want to use the new site for image posts and the like, I set up a bookmarklet to set/unset that cookie on command.
I've since found that setting this cookie bypasses the old.reddit login page, allowing me to view the old site while not logged in. No idea how long that will last though.
I actually think the menacing messages are on point but should apply to play store apps as well. Most of the people I know are incredibly cavalier about running mystery software from unfamiliar developers on by far the most sensitive device that they own.
The "convoluted" way is/was the default in the absence of a monopolist app store. Before centralised app stores, users downloaded or bought boxed software ad-hoc and installed it on their computers from installation archives, just like you can install apps from APK files on Android. If you banned Google from preloading their app store, isn't that what we would revert to?
The goal is not to prevent a Google monopoly. The goal is to have competition to prevent Google abusing its monopoly to lock down users.
There is Samsung Galaxy store.There is Xiaomi store.There was Amazon app store which failed to gain traction as it was not pre-installed but had decent number of apps. This is even before we get to open stores like F-droid.
Now their viability is a question in the long term, if Google has complete discretion over what is allowed.
Google doesn't have complete discretion. On Samsung phones, Samsung's discretion overrides Google's. On Xiaomi phones, Xiaomi's discretion overrides Google's.
Not really. Google sets strict boundaries for smartphone brands on what they can do software-wise. For instance, iirc, shipping the phone primarily with a non-Google alternative ROM means you won't get any play services on them, even if you want to have a secondary version with a standard Google ROM.
Google has essentially full control. Because they own security updates. Because banking apps already now often do not work without Google services. Etc. Etc.
It is a monopoly (regarding Android app developers), and is increasingly exploiting that to cash in.
Actually old reddit doesn’t work that way anymore lol you must login or use crappy reddit, which is exactly to your point though! They will just keep making it harder and harder until you simply can’t, but by then so a few people will be “opting in/out” that they’ll argue nobody wants the ability to toggle that anyway.
I think the old reddit redirect extension gets around this somehow, that has worked for me lately (occasionally with some toggling of the extension). Although maybe it's best to just use less reddit tbh
But it's a good thing, actually because:
- when reddit is good it's way to addictive
- reddit has become nearly as bad as most other social media sites
So if they force me to use an account, I'll finally be able to kick the habit ;-)
Make that 'since forever'. But there used to be a lot of insightful discussion inbetween the facebook-like parts. (Maybe it was the same on facebook, I wouldn't know because I never had a facebook account and you can't access the site without it.)
But I deleted my account (or at least randomized my password) somewhere in 2016 or so, so apparently 10 years ago I decided I wanted out. But I'm still reading it at least as much as HN. So fingers crossed they screw up badly enough this time :-D
You don't always need an extension to use old.reddit.com, it's an actual setting if you're logged in.
The real problem is that old.reddit.com and its ecosystem are all becoming worse and worse. Just off the top of my head, things like image galleries, message notifications, RemindMe bot, RES, /r/random, etc all have various problems and breakage.
I resigned as a mod after the API shitshow and am so glad I did. It’s a terrible site. I wind up there every month or two from friends or looking something up, it’s hard to see how much of a cesspool it is when you’re so invested in it and up close.
While I agree with your point, conflating the effort to install apps outside of the Google Play Store with the effort to immigrate to a different country is wildly incomparable.
There are solutions and then there are workarounds. what we see are workarounds, not solutions.
Even in software, you can only patch so many workarounds without fixing the issue. Eventually fatigue sets in or we run out of workarounds and just publish the bug as "expected behavior" don't we?
I don't want the workarounds to distract from the need for a proper fix.
Everyone is speed running towards a future where you need a permit to write software.
Try to run a binary that doesn’t have the right cert( or whatever it’s called on Windows) and you get a bunch of warnings.
Even if Android is open , normal people will only use the App Store. I can imagine China forcing Apple to allow 3rd party installations of software one day .
The EU did something where to my knowledge Apple still gets a cut of each sale.
I am really hoping Google forces everyone to use signed apps Play Store. That is the only thing that will make people stop using Google/Android, to develop a real, actual, not-just-a-bad-fork-of-Android alternative mobile platform. Otherwise everyone will keep putting up with the bullshit because it's not painful enough yet. The OS will keep getting more bloated and slow. We'll all be forced by the constant churn of breaking changes to keep buying new phones when the old ones work fine. And the surveillance state of an authoritarian country has instant root access on half the devices on the planet.
Wow. The click the build number a bunch of times is already onerous enough. Now we're going to have to wait 24 hours to spin up a new development device?
Google is making it increasingly difficult to freely install software from app stores that they don't control and tax. Quoting https://keepandroidopen.org :
> Starting in 2027*, a silent update, nonconsensually pushed by Google, will block every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with Google, signed their contract, paid up, and handed over government ID.
> Every app and every device, worldwide, with no opt-out.
>> Pick "allow temporarily" (7 days) or "allow indefinitely
Geez. I don't like what they're doing either but this fear-mongering is not helping your cause. So the "trap door" here is just that you can't buy a phone and immediately start loading apps from unverified developers onto it until 24h have passed? Of all the hills we could be dying on, that's the one we're picking?
- the "24 hours" is Google's first formulation of plausible deniability. They've likely done testing to hone that number to find a sweet spot.
- the "24 hours" is enforced by remotely-run code, meaning Google remains in control of it and can unilaterally alter how this works, any time they feel like.
Imagine you went to the shops, and found that one shop, while it had the goods on display, and could totally just let you pick them up and buy them, was required by the shop next door to make you go away and come back no sooner than 24 hours later. Meanwhile, the shop next door is right there, and it's open, and it has no such restriction.
On what planet do you think anyone other than the most dedicated of dedicated people would choose the shop that requires waiting a whole day to use it when the alternative has no such restriction?
> unverified developers
The developers in F-Droid are verified, just not by Google. That's the whole fucking point. Google is not the be-all and end-all, but with this power-play, they are making themselves that.
> On what planet do you think anyone other than the most dedicated of dedicated people would choose the shop that requires waiting a whole day to use it when the alternative has no such restriction?
I have no clue what you're referring to or worried about here, could you clarify? Are you worried Android is going to lose power users to iPhone? What are the alternative shops you're referring to here? We're not buying pastries.
> The developers in F-Droid are verified, just not by Google.
"Unverified" in my comment was a shorthand for "unverified by Google", not an insult.
> Google is not the be-all and end-all, but with this power-play, they are making themselves that.
The complain about that? Rather than wasting time complaining about the 24h wait?
I don't know if people's imaginations are lacking here, but there could easily be a world in which your 'alternative' verifier would still make you wait 24h (or longer). The wait is clearly a security mechanism, regardless of who makes you do it. (And yes, it could have been chosen for plausible deniability.) Is your actual problem the wait itself, or is your actual problem the identity of the entity making you do it, or is your actual problem that the power is too concentrated in one entity, regardless of the entity? These are very different issues with very different solutions.
> What are the alternative shops you're referring to here?
In this analogy, the alternative shop that is preventing you from buying stuff from its competitors without a 24 hour wait is the Play Store monopoly.
> but there could easily be a world in which your 'alternative' verifier would still make you wait 24h (or longer).
Then in this hypothetical world where there were a free market for verifiers rather than a single, monopolistic choice, I would choose another alternative verifier that doesn't make me wait 24 hours, or no verifier at all.
> Are you worried Android is going to lose power users to iPhone? What are the alternative shops you're referring to here? We're not buying pastries.
Are you 13 years old? Who in their right mind would even care that "all the power users" went and bought iPhones? Are thoughts like this keeping you up at night?
> I don't know if people's imaginations are lacking here, but there could easily be a world in which your 'alternative' verifier would still make you wait 24h (or longer).
It's your imagination that's failing; we don't want ANY verifier at all, whatsoever. Nobody should be able to reach into my phone OS and have a say regarding what I can install or not.
> The wait is clearly a security mechanism, regardless of who makes you do it.
"Security mechanism" to protect WHO from WHAT, exactly? And please don't repeat the drivel about scams that Google's pushing, we all know those are excuses, "It's for the CHILDREEEENNNN!!!!" sure.
> or is your actual problem the identity of the entity making you do it, or is your actual problem that the power is too concentrated in one entity, regardless of the entity? These are very different issues with very different solutions.
So you DO know what's going on! In that case I have no idea why you're arguing in favor of having a gate placed in front of our [personal, owned] phones to regulate what we do with our own devices.
> So you DO know what's going on! In that case I have no idea why you're arguing in favor of having a gate placed in front of our [personal, owned] phones to regulate what we do with our own devices.
Then you're not understanding anything I'm writing, and I don't have the energy to keep going.
All I'm saying is that you need to pick your battles carefully and be honest about your goals if you want to have a fighting chance of winning this war against general-purpose computing. I want to win this just as much as you. I don't want to lose it, and I certainly don't want to lose it in a dumb way. Dying on the wrong hill during the wrong battle because people on my side constantly lie, exaggerate, and otherwise misrepresent reality and turn away would-be supporters is probably the dumbest way to see this happen, and it should make you angry, if you actually want some success in what you're doing.
About that... you might be interested that private property ownership in general is the result of similar kinds of onerous and exploitative processes. Anthropologists and historians have done a bunch of research on this for a while, and one of the interesting narrative texts about this is Engels'
I agree wholeheartedly, but you can already unlock and root your phone and install whatever you want. This is not that battle. Mind you, I don't like either of these, but they're very different in nature.
And if I want to run the stock OS I paid for, with apps of my choice? It feels like a bait and switch to lock down the OS like this after you've sold the device.
This is the stock OS you paid for. It's beholden to Google and subject to their updates as it always was. You can either flash a different OS entirely, or even break their ability to update it before the change rolls out, if that's what you want. What I think you really want is to pick and choose what updates you get, which I would love too, but that's neither here nor there.
So we started with an OS (when Google still needed to gain market share and goodwill) which was opensource. Now Google is no longer developing Android source code in the open and decreasing the "opensourcing" to a couple of source drops each year (the interval has been decreased multiple times). Google Play was introduced (basically clamping down the app store ecosystem) and from there Google has only made it harder to get around Google Play. Introducing things like phone attestation. Supposedly a security measure, yet for some reason a Samsung phone which hasn't had an update in 4 years still passes basic level attestation. And now Google is yet again making it harder to get around the Play store.
And for some reason you seem to think it is reasonable to assume it is going to stop here?
> And for some reason you seem to think it is reasonable to assume it is going to stop here?
I really don't. That is, actually, my entire point: people are going to roll their eyes at this right now. And then you're going to lack/lose the supporters you'll need when things really get bad.
Things are really bad already on Android. Most bootloaders are locked, Google prevents you to use the very few unlocked ones through the (legally questionable) Play Integrity. AOSP is basically dead (it doesn't even include a functional keyboard nor a functional call manager nowadays, can it still be called a phone?) and now they are further locking direct installs
> Things are really bad already on Android. Most bootloaders are locked, Google prevents you to use the very few unlocked ones through the (legally questionable) Play Integrity. AOSP is basically dead
This feels like complaining about the color of the bikeshed, me saying you should save your complaints for when things get really bad, and you replying "things are really bad already, there is a rotten carcass in there and the roof leaks."
Okay, so let's keep complaining about the color then.
What would be "really bad" for you? Non-google Android is dead outside of China and you can't realistically distribute software either without a Google stamp.
I don't see much difference between Android and iOS in terms of openness nowadays personally.
"Block[ing] every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with Google, signed their contract, paid up, and handed over government ID. Every app and every device, worldwide, with no opt-out"
...would be "really bad" in my view.
Which is probably exactly why they worded it that way, despite knowing fully well they are (rather blatantly) lying. They literally explained how to avoid it themselves further down below, after you've already been angered.
> "Block[ing] every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with Google, signed their contract, paid up, and handed over government ID. Every app and every device, worldwide, with no opt-out"
Personally for me, a fake convoluted opt-out is the same as no opt out so we're already there.
Even Fortnite failed to distribute outside the Play Store, if they can't despite being famous, well you can't.
> Personally for me, a fake convoluted opt-out is the same as no opt out so we're already there.
Convoluted, yes, but fake? Aren't you just repeating the same lie? That means it looks like it bypasses the verification but doesn't actually do so. What are you basing that off of?
I'm talking about it as an app distribution method from the perspective of a developer and an app distribution method you can only ask a few people on Github to perform definitely isn't a valid one to me.
> I'm guessing you've never shown up to a foreign country without a phone. First thing I do after I get through customs is find the phone store.
Indeed I have not. In fact I haven't even heard of people doing this until your comment. And that's before unknown app developers coming into the picture. I assume you do this to avoid border phone searches? And you feel the (ostensibly) security-related mechanisms for the rest of the world to be centered around this use case? Meaning the rest of the world should pay the cost to their own security to cater to this flow?
I just print out all my stuff and go old school. Pick up a cheap android phone at the airport and go about my business. Not sure why this is uncommon. Maybe I'll switch it up next time and bring my phone loaded up with dick pics.
Why shouldn't people be free to install their preferred software immediately after purchasing a phone? How does it help anyone other than Alphabet shareholders to restrict that?
No, you can't; not without jumping through hoops, not without clicking on fake warnings, not without a song and a dance about fake "saving you from scammers" scare tactics.
Please stop covering for Google. They're behaving badly, people are reacting, stop with the "Achucally..." which is pretty grating and cringe worthy.
It's not "sideloading" it's just "installing software" don't help legitimize this stance that google is meant to be the official arbiter of what I do on a device I own.
It's honestly not that big of a problem. Probably some anti-trust legislation can/should be passed to make installing F-Droid and the like easier, but it's already pretty easy. If enough popular apps start requiring you to install them through F-Droid then that'll become normalized and Google will lose its soft monopoly in this space, which is an outcome I'm all for.
Google is making it much more difficult and annoying to install F-Droid and any apps from there RIGHT NOW.
To the point where it will cease to be a viable way of distribution for any app that wants to attract an audience larger than the handful of power users.
if you havent been paying attention, google is REEEEALLY into monopolies and fascism. Google literally jumped out of their pants to change the name of lake ontario the second trump said to.
To me it's not really the concept of the app store that's dystopian, it's not that different from a deb or rpm repository. What is dystopian is the level of control the OS vendor maintains over the entire ecosystem.
>it's not that different from a deb or rpm repository
The difference is that the default app stores require you to make an account to be able to use them. This would rightfully be considered insane on desktop OSs, yet is considered normal for phones.
Is it really that insane of itself? I don't see many people arguing that Valve is evil for requiring a Steam account to access their game library (ignoring the online activation/DRM question).
You don't need an account to browse the steam store, you need one to verify you're a user before downloading/installing a game, or (obviously) buying a game.
In a perfect world, you wouldn't need an account to buy or download something, either. It's too bad we've somehow normalized this idea that you need an account just to buy something.
> Play billing "must not be used in cases where payments include … tax exempt donations"
> Note: 501(c)(6) is a tax-exempt status; donations are not tax-deductible for the donor. Google's communications explicitly state "tax-exempt".
Isn't it pretty obvious that the problem is the donations aren't tax-exempt, despite the organization being tax-exempt? Your note suggests you already understand this.
Logically, the payment processor (who deals with sales taxes rather than income taxes) should worry about the taxability of the transaction rather than the tax status of the recipient, right?
> Specifically, your app allows users to contribute donations to an organization that is not tax-exempt.
So whoever is writing their email is mixing these two up, but you're reading the policy itself and it is fairly clear-cut what it means for you, right?
Their emails are confusing, but they came after the alleged violation in private communication, not what you were going from at the time of the alleged violation. If you ignore them momentarily (surely you understand they probably aren't as well-scrutinized by lawyers, which would explain why they appear to mistakenly refer to the tax status of the recipient rather than that of the donation), is anything else actually confusing or inconsistent? Their policies, the relevant laws, and what common sense would have you expect - they seem pretty cut and dried. Are they inconsistent with anything other than their emails, which came after the fact?
From another angle: why/how do you feel the tax-exempt-mess of the recipient itself could sensibly be the determining factor here, rather than the taxability of the transaction itself? Is there any law or precedent or anything outside their emails that would suggests a payment processor should look at the tax status of the recipient rather than that of a transaction?
I don't know every jurisdiction, but that's not the only relevant factor. If they are tax-deductible, they still introduce the need for paperwork etc. for the payment processor to let the payer deduct it from their own income. A 0% tax on some action doesn't imply you don't have to worry about tax law when performing said action.
Though I think you can just read the policy and take it at face value and not even have to know any of this beforehand.
But the complaint isn't that Google won't process the payment. It's that they won't allow them to link to an OpenCollective donation page, and presumably OpenCollective would handle anything like that.
That’s not true. If a donation is tax deductible that’s just between the IRS, the recipient and the donor. The payment processor, banks, etc don’t do anything special.
So I'm only a layperson and don't know what is strictly legally required, but my understanding (based on reading/third-hand information) is that payment processors do in practice end up with more work to do for this, whatever the reason. Quoting from [1]:
> Nonprofits have strict tax regulations when accepting donations. The more a payment processing system can assist with these regulations, the better for you and your donors. For instance, donors need to receive specific documentation for tax-deductible contributions, such as donation receipts. Additionally, different types of donations may involve different tax considerations for the donor and the organization. Nonprofits also have to consider any state and federal regulations regarding their charitable solicitation and fundraising activities, which may vary depending on location and activities.
And there's of course also exemption from sales tax which they have to handle too.
The policy is far from clear cut, and even having read your comments I am still not sure what you think it's trying to say. The policy suggests that an app may lead users to another payment method where the payment is a "tax exempt donation". What tax, specifically, are you suggesting a donation to OSC is not exempt from? You mention sales tax, is it the case that donations are not exempt from (ie, are subject to) sales tax?
Or are you saying the key point is that the donation not tax-deductible for the donor, which is a different thing to being tax exempt (and does not have anything to do with the "taxability of the transaction")?
The mere fact that they have to avoid dealing with sales tax here (unlike their typical transactions) is clearly extra complication for them. So you can understand that sales tax being 0% (thus "not taxable") can make things harder, not easier.
Having to deal with bookkeeping or paperwork for tax deductions could also make things harder.
In any case, whether you think these are easier or harder, and regardless of which cases should be supported from a business perspective, their policy page (at least the one that I'm reading) very clearly says you can't use their system for such donations.
If you can't use their systems for a donation with a sales tax rate of 0%, then per the policy that means you can route users to alternative payment methods for those transactions. So by your reasoning, if donations to OSC are not subject to sales tax, then what the app is doing should be okay.
(As an aside, I have no idea if donations to OSC are subject to sales tax, but I would be surprised if they were given there is no sale or supply happening, and no one here seems to have suggested they are.)
> In any case, whether you think these are easier or harder, and regardless of which cases should be supported from a business perspective, their policy page (at least the one that I'm reading) very clearly says you can't use their system for such donations.
I disagree, because it uses the loose term "tax exempt donations", and nobody, it seems, can agree on whether that means exempt from income tax (ie, recipient does not need to pay income tax on it), exempt from sales tax, or deductible for income tax purposes (personally I think this is likely what it is intended to capture, and the only real basis on which to distinguish between 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(6) organisations, but in fact is the least supported by a literal reading).
> If you can't use their systems for a donation with a sales tax rate of 0%, then per the policy that means you can route users to alternative payment methods for those transactions. So by your reasoning, if donations to OSC are not subject to sales tax, then what the app is doing should be okay.
I'm not seeing "if not {this}... then {that}" implication anywhere that you're citing. i.e. I do not see anything that implies at least one of the billing systems must be permitted for any given app. All I'm seeing are some sets of conditions under which you can use Google's payment system, and other sets of conditions under which you can use an alternative billing system. Sometimes they overlap and sometimes neither applies.
What's clear to me is:
- Page [1] says that you can't use their billing systems for "tax-exempt donations" (however that is supposed to be interpreted).
- Google's last correspondence says "For more information about alternative billing and external linking options available in some countries and regions, see the FAQ", and does not claim that such options are (or aren't) available to them. Page [2] says that this varies by country, and it's not clear to me what countries apply to them, but they seem to be in Japan. I am unclear on what they have/haven't done here, but it sounds like they have not followed all the requirements in [3] (or whatever the relevant requirements are), as [1] says: "Developers serving users in eligible countries/regions may offer users an alternative billing system within the app if they enroll in the applicable program and agree to the additional terms and program requirements."
I'm not sure if you have more information beyond this, but that's all I'm taking away so far. Perhaps I'm missing something?
And obligatory disclaimer (because this is HN): none of this is to suggest I like these circumstances; I'm just discussing the facts as I see them written.
And they were not right? The issue here is that Google doesn't define tax-exempt properly, but does tell you to not use play. And then throws a fitty when you do that and they decided it's not the right kind of tax exempt?
At least,that is how i read it.
And then the way google deals with these cases is the real problem: no communication, no recourse, just spam HN and pray.
And I am 99.99% certain they don't want such transactions for some other reason, perhaps they can't make as much money from them orso
I'm pretty sure they could support this if they wanted to, which implies they don't want such transactions. And they obviously aren't going to make it easy to get around something they don't want. So we agree on that. It sucks. I'm not debating any of that. I think our only disagreement is on whether the policy is clear, and AFAICT it is, as terrible as it might be.
So we don't devolve into semantics, I am just going to use the term "special tax status" to denote anything thab the regular payment flow. I'm doing that on purpose, because part of the argument is that tax exempt and tax deductible are different things. Your argument, as far as I understand, does not actually rely on this distinction. It just comments on it.
I read your comments and what I ended up inferring was that it relies on a few premises:
1. Google states in their policy that their billing platform cannot be used for [special tax status].
2. Google would be presented with an undue burden if they had to alter their processes to process donations with [special tax status], which may potentially involv extensive manual review manually.
3. Therefore, despite the wording, the rules and undue burden are clear that you cannot use Google Play billing for [special tax status].
I've read the rest of your comments
downthread and I think that I'm representing your position accurately. Again, if I'm not, I legitimately want corrections.
The issue with going from the premise to the conclusion is that if you look at their actual payment flow to the Open Collective it seems to be just a webview to their donation page. I mean, it doesn't look like Google's payment flow at all and I'm pretty sure Google doesn't accept ACH payments directly.
If Google wants to avoid extra work, they literally just can do nothing about it and the donations on that page will go to a tax exempt organization.
I'm going to take a look at the rules right now and either update this comment or reply to it. (Sorry, I figured I would post it because I'm not sure when I would be able to post another.)
P.S. I probably should have out of this to the top, but I do want to mention that several people pointed this out in the comments but I wanted to be a bit more specific about the payment flow, and what we're actually debating.
> the payment processor (who deals with sales taxes rather than income taxes) should worry about the taxability of the transaction rather than the tax status of the recipient
A donation is not a sale of a good or service. This is not a question of sales tax collection.
I didn't say it's a question of sales tax collections. I said a payment processor deals with sales taxes.
In this case they clearly have to exempt this transaction from sales tax in order to support it, when other transactions through their system do get sale tax applied. So the mere fact that they have to deal with sales taxes in general is likely to introduce additional complications for them even here, in cases where sales tax turns out not to be applicable.
They don’t have to exempt anything. Just let them have a link to the donate page like they always have. Which is also how nearly every donation works in the US.
It's a link to a page where you can donate. Google is not involved in the transaction. Google's rules say you can link out for donations. Google is then telling them they can't link out for donations.
> So whoever is writing their email is mixing these two up, but you're reading the policy itself and it is fairly clear-cut what it means for you, right?
This (rhetorical?) question seems to suggest that you have a level of understanding or have done the analysis required to come to such a meaning. It seems to me that it would be most beneficial if you simply shared that analysis.
To me, seeing this here for the first time, it is not at all obvious what the terms mean for someone seeking a donation, because of the past behavioral detail of WireGuard going through something similar. The terms you quote seem to me to state that since there is a tax exempt donation involved, the prohibition on routing to a non-Google Play billing workflow should not be in effect.
> Because we are a 501(c)(6), OSC is not a registered 501(c)(3) charity; donations to hosted member projects are not tax-deductible. This is consistent with IRS guidelines — open source donations aren't automatically classified as charitable simply because they are FOSS.
> If your project has a clear charitable purpose, a 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsor may be a good fit.
IANAL, but it seems like the wording in the public-facing version of the policy is a little muddy. As far as I'm aware, "tax exempt donation" not a thing that actually exists in US tax law. It seems to be a conflation of "tax deductible donation" and "tax exempt organization".
Knowing how big corporations do things, that document was likely written by someone who doesn't fully understand the jargon or even how pedantic you have to be about words when dealing with legal concepts, who didn't set the policy themself, and who is not responsible for enforcing the policy. So we should take its specific choice of words with a grain of salt.
I made hundreds of cards to get me through the ACR core exam, and I'll be teaching my kids to make cards when it's time for them to do intensive memorization. Paper is just fine, but I think this is a situation where digital is better.
Seconded here. So far only used ready made sets, especially the fantastic CCNA one from Jeremy's IT Labs.
But I guess that if I fix few more errors, I'll break into creating my own cards.
I found that creating and adding to my own decks is the best way to learn. It's also a lot of fun creating the cards/notes structure, with some cards being created conditionally upon state of certain fields in the note, etc. It's a bit like creating a database schema.
If only PWA were not made invisible by Apple. The install button has been moved voluntarily to the share menu.
The UE should make it mandatory to permit PWA install popups on all platforms.
Such problems wouldn't arise, because this app could be installable as a cached Web app. A native mobile application could be installed only for specific functionalities.
PWAs are not much more than webpages, basically just a separate launcher icon and less browser chrome making it look and feel more native. It's in the user's best interest to use these, since they get the good parts of using an app while avoiding full-featured-app junk like persistent background services that constantly monitor you.
Nooo what you are saying communist. I also think so, but each time someone (typically the EU) does something in the direction (e.g. digital market act) the US government, companies and citizens accuse us to be communists, against progress, that we overregulate, that the "free market" regulates by itself, and similar bullshit.
Just because Google built something valuable that doesn't mean the government should take control of it. This line of reasoning also leads to the government taking over YouTube and changing the rules there due to how "important" it is.
The things mega corporations built could be even more valuable (for society) if they didn't intentionally restrict for their own and their shareholders' benefit what you can do with them.
Since they are public companies the shareholder's benefit is to society's benefit.
>"Regulating" also doesn't mean "taking shareholders' benefit
Technically true, but if the regulations are just suggestions then they won't accomplish anything. When people suggest regulation they want to control how these companies are acting, not just sending them a strongly worded letter.
Yes, throw more government involvement into a fire that was started through the government giving billions of dollars to Google, Microsoft, and apple through tax cuts, and buying services from them instead of their smaller competitors.
> I'll keep this old phone as a secondary device for banking apps
Our bank has just bumped the minimum Android level again to the point where the Play Store reviews are flooded with people complaining they can only access their banking via the web now.
Being a developer, I can say that working with Google is a pain. There is no possibility to talk with a human, all communication is answered by the same AI-generated response that links you to the same AI-generated documentation.
And if such AI does something wrong (which it does) no matter what they WILL REMOVE your app. Because they don't care about you. Sometimes the only way out is to publish the app again with another package identifier, because once they flagged it even if you remove all reference to the offending feature there is no way that they will accept it (it unfortunately happened, fortunately before releasing the app to the public so we could switch without affecting users).
In some sense I prefer Apple (and I say it as an Android user), you surely pay an annual fee to publish to the store, but if you have some issues you can open a ticket where a fucking real human will look into it and answer you, and explain what to to.
I have apps published to both the Play Store and App Store, and I agree. Despite the stereotype, Apple is much nicer to deal with. If you work within the Google ecosystem, you enjoy none of the benefits of the supposedly open Android system, but need to deal with more bureaucracy, more limitations, and worse support.
My experience was that my person got banned from ever submitting apps. I could try making a new account, but I'd have to provide ID so their AI might know to ban me again.
Just remove the open collective link. Point to your homepage where the motivated donors will certainly pay. You already should know how many of the motivated users actually care about donations. The goal of this story and publishing it in HN seems to catch more eyeballs and marketing of Ankidroid, under new leadership. All I am suggesting is, just play along with Google. No harm here.
Apps need to exit the Play Store. I have a whole slew of apps which haven't been updated for a while now because Aurora Store isn't working because of whatever Google of doing. Meanwhile the ones installed via FDroid and other means are perfectly up to date. It's a crappy state of affairs as Google continues to close the boiling Android frog.
On my end the experience was more pleasant on f-droid than on Google. On f-droid I had to manually push some things, in repositories. That I solved in a week or so.
On Google end I had to verify my account. Which was not easy feat.
- had to provide my ID several times, because it got rejected multiple times
- I uploaded driving license
- the verification process was stuck
- only after help ticket google employee pushed it forward
- I had to provide many more details, also had to use banking to pay substantial amount of money
- I currently trying to create app, but it requires 14 testers, and it can still be rejected, if their involvement was too poor
I am wondering what more things Google will invent to make my life worse.
From a user perspective I think F-Droid is really good too, mainly because it only allows FOSS apps by default, which cuts out a lot of the BS you see in Play Store apps.
You can go download a random, no-name app from F-Droid and be very confident it does what it says on the tin and won't be riddled with ads or spam you with notifications.
I am a little wary how many of the newer apps on F-Droid seem fully vibe-coded. there's only so many 'brain training' games and 'fully offline notes' that one really needs
I wish there was a 'ranking' feature that periodically (maybe daily?) pulled down star/contributor numbers so you could at least look at projects that are more likely to receive continuing support and have basic hygiene like Dependabot alerts
that said, migrating off so many of the Google-native or phone manufacturer apps has been such a liberatory feeling. I do some community organizing in my free-time and am a huge FOSS evangelist in those spaces. there's so many similar values, namely anti-surveillance, and but for resistance to change and preference for hyperpalatable UX, it's such a natural fit
Thats the only reason for at least me to use f droid and I have for the last decade I think.
It "just works".
As opposed to play store apps requiring "play store services" meaning having to sign into play store. It refuses to do so on a FOSS principle so I am literally cut off from a lot of apps.
Aurora store helps but apps that "require play store services" don't work.
> "play store services" meaning having to sign into play store
Not necessarily. Most apps that require Play Services should work fine even if you’re not logged into Google. You do, however, have to have the “gapps” installed. (Some apps would also actually check whether you’ve installed them from the Google Play store and not, say, Aurora, but from my experience most don’t bother.)
Also, perhaps look into microG? It reimplements the Play Services APIs, but is FOSS and only connects to Google servers when it’s necessary for some functionality (e.g. if you enable push notifications): https://microg.org/
On the user side my experience with F-Droid is auto updates dont work and I constantly get a "repository not reachable" f-droid error every now and then popping up on my phone (that little small middle-of-screen toast) when im doing something else completely unrelated. Might be a regional thing.
I get the F-Droid toasts once every few weeks or so. To me, it's worth it. Finding a tolerable weather app on the Play Store is impossible nowadays. Finding one on F-Droid is easy.
F-Droid is a nerd solution and will be used by 0.00001% of the total market. There are more people that will use Linux on desktop than will use F-Droid.
We need governments to mandate both Apple and Google to allow web installs of apps. No requirement for Apple/Google pay, Apple/Google login, or Apple/Google services.
Total freedom for users, for developers, and for competitors.
This duopoly has fucked over America and the EU by training us to think only these two companies have the right to decide what gets to be on your phone that you pay for.
They've created a moat so strong that it's impossible to compete with Android/iPhone, so the market cannot even have healthy competition.
F-Droid is not the answer. Regulation is.
And I'll have none of this fangirl/fanboy "but my grandma will fall for scams" nonsense.
Google and Amazon and all the platforms have scammy ads on their platforms. Nobody's doing anything about that.
Technology can be sandboxed, permissioned, signed, fingerprinted, attested, scanned, and blacklisted. It's easy to make this safe in the year of our lord 2026. Don't pretend we don't have a million ways to make this safe for your meemaw. She's more likely to fall down the stairs or get a scam call.
Regulate Google. Regulate Apple. Make our phones free.
On Youtube just now I got hit with an ad whose first 5 unskippable seconds were an AI person saying "Did you know the cure for dimentia is in the Bible!?!?" - considering who that ad is targetting, Google can F off with any stance about protecting people from scams.
That's good, but don't forget that the point is that Google's pearl clutching about security doesn't apply when they are making money. They'll sell you straight to scammers if it makes them money.
> Technology can be sandboxed, permissioned, signed, fingerprinted, attested, scanned, and blacklisted.
Many of the things you're listing are the exact things the platforms would have to be banned from doing by the regulation you're proposing because they're the mechanisms used to exclude competitors.
If you put all apps in a sandbox then they can't perform certain operations (e.g. install other apps) which inherently means they can't compete in the market for doing those things. If apps have to be signed by the platform then the signing fee becomes the vig they charge to everyone even if they're using a competing store, and both that and scanning/fingerprinting provide a mechanism to revoke competing apps under arbitrary pretexts and otherwise grief their developers and users.
Attestation is the thing you would have to ban the most because it's not just subject to abuse, its very mechanism of operation is to prevent existing apps that use it from running on a competing new system at the point in time when the new system has too few users for all the apps to explicitly add support for it, thereby preventing the competitor from getting enough users for that to ever happen.
But attestation doesn't prevent grandma from getting scammed anyway. When the scammer calls pretending to be the grandchild who needs money for an emergency, they use the official signed bank app on the attestation-passing device to transfer money to the scammer. When the scammer is using a fake bank app to steal the user's credentials, the fake app doesn't require attestation.
The actual problem here is that you want to have someone vetting apps for grandma, but you don't want the platforms to be able to insist it be them rather than F-Droid or Aurora etc. Which the platforms will try to claim is chicken and egg (how do you know you can trust F-Droid?) while hoping you don't notice that they don't actually get you out of it -- how do you know you can trust Google?
> Many of the things you're listing are the exact things the platforms would have to be banned from doing by the regulation you're proposing because they're the mechanisms used to exclude competitors.
And they should still be banned from forcing apps to do it under their arbitrary judgements in order to participate on their platform. That isn't the same thing as preventing them from doing it. Some people honestly think they love walled gardens (they don't), but some people honestly need walled gardens. There should even be competing walled gardens. Let me install the best kids app store for my kids, and the best grandmas app store for my grandma.
I'm also not sure that attestation should be banned at the app store or platform level; it's a service. I'd ban it at the bank and merchant level. Attestation should be a tool for the user of the device (just like everything else on the phone they own.) They should be able to get it to attest to whatever they want to get it to attest to - if I'm a company and I issue my employees phones, I might want to make sure those phones haven't been tampered with. If I'm a parent and I issue my children phones, I might want to make sure those phones haven't been tampered with. The problem comes when arbitrary people are using it to make sure that the user hasn't tampered with their own phone since it came from some official list of blessed companies.
Let me install the best kids app store for my kids, and the best grandmas app store for my grandma. Let me be able to use attestation to make sure their phones haven't been altered since the last time I checked.
> If apps have to be signed by the platform
I'd like to get back to apps being signed by upstream, so we know they actually come from the author. I couldn't care less if the platform offers a service which verifies those signatures, and if almost everyone uses that service. That's just DNS. If your platforms service becomes hostile, there will be cheap/free competitors, just like DNS.
Just agreeing loudly. But the problem with F-Droid is that it is to be a store that has been blessed by Google in order to avoid legal questions. I know that this is not their fault, and that they hate it. I exclusively use F-Droid and don't even have a Google Play account, but if they started making decisions that I couldn't stand (they haven't, ever) I wouldn't have any alternative.
I remember the bullshit settlement of Microsoft antitrust is that they had to place a modal popup do select a default browser (that I never saw, once, in any context.) No reason why the platform's store can't be demoted to one of a number of stores other than that it is a profit spinner.
> And they should still be banned from forcing apps to do it under their arbitrary judgements in order to participate on their platform. That isn't the same thing as preventing them from doing it.
If they do it and it's enabled by default then they still get to grief their competitors because by default anyone who tries to use the competitor gets a big scary red box that deters adoption and has to jump through a bunch of hoops to get past it. It also thwarts adoption of competing signing alternatives because >90% of people will use whatever the default is even if the alternatives are at least as good.
> some people honestly need walled gardens
"Walled garden" is an Orwellian term. It's meant to imply that someone is curating what's inside it and not letting in things you don't want, and that is indeed a useful thing. But then people use the same term to mean a "garden" that locks you inside of it rather than locking bad things out. The only people who need that are small children and adults with mental illnesses severe enough to justify them having a guardian assigned to make their decisions for them.
> I'm also not sure that attestation should be banned at the app store or platform level; it's a service.
It isn't a service at all. The device contains hardware to sign the state of the device using a protected private key. Solving the problem is very simple -- you ban the device from coming with any private key already installed that the user can't freely extract. Then the root of the chain of trust is the customer's public key, not the vendor's, and whether a device is authorized comes down to whether the user's public key is authorized rather than the vendor's, which in turn makes the system vendor-agnostic.
> That's just DNS. If your platforms service becomes hostile, there will be cheap/free competitors, just like DNS.
DNS is actually a pretty terrible model because the "competition" is a fraud. There are registrars and registries and the registrars compete with each other but the registry still sets the price the registrars pay and the registries have a monopoly over every name in that TLD, so the competition can't actually get you a lower price than the monopoly registry itself sets. And the registries only compete with each other to the extent that you think that example.dental is valid substitute for example.football (no, sorry, those are both the same registry anyway) and to the extent that example.co.uk is a domain you could get instead of example.com rather than needing both. Meanwhile ICANN charges an extortionate amount to anyone who wants to become a registry and the entire system is set up to encourage squatting, to the point that the registries are now doing it themselves rather than making any attempt to impede it.
In general if you want something to work well you need to make it a protocol rather than a service. As soon as you allow a central chokepoint to exist you'll have a troll jumping out from under the bridge and trying to collect tolls.
Having a theory of power that doesn't unrealistically imagine a control over government which one demonstrably doesn't have is not "defeatism." Limiting yourself to only one impossible way of doing things is more insidious than learned helplessness, because they can give you a dramatically scripted mini-game to fool yourself into thinking that you're progressing. See slacktivism.
The trouble with controlling the government is that nobody actually does. Nobody will ever get it to do everything they want, or everything it "should", or anything like that. It's a giant uncoordinated bureaucracy full of inefficiency and perverse incentives. Relying only on the government is a time-honored way to die with regrets.
This is not the same as being unable to affect it at all. It can very easily go from being hot garbage to being flaming toxic waste in a tornado when the only people who show up are the ones trying to steal from everyone else.
Actions speak louder than words, and there has been no real action for my entire gray-haired life. Politicians can talk all they want about anti-trust reforms, but both parties equally have lots of members with vested interests in these cartels and who profit from the status quo. I think that ultimately overrides the will of the people more often than not.
She didn't "take too long," she did all she could as long as she could, and is still doing it. The problem is that she was opposed by both political parties and the administration, for whom she was a token to hand to the Bernie and AOC people so they could sell out without being called sellouts.
If Biden had promoted Khan not only would she have had vastly more success, but he would have won the election - demented or not. Instead, if you listened to his press conferences, you would have no idea that she existed. He did not support her. He was a tool for financial scammers his entire career. His tiny little state was to domestic financial scams as Ireland is to worldwide tax dodging.
> Both the Democratic and Republican parties have lots of members who are fed up with big tech.
Few members, with no power. All of the leadership is on the big tech payroll. It's the population which hates big tech, and their opinions don't matter.
The public are also easily movable over time and under great pressure. The public have become aggressively pro-Big Pharma and Free Trade globalists in a single generation. Libs have become militantly pro-FBI and CIA anti-Soviet warriors. They literally revived the 50's anti-Commie language to describe everything they didn't like, and worship The Lincoln Project, David Frum, and even goddamn Bill Kristol which I never thought would work. It's literally the same generation that reviled them and anyone who would tolerate them just 20 years ago.
They didn't even have to die for success of the submissiveness revolution. They just had to keep watching, and consuming. And you had to threaten their jobs, all the time.
90% of my apps (all except for banking, streaming and ev charging app) are installed without play store. Beyond FDroid with custom repos, I actually came to like Komi-Store in combination with obtainium. I really wonder what will happen when Google enforces their own registered developer signatures. I hope there is a crucial mass of apps outside of Play store until then to generate some heard protests.
>Corporation like Google should have been fined to the edge of bankruptcy for such predatory behaviour.
Google has an alternative at least (can download other app stores, apks, and have been able to for 15 years), I have no idea how Apple has been allowed to get away with what they do.
Better framing in their lawsuits- being a ‘market’ is less a thing in a monoculture- i.e. the market for Apple phones vs the market for all Android phones from a variety of makers.
Also in the worldwide market it most definitely isn’t a monopoly in phones at all- which is exactly why the EU had to reform their laws (DMA ect)to get regulatory powers over them.
"It's not a monopoly" is exactly the framing. Antitrust isn't inherently concerned with monopolies, it's concerned with market power. It's just that a monopolist has no room to move in claiming that they don't have market power.
They also play this trick where they pretend the only market is "phones" and ignore all of the complementary markets they're tying together with their phones, like app distribution and browser engines etc., since the market definitions for those shouldn't be the same as it is for "phones" when an app store that can be used on Google and Samsung phones can't be used (and therefore doesn't compete) on Apple phones and vice versa.
I never understood the argument that Apple's hostility to developers was unfair. The business proposition is simple:
"Buy our overpriced hardware with our famously inflexible and invasive software and sign this massive, legally-binding contract agreeing that you understand all of the above to extract further value out of the Apple ecosystem."
The "App Store" is just a natural extension of the club. As far as I'm concerned, they can gatekeep and sloppify as much as they want. Apple users agree to this.
I've never felt slighted that I couldn't hack apart my iPad - though I will absolutely do it once somebody cracks the code and gets a proper Linux kernel running.
We Americans collectively voted for this for decades. Virtually everyone who has cast a ballot for a national race has voted for this state of affairs.
Especially in the software community, overwhelmingly self-described libertarian, all voted for this.
It takes a big government to stop this from happening. (It also takes a big government to stop structural racism, etc., which means higher taxes, which means there's no such thing as a fiscal conservative who is also socially liberal. But I digress.)
Of the last 10 Presidential terms spanning 40 years, Republicans have held the office for 5 and Democrats for 5. Each party has likewise held around half the seats in the House and Senate. This has nothing to do with the voters, it's the structural outcome of a FPTP voting system. You get two parties and they each get around half the votes/seats.
The US federal government has also played a major role in causing this by passing laws like DMCA 1201 and the CFAA which incumbents use to threaten competitors who attempt adversarial interoperability.
Moreover, the DoJ budget is ~$33B whereas e.g. the military budget is ~$1T, so arguing that the only way to allocate more resources to antitrust enforcement or similar is to raise taxes would imply that all of the existing spending is critically necessary and Congress never e.g. buys tanks the Army doesn't want or otherwise poorly allocates existing funds.
The US Government spends a preposterous amount of money, and the number only ever goes up. It doesn't need to be bigger, it needs to be less inefficient.
This just should not be the top comment here. HN being HN, it's way, way too bent out of shape about the company name attached to the app store and not the minutiae of tax policy, which is what this is really about.
The app in question declares itself this way: AnkiDroid is a free, open-source flashcard app for Android with over 10 million installs, used worldwide for various purposes, primarily in medical education and language learning.
But it's registered as a 501(c)(6) non-profit, which is a designation for a "business league or industry association". This is what you use if you're a Chamber of Commerce, not a flash card app!
Obviously we're all reading this expecting that Anki is a 501(c)(3) charity, like most open source organizations, and it's just not. And the distinction is definitely impactful for tax purposes, something a payment processor is going to care about. Both organizations are exempt from tax themselves, but charitable donations are also deductable, and Anki isn't a charity. Likely Google isn't set up to record the distinction in an auditable way.
The bottom line is that Anki's lawyers messed up. Or plausibly are running some kind of scam (e.g. they take the "donations" and then hand them over to a for-profit "member" company). They need to fix their registration if they want to take money from people, this isn't how you do it and this is surely not the only problem they'll have. Seriously, my Fraud Meter is dinging at about 19.6% here...
Do LF and Rust solicit individual donations via phone apps (or at all, really)?
Indeed, those are structured as corporate-funded consortiums of exactly the type you'd be very suspicious of if, say, your kernel or compiler logs started stuffing a donation link into the stream!
Note that GNU software does historically mention donations (not in the logs AFAIK), and indeed the FSF is a 501(c)(3).
> "Phone apps" is irrelevant, because again, Anki was not taking donations via their app but rather via a link to OpenCollective, a separate website.
...Irrelevant? That's the whole point. "Taking donation via a separate website (emphasis in original)" is explicitly dissallowed in the Play Store (and App Store on iOS)! There happens to be an exception carved out for federally-registered charities. But no, you don't get to just hold out a link to a tip jar.
Does this link count as a charity? No, per the structure of federal tax law. Also no, per the set of rules of the app store it's trying to be listed on. Should it count? Well, maybe I guess? Open source projects are like charities in some cases. We should all want to support them. But doing it like this, through a middle-man organization that isn't a charity, just plain smells like fraud to me. Who's doing the auditing that this is just supporting development and not profit centers? Is the IRS doing it? Not as far as I can see.
The 501(c)(6) in question is Open Source Collective, which is a “business league or industry association” dedicated to providing financial and administrative assistance to Open Source projects. Anki does not have lawyers, Open Source Collective does.
Since you seem to have done the research, can you link some other iOS or Android apps that have been allowed to solicit donations for the Open Source Collective? Thanks.
I mean, come on. Just read their page. They're not a charity, at all. They're a "fiscal host" (which is a weird term right out of the gate) designed to solicit donations on behalf of other projects. They're literally a payment processor in competition with Google and Apple, and taking a cut of their own.
I mean, fine. They can do that. But that's not charity.
> The bottom line is that Anki's lawyers messed up.
Anki and Ankidroid are not the same entity and they have different owners, if you want to call it that.
Anki is owned by Nicholas Flint, a physician who sells med school-related decks online under the name AnKing, which controls Ankihub, which now controls Anki after the original founder (Damien Elmes) gave them control about six months ago.
Ankidroid is a non-profit project that arose when there was only an iPhone mobile version of Anki. Completely unrelated to Anki except that it was blessed by the original creator of Anki.
It's also just some nerd programmers who ported Anki to run on Android. It's not some org with a revenue stream and attorneys.
> Obviously we're all reading this expecting that Anki is a 501(c)(3) charity
No, no one is reading it thinking that Anki is a charity.
Anyway, when you are going to harp on about HN not caring about the minutiae of tax policy, you should make sure you understand that you're talking about two unrelated entities run by different people as if they were the same entity.
So... why is one soliciting donations on behalf of the other?! My Fraud Meter is rising, not falling here.
> It's also just some nerd programmers who ported Anki to run on Android. It's not some org with a revenue stream and attorneys.
"Just Some Nerd Programmers" don't, very obviously, have standing to solicit tax exempt donations. Rising further still...
I think a lot of people here are operating on the assumption that apps have the inherent right to ask for money on a proprietary platform that gives them a monetization path. They don't, on any such platform, and never have. There are specific carveouts allowed by the platform vendors for cases we all agree are valuable, like charitable donations. It's just really clear that Anki is playing games here and frankly I really doubt they qualify.
> So... why is one soliciting donations on behalf of the other?! My Fraud Meter is rising, not falling here.
It's not... AnkiDroid was soliciting donations to AnkiDroid, via OpenCollective, which essentially "owns" them financially, for the purpose of soliciting donations.
This is all explained very clearly in the linked GitHub issue:
> AnkiDroid's donations go to Open Source Collective, a US non-profit which acts as our fiscal host.
> AnkiDroid is the Anki client for Android, developed and maintained by volunteers. Nothing is sold in the app and our Open Collective is the sole source of funding for maintenance and development. AnkiDroid is independent from Anki, AnkiWeb, AnkiMobile, and AnkiHub.
While some confusion is understandable, continuing to press on about your "Fraud Meter" just puts egg on your face when you're misunderstanding things through multiple replies explaining them to you.
> I think a lot of people here are operating on the assumption that apps have the inherent right to ask for money on a proprietary platform that gives them a monetization path.
no one here thinks that there is an "inherent right" to ask for money on a proprietary platform. That's a strawman.
You're also still wrong about the nature of AnkiDroid, and it's making you look silly when you're so confident and rude about it.
In Iran, we have a reverse market competition rule that is "instead of the market lowering prices to be competitive with the lowest price, as soon as one actor pushes the prices up, all other actors raise their own prices as fast as humanly possible."
I'm amazed to see the exact playbook be used here. Instead of people opposing Apple's horrible App Store, it seems that every other store is studying their strategies.
I think by the time of Apple's next court case on the App Store, the judge will pay them something back as they'll arrive at the conclusion of Apple doing nothing out of the ordinary.
Just chiming in to say that, as a user, F-Droid is so nice and comfortable. Never have I ever had to worry about predatory bs. Thanks to everyone involved :)
we think complying by removing donation links is a bad idea because it just lets google get away with this and won't cause any users to notice. you need to let disruptions like this reach the users so that google might do something about this
Shit like this is yet another reason why we don't have apps in the app store. In app purchases are a non-starter for us.
As I understand it, there are ways to work around accepting payments or donations outside of the app stores.
It adds one more thing to have to do and explain to users. And even with that piece taken care of, we would need to be constantly vigilant about changes in Apple or Google policies that might eject our app from the storefront.
Every day Google commits to more Evil. How much more Evil can this world take from Google?
Also - all those monopoly-stores need to be broken up. It can not be that these mega-corporations continue to be protected by a selfish US government wanting to install monopolies globally.
I've been more minimal and focused in my technology usage, specifically lucky enough to keep my phones and devices in "no notifications" mode for much of their lifecycle. My desktops and screens also have 0 apps on them ever, if I want to open something I just open a search UI and tap it and open it.
It works great on Mac, and iPhone. I imagine as more people try this sort of user experience, they might wonder like I am "Why use a Google experience device at all?" Most of what I use these days is simple and the extra value-add AI features, attention driven designs that justify new OS and new hardware, and even app stores barely feel necessary. OK some people say "but banking software" but very rarely do I have to use my banking software in a way I couldn't get to in the web browser?
I believe we're very close to having a 80:20 experience designed out in both hardware and software for laptops, phones and smart watches. I can't see these monopolies holding out much longer.
> GitHub Sponsors is another way to raise for an open source organization.
Which they do in fact use, with OSC as a fiscal host. Still doesn’t help here though – Google is unhappy with the nature of transaction (donation that is not tax-exempt in the U.S.), not with the platform on which it occurs.
If they instead made the donations go to e.g. the lead developer, it would probably be allowed (“peer-to-peer payments” can’t use Google Play billing, so the app can “lead users to [another] payment method” [1]). Whether this is a good idea is a whole another question.
A majority of the people that have contributed to Android did not contribute with the understanding that Google would monopolize payments in all apps on the app store.
This is not a great look for what is likely shoddy AI application affecting a free/open source/non-profit project.
Google's AI can't even line up the facts of it's own TOS as laid out in the ticket. If it's covert AI running in the background, it should at least throw out a bone as a github issue or something to let people submit on it.
In a time where marketplace options are supposed to be opening up, an app for learning ends up in the crosshairs.
Not Google's first rodeo. They pulled the same move in 2019: https://www.phoronix.com/news/WireGuard-Ejected-Play-Store
This is why software should not be subjected to an "app store" type distribution system, where a monopolist retains absolute control of what software can run on your devices, and can capriciously deny distribution to developers for whatever reason it likes.
You can install from other stores (AnkiDroid is on F-Droid, for example), or from direct file download on Android already. The problem is rather thay most users just use the store preinstalled on their phone as part of Google's deal with OEMs to bundle Google Play Services. So either you follow Google's rules, or you lose all the users who don't want to leave the walled garden, even though they can.
When do we stop this instinctive response of "well you can still do it in an only slightly convoluted way" everytime a corporate does something bad.
Windows added ads - well you can disable them, if you don't like it.
Chrome brought up mv3 - well you can still use mv2, it is only optional.
Reddit locking subreddits behind login wall - well there's always old.reddit
Android moving everything to playstore - there's always FDroid.
How many of these are still true and for how long?
If someone's country is a dictatorship, it doesn't help to tell them that there are 100 other democratic countries, just move. Not everyone can emigrate or want to emigrate for any number of reasons.
The frog is boiling slowly.
Google is breaking fdroid in less than a month left for sideloading: https://f-droid.org/en/2025/09/29/google-developer-registrat...
Imo if you compare what Google does to the one other mobile OS manufacturer with any users, claiming Google should be fined is something like the cop pulling you over for going 8 over the speed limit while Apple is doing triple digits and just ran two people over.
'Why not both' is an argument, but clear as day what Apple does is worse. There's no alternative.
Your reasoning shows why it's so much harder to fix a duopoly than to fix a monopoly. If there was no Apple then Google would get its comeuppance. If there was no Google then Apple would get its comeuppance. But because we have both Google and Apple, we can't punish either.
The mathematician in me wants to solve the problem of the duopoly by first reducing it to a monopoly, which we have known solutions for.
oligopolies are just as bad.
They're worse. See above.
We both agree that there is a speed limit and it needs to be adhered to, regardless of who it is.
The problem with Google is that it may have started at 8 over the limit, but it advertised itself as sticking to the limit but always hovered slightly above it pushing the boundaries. This has skewed our perception into believing that Google's was acceptable and we have been gradually raising our threshold itself to a dangerous level.
Now Google is not too far behind Apple that it can't catch up.
Give it up. Stop defending your position when it's been pointed out that you are holding the two companies to two different standards. It's all right to admit you were wrong and learn something, even on the internet.
How do you know what standard he is holding Apple to? This thread is about Google and Apple was not mentioned.
> it's been pointed out that you are holding the two companies to two different standards.
Stop making things up. Apple is garbage, too. This isn't an Apple thread.
On the contrary, defending Google by bringing up Apple in this context is about as cut and dry as whataboutism gets. What Google is doing is wrong, full stop. Anything else is in addition to and also irrelevant.
> 'Why not both' is an argument, but clear as day what Apple does is worse. There's no alternative.
'Just start somewhere, anywhere, please' is another argument.
So let's start with the worse one.
Ironically, Apple allows alternate app stores in the EU now, while Google is moving to disallow them everywhere.
I don't think Google is moving to disallow them, it's more that the EU said that it's fine for Apple to still own app notarization / developer verification even outside of Apple's app store. Google saw this and said, cool, we'll add that to Android too so we can also get our (undeserved) cut outside of the Play Store. I can install F-Droid or anything else, but if they dont submit papers to Google, I get a big scary warning when I install it (I get the same scary warning if a developer distributes apps through F-Droid, but doesn't verify with Google, which is ridiculous too). On iOS if I don't submit to Apple I cant do anything.
It all sucks, and I'm not saying this is a good thing. But Google and Apple are both trying to position themselves as not having monopolies on store fronts, while still forcing notarization and verification to run through them independent of the store being used. And the EU seems fine with this for some insane reason. Google isn't trying to be worse than Apple, they're trying to match Apple.
Google are trying to match Apple's worst behaviour.
Next will be USA deciding that it's illegal to use the new Chinese offerings that will pop up to work around Google/Apple shittiness, because unconstitutional market manipulation goes hand-in-hand with USA's Russian-style oligarchy.
How long before Linux is added to the USA regime list of software that 'shows someone is a terrorist'.
> Reddit locking subreddits behind login wall - well there's always old.reddit
old.reddit is now locked behind login as well.
There's a workaround if you want it enough.
I noticed that reddit was setting a use_redesign (I might have the name slightly wrong) cookie when I explicitly visited the old.reddit domain, and this caused old reddit to persist. Since I do occasionally want to use the new site for image posts and the like, I set up a bookmarklet to set/unset that cookie on command.
I've since found that setting this cookie bypasses the old.reddit login page, allowing me to view the old site while not logged in. No idea how long that will last though.
To what value do I need to set the cookie?
I just checked and the cookie is actually redesign_optout. The value doesn't seem to matter - I just checked with value xyz and it worked.
Here's the bookmarklet I use:
javascript:(function(){const old_or_new = prompt("[O]ld or [N]ew?", "New");if (old_or_new.charAt(0).toUpperCase() == 'N') {document.cookie = 'redesign_optout=; Path=/; Domain=.reddit.com; Expires=Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:01 GMT;';} else {document.cookie = 'redesign_optout=true; Path=/; Domain=.reddit.com';}window.location.reload()})();
The simple workaround to most of these walls is to create an account with your email address and phone number.
Which is not a workaround, but giving in. And it gets increasingly difficult to create an account without giving them personal data.
The simple workaround is to not use services that engage in such tactics.
When did this start? I didn't even realize at first because I use Redlib.
few weeks ago
https://old.lemmy.world has no login wall!
The amount of time I've spend to turn off news and ads in Windows is absurd. Just to be turned on in a new update.
And the menacing messages of installed something from F-Droid. My mother would never do it. Even my programmers colleagues usually don't do it.
I actually think the menacing messages are on point but should apply to play store apps as well. Most of the people I know are incredibly cavalier about running mystery software from unfamiliar developers on by far the most sensitive device that they own.
The "convoluted" way is/was the default in the absence of a monopolist app store. Before centralised app stores, users downloaded or bought boxed software ad-hoc and installed it on their computers from installation archives, just like you can install apps from APK files on Android. If you banned Google from preloading their app store, isn't that what we would revert to?
The goal is not to prevent a Google monopoly. The goal is to have competition to prevent Google abusing its monopoly to lock down users.
There is Samsung Galaxy store.There is Xiaomi store.There was Amazon app store which failed to gain traction as it was not pre-installed but had decent number of apps. This is even before we get to open stores like F-droid.
Now their viability is a question in the long term, if Google has complete discretion over what is allowed.
Google doesn't have complete discretion. On Samsung phones, Samsung's discretion overrides Google's. On Xiaomi phones, Xiaomi's discretion overrides Google's.
Not really. Google sets strict boundaries for smartphone brands on what they can do software-wise. For instance, iirc, shipping the phone primarily with a non-Google alternative ROM means you won't get any play services on them, even if you want to have a secondary version with a standard Google ROM.
Google has essentially full control. Because they own security updates. Because banking apps already now often do not work without Google services. Etc. Etc.
It is a monopoly (regarding Android app developers), and is increasingly exploiting that to cash in.
On my Nokia (featurephone) you don't need to install apps, you just run them.
Actually old reddit doesn’t work that way anymore lol you must login or use crappy reddit, which is exactly to your point though! They will just keep making it harder and harder until you simply can’t, but by then so a few people will be “opting in/out” that they’ll argue nobody wants the ability to toggle that anyway.
I think the old reddit redirect extension gets around this somehow, that has worked for me lately (occasionally with some toggling of the extension). Although maybe it's best to just use less reddit tbh
Not anymore :-(
But it's a good thing, actually because: - when reddit is good it's way to addictive - reddit has become nearly as bad as most other social media sites
So if they force me to use an account, I'll finally be able to kick the habit ;-)
Reddit has been akin to Facebook since around 2022.
Make that 'since forever'. But there used to be a lot of insightful discussion inbetween the facebook-like parts. (Maybe it was the same on facebook, I wouldn't know because I never had a facebook account and you can't access the site without it.)
But I deleted my account (or at least randomized my password) somewhere in 2016 or so, so apparently 10 years ago I decided I wanted out. But I'm still reading it at least as much as HN. So fingers crossed they screw up badly enough this time :-D
You don't always need an extension to use old.reddit.com, it's an actual setting if you're logged in.
The real problem is that old.reddit.com and its ecosystem are all becoming worse and worse. Just off the top of my head, things like image galleries, message notifications, RemindMe bot, RES, /r/random, etc all have various problems and breakage.
I resigned as a mod after the API shitshow and am so glad I did. It’s a terrible site. I wind up there every month or two from friends or looking something up, it’s hard to see how much of a cesspool it is when you’re so invested in it and up close.
I use redlib https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib and librediret instead.
https://srinagar.nic.in/notice/immediate-suspension-of-virtu...
They banned "VPN"
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/after-vpn-ban-in-k...
Then came arrests.
https://www.medianama.com/2026/01/223-jammu-kashmir-vpn-ban-...
Street level checks. Police literally stop you roadside and check your phone for VPN.
This is happening in 2026. RIGHT NOW.
I talked to some officials and "oh you know what happened in Delhi blasts? They were using signal. If we had only caught them before".
While I agree with your point, conflating the effort to install apps outside of the Google Play Store with the effort to immigrate to a different country is wildly incomparable.
macOS slowly ramping up the friction to run unsigned/unapproved apps over the years
old.reddit now requires a login :/
old.reddit is also locked behind a login wall too, now!
sometimes people share a problem and want solutions or workarounds
other times people share a problem and just want to feel validated ("yeah that sucks dude")
it sounds like you wanted the 2nd but got the 1st
There are solutions and then there are workarounds. what we see are workarounds, not solutions.
Even in software, you can only patch so many workarounds without fixing the issue. Eventually fatigue sets in or we run out of workarounds and just publish the bug as "expected behavior" don't we?
I don't want the workarounds to distract from the need for a proper fix.
Yeah, not for much longer though: https://keepandroidopen.org/
Thanks for sharing.
Everyone is speed running towards a future where you need a permit to write software.
Try to run a binary that doesn’t have the right cert( or whatever it’s called on Windows) and you get a bunch of warnings.
Even if Android is open , normal people will only use the App Store. I can imagine China forcing Apple to allow 3rd party installations of software one day .
The EU did something where to my knowledge Apple still gets a cut of each sale.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
This article appeared in the February 1997 issue of Communications of the ACM (Volume 40, Number 2).
Not just warnings.
I literally can't run non signed software in the job-provided computer even if I compile it myself.
I am really hoping Google forces everyone to use signed apps Play Store. That is the only thing that will make people stop using Google/Android, to develop a real, actual, not-just-a-bad-fork-of-Android alternative mobile platform. Otherwise everyone will keep putting up with the bullshit because it's not painful enough yet. The OS will keep getting more bloated and slow. We'll all be forced by the constant churn of breaking changes to keep buying new phones when the old ones work fine. And the surveillance state of an authoritarian country has instant root access on half the devices on the planet.
Wow. The click the build number a bunch of times is already onerous enough. Now we're going to have to wait 24 hours to spin up a new development device?
Google is making it increasingly difficult to freely install software from app stores that they don't control and tax. Quoting https://keepandroidopen.org :
> Starting in 2027*, a silent update, nonconsensually pushed by Google, will block every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with Google, signed their contract, paid up, and handed over government ID.
> Every app and every device, worldwide, with no opt-out.
> Google's "escape hatch" is a trap door
>> Wait 24 hours
>> Pick "allow temporarily" (7 days) or "allow indefinitely
Geez. I don't like what they're doing either but this fear-mongering is not helping your cause. So the "trap door" here is just that you can't buy a phone and immediately start loading apps from unverified developers onto it until 24h have passed? Of all the hills we could be dying on, that's the one we're picking?
- the "24 hours" is Google's first formulation of plausible deniability. They've likely done testing to hone that number to find a sweet spot.
- the "24 hours" is enforced by remotely-run code, meaning Google remains in control of it and can unilaterally alter how this works, any time they feel like.
Imagine you went to the shops, and found that one shop, while it had the goods on display, and could totally just let you pick them up and buy them, was required by the shop next door to make you go away and come back no sooner than 24 hours later. Meanwhile, the shop next door is right there, and it's open, and it has no such restriction.
On what planet do you think anyone other than the most dedicated of dedicated people would choose the shop that requires waiting a whole day to use it when the alternative has no such restriction?
> unverified developers
The developers in F-Droid are verified, just not by Google. That's the whole fucking point. Google is not the be-all and end-all, but with this power-play, they are making themselves that.
> On what planet do you think anyone other than the most dedicated of dedicated people would choose the shop that requires waiting a whole day to use it when the alternative has no such restriction?
I have no clue what you're referring to or worried about here, could you clarify? Are you worried Android is going to lose power users to iPhone? What are the alternative shops you're referring to here? We're not buying pastries.
> The developers in F-Droid are verified, just not by Google.
"Unverified" in my comment was a shorthand for "unverified by Google", not an insult.
> Google is not the be-all and end-all, but with this power-play, they are making themselves that.
The complain about that? Rather than wasting time complaining about the 24h wait?
I don't know if people's imaginations are lacking here, but there could easily be a world in which your 'alternative' verifier would still make you wait 24h (or longer). The wait is clearly a security mechanism, regardless of who makes you do it. (And yes, it could have been chosen for plausible deniability.) Is your actual problem the wait itself, or is your actual problem the identity of the entity making you do it, or is your actual problem that the power is too concentrated in one entity, regardless of the entity? These are very different issues with very different solutions.
> What are the alternative shops you're referring to here?
In this analogy, the alternative shop that is preventing you from buying stuff from its competitors without a 24 hour wait is the Play Store monopoly.
> but there could easily be a world in which your 'alternative' verifier would still make you wait 24h (or longer).
Then in this hypothetical world where there were a free market for verifiers rather than a single, monopolistic choice, I would choose another alternative verifier that doesn't make me wait 24 hours, or no verifier at all.
> Are you worried Android is going to lose power users to iPhone? What are the alternative shops you're referring to here? We're not buying pastries.
Are you 13 years old? Who in their right mind would even care that "all the power users" went and bought iPhones? Are thoughts like this keeping you up at night?
> I don't know if people's imaginations are lacking here, but there could easily be a world in which your 'alternative' verifier would still make you wait 24h (or longer).
It's your imagination that's failing; we don't want ANY verifier at all, whatsoever. Nobody should be able to reach into my phone OS and have a say regarding what I can install or not.
> The wait is clearly a security mechanism, regardless of who makes you do it.
"Security mechanism" to protect WHO from WHAT, exactly? And please don't repeat the drivel about scams that Google's pushing, we all know those are excuses, "It's for the CHILDREEEENNNN!!!!" sure.
> or is your actual problem the identity of the entity making you do it, or is your actual problem that the power is too concentrated in one entity, regardless of the entity? These are very different issues with very different solutions.
So you DO know what's going on! In that case I have no idea why you're arguing in favor of having a gate placed in front of our [personal, owned] phones to regulate what we do with our own devices.
> So you DO know what's going on! In that case I have no idea why you're arguing in favor of having a gate placed in front of our [personal, owned] phones to regulate what we do with our own devices.
Then you're not understanding anything I'm writing, and I don't have the energy to keep going.
All I'm saying is that you need to pick your battles carefully and be honest about your goals if you want to have a fighting chance of winning this war against general-purpose computing. I want to win this just as much as you. I don't want to lose it, and I certainly don't want to lose it in a dumb way. Dying on the wrong hill during the wrong battle because people on my side constantly lie, exaggerate, and otherwise misrepresent reality and turn away would-be supporters is probably the dumbest way to see this happen, and it should make you angry, if you actually want some success in what you're doing.
I will leave you with https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3818307.
> So the "trap door" here is just that you can't buy a phone and immediately start loading apps
I'm sorry, I thought I owned the phone I bought, and had a right to decide what software I want on it whenever I want.
It's still surprising to me how fast we lost ownership norms, and most seem satisfied with renting the right to be a sort of peasant.
Unless you own your own cell carrier and built towers across your country, you can’t own a phone.
Sure you can, the same way you can own a lamp without owning the power plant.
If you don't lay down your own roads you can't own a bike.
About that... you might be interested that private property ownership in general is the result of similar kinds of onerous and exploitative processes. Anthropologists and historians have done a bunch of research on this for a while, and one of the interesting narrative texts about this is Engels'
Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (based on Lewis Herny Morgan's work) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-fami...
I agree wholeheartedly, but you can already unlock and root your phone and install whatever you want. This is not that battle. Mind you, I don't like either of these, but they're very different in nature.
And if I want to run the stock OS I paid for, with apps of my choice? It feels like a bait and switch to lock down the OS like this after you've sold the device.
This is the stock OS you paid for. It's beholden to Google and subject to their updates as it always was. You can either flash a different OS entirely, or even break their ability to update it before the change rolls out, if that's what you want. What I think you really want is to pick and choose what updates you get, which I would love too, but that's neither here nor there.
> fear-mongering is not helping your cause
So we started with an OS (when Google still needed to gain market share and goodwill) which was opensource. Now Google is no longer developing Android source code in the open and decreasing the "opensourcing" to a couple of source drops each year (the interval has been decreased multiple times). Google Play was introduced (basically clamping down the app store ecosystem) and from there Google has only made it harder to get around Google Play. Introducing things like phone attestation. Supposedly a security measure, yet for some reason a Samsung phone which hasn't had an update in 4 years still passes basic level attestation. And now Google is yet again making it harder to get around the Play store.
And for some reason you seem to think it is reasonable to assume it is going to stop here?
> And for some reason you seem to think it is reasonable to assume it is going to stop here?
I really don't. That is, actually, my entire point: people are going to roll their eyes at this right now. And then you're going to lack/lose the supporters you'll need when things really get bad.
Things are really bad already on Android. Most bootloaders are locked, Google prevents you to use the very few unlocked ones through the (legally questionable) Play Integrity. AOSP is basically dead (it doesn't even include a functional keyboard nor a functional call manager nowadays, can it still be called a phone?) and now they are further locking direct installs
> Things are really bad already on Android. Most bootloaders are locked, Google prevents you to use the very few unlocked ones through the (legally questionable) Play Integrity. AOSP is basically dead
This feels like complaining about the color of the bikeshed, me saying you should save your complaints for when things get really bad, and you replying "things are really bad already, there is a rotten carcass in there and the roof leaks."
Okay, so let's keep complaining about the color then.
What would be "really bad" for you? Non-google Android is dead outside of China and you can't realistically distribute software either without a Google stamp.
I don't see much difference between Android and iOS in terms of openness nowadays personally.
> What would be "really bad" for you?
"Block[ing] every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with Google, signed their contract, paid up, and handed over government ID. Every app and every device, worldwide, with no opt-out"
...would be "really bad" in my view.
Which is probably exactly why they worded it that way, despite knowing fully well they are (rather blatantly) lying. They literally explained how to avoid it themselves further down below, after you've already been angered.
> "Block[ing] every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with Google, signed their contract, paid up, and handed over government ID. Every app and every device, worldwide, with no opt-out"
Personally for me, a fake convoluted opt-out is the same as no opt out so we're already there.
Even Fortnite failed to distribute outside the Play Store, if they can't despite being famous, well you can't.
> Personally for me, a fake convoluted opt-out is the same as no opt out so we're already there.
Convoluted, yes, but fake? Aren't you just repeating the same lie? That means it looks like it bypasses the verification but doesn't actually do so. What are you basing that off of?
I'm talking about it as an app distribution method from the perspective of a developer and an app distribution method you can only ask a few people on Github to perform definitely isn't a valid one to me.
I'm guessing you've never shown up to a foreign country without a phone. First thing I do after I get through customs is find the phone store.
> I'm guessing you've never shown up to a foreign country without a phone. First thing I do after I get through customs is find the phone store.
Indeed I have not. In fact I haven't even heard of people doing this until your comment. And that's before unknown app developers coming into the picture. I assume you do this to avoid border phone searches? And you feel the (ostensibly) security-related mechanisms for the rest of the world to be centered around this use case? Meaning the rest of the world should pay the cost to their own security to cater to this flow?
I just print out all my stuff and go old school. Pick up a cheap android phone at the airport and go about my business. Not sure why this is uncommon. Maybe I'll switch it up next time and bring my phone loaded up with dick pics.
Why shouldn't people be free to install their preferred software immediately after purchasing a phone? How does it help anyone other than Alphabet shareholders to restrict that?
I've never heard of a cheap Android phone at the airport.
Ok
It is not "fear-mongering". It is an objective analysis of factual truths.
No, you can't; not without jumping through hoops, not without clicking on fake warnings, not without a song and a dance about fake "saving you from scammers" scare tactics.
Please stop covering for Google. They're behaving badly, people are reacting, stop with the "Achucally..." which is pretty grating and cringe worthy.
> you lose all the users who don't want to leave the walled garden, even though they can.
I think it's moreso you lose all the users who don't realize anything outside the walled garden even exists.
But not for long. Sideloading is being frowned upon by the mighty G
s/sideloading/not using the play store/
It's not "sideloading" it's just "installing software" don't help legitimize this stance that google is meant to be the official arbiter of what I do on a device I own.
You're not wrong. I'm not hung up on the terminology, but it is better to not use their language.
It's honestly not that big of a problem. Probably some anti-trust legislation can/should be passed to make installing F-Droid and the like easier, but it's already pretty easy. If enough popular apps start requiring you to install them through F-Droid then that'll become normalized and Google will lose its soft monopoly in this space, which is an outcome I'm all for.
Google is making it much more difficult and annoying to install F-Droid and any apps from there RIGHT NOW.
To the point where it will cease to be a viable way of distribution for any app that wants to attract an audience larger than the handful of power users.
There is no reason at all to defend them.
99.99% of the typical mobile phone users will not be able to implement your advice and the 0.01% that can already knows.
if you havent been paying attention, google is REEEEALLY into monopolies and fascism. Google literally jumped out of their pants to change the name of lake ontario the second trump said to.
app stores always seemed dystopian to me
To me it's not really the concept of the app store that's dystopian, it's not that different from a deb or rpm repository. What is dystopian is the level of control the OS vendor maintains over the entire ecosystem.
>it's not that different from a deb or rpm repository
The difference is that the default app stores require you to make an account to be able to use them. This would rightfully be considered insane on desktop OSs, yet is considered normal for phones.
Is it really that insane of itself? I don't see many people arguing that Valve is evil for requiring a Steam account to access their game library (ignoring the online activation/DRM question).
You don't need an account to browse the steam store, you need one to verify you're a user before downloading/installing a game, or (obviously) buying a game.
In a perfect world, you wouldn't need an account to buy or download something, either. It's too bad we've somehow normalized this idea that you need an account just to buy something.
Also apt supports multiple repositories and you can add your own. The Play Store app only supports Google's app repository and doesn't interoperate.
> Play billing "must not be used in cases where payments include … tax exempt donations"
> Note: 501(c)(6) is a tax-exempt status; donations are not tax-deductible for the donor. Google's communications explicitly state "tax-exempt".
Isn't it pretty obvious that the problem is the donations aren't tax-exempt, despite the organization being tax-exempt? Your note suggests you already understand this.
Logically, the payment processor (who deals with sales taxes rather than income taxes) should worry about the taxability of the transaction rather than the tax status of the recipient, right?
> Specifically, your app allows users to contribute donations to an organization that is not tax-exempt.
So whoever is writing their email is mixing these two up, but you're reading the policy itself and it is fairly clear-cut what it means for you, right?
We've been seeking official clarification from Google on this for over a month. That's what we're seeking here.
It's not clear given Google's policy wording and replies. We've removed the links, and can move forward once clarification has been provided.
Their emails are confusing, but they came after the alleged violation in private communication, not what you were going from at the time of the alleged violation. If you ignore them momentarily (surely you understand they probably aren't as well-scrutinized by lawyers, which would explain why they appear to mistakenly refer to the tax status of the recipient rather than that of the donation), is anything else actually confusing or inconsistent? Their policies, the relevant laws, and what common sense would have you expect - they seem pretty cut and dried. Are they inconsistent with anything other than their emails, which came after the fact?
From another angle: why/how do you feel the tax-exempt-mess of the recipient itself could sensibly be the determining factor here, rather than the taxability of the transaction itself? Is there any law or precedent or anything outside their emails that would suggests a payment processor should look at the tax status of the recipient rather than that of a transaction?
Aren't donations untaxed?
> Aren't donations untaxed?
I don't know every jurisdiction, but that's not the only relevant factor. If they are tax-deductible, they still introduce the need for paperwork etc. for the payment processor to let the payer deduct it from their own income. A 0% tax on some action doesn't imply you don't have to worry about tax law when performing said action.
Though I think you can just read the policy and take it at face value and not even have to know any of this beforehand.
But the complaint isn't that Google won't process the payment. It's that they won't allow them to link to an OpenCollective donation page, and presumably OpenCollective would handle anything like that.
That’s not true. If a donation is tax deductible that’s just between the IRS, the recipient and the donor. The payment processor, banks, etc don’t do anything special.
So I'm only a layperson and don't know what is strictly legally required, but my understanding (based on reading/third-hand information) is that payment processors do in practice end up with more work to do for this, whatever the reason. Quoting from [1]:
> Nonprofits have strict tax regulations when accepting donations. The more a payment processing system can assist with these regulations, the better for you and your donors. For instance, donors need to receive specific documentation for tax-deductible contributions, such as donation receipts. Additionally, different types of donations may involve different tax considerations for the donor and the organization. Nonprofits also have to consider any state and federal regulations regarding their charitable solicitation and fundraising activities, which may vary depending on location and activities.
And there's of course also exemption from sales tax which they have to handle too.
[1] https://www.subsplash.com/blog/nonprofit-payment-processing#...
Google's policy wording is clear. It is just you don't like what is written.
The policy is far from clear cut, and even having read your comments I am still not sure what you think it's trying to say. The policy suggests that an app may lead users to another payment method where the payment is a "tax exempt donation". What tax, specifically, are you suggesting a donation to OSC is not exempt from? You mention sales tax, is it the case that donations are not exempt from (ie, are subject to) sales tax?
Or are you saying the key point is that the donation not tax-deductible for the donor, which is a different thing to being tax exempt (and does not have anything to do with the "taxability of the transaction")?
The mere fact that they have to avoid dealing with sales tax here (unlike their typical transactions) is clearly extra complication for them. So you can understand that sales tax being 0% (thus "not taxable") can make things harder, not easier.
Having to deal with bookkeeping or paperwork for tax deductions could also make things harder.
In any case, whether you think these are easier or harder, and regardless of which cases should be supported from a business perspective, their policy page (at least the one that I'm reading) very clearly says you can't use their system for such donations.
If you can't use their systems for a donation with a sales tax rate of 0%, then per the policy that means you can route users to alternative payment methods for those transactions. So by your reasoning, if donations to OSC are not subject to sales tax, then what the app is doing should be okay.
(As an aside, I have no idea if donations to OSC are subject to sales tax, but I would be surprised if they were given there is no sale or supply happening, and no one here seems to have suggested they are.)
> In any case, whether you think these are easier or harder, and regardless of which cases should be supported from a business perspective, their policy page (at least the one that I'm reading) very clearly says you can't use their system for such donations.
I disagree, because it uses the loose term "tax exempt donations", and nobody, it seems, can agree on whether that means exempt from income tax (ie, recipient does not need to pay income tax on it), exempt from sales tax, or deductible for income tax purposes (personally I think this is likely what it is intended to capture, and the only real basis on which to distinguish between 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(6) organisations, but in fact is the least supported by a literal reading).
> If you can't use their systems for a donation with a sales tax rate of 0%, then per the policy that means you can route users to alternative payment methods for those transactions. So by your reasoning, if donations to OSC are not subject to sales tax, then what the app is doing should be okay.
I'm not seeing "if not {this}... then {that}" implication anywhere that you're citing. i.e. I do not see anything that implies at least one of the billing systems must be permitted for any given app. All I'm seeing are some sets of conditions under which you can use Google's payment system, and other sets of conditions under which you can use an alternative billing system. Sometimes they overlap and sometimes neither applies.
What's clear to me is:
- Page [1] says that you can't use their billing systems for "tax-exempt donations" (however that is supposed to be interpreted).
- Google's last correspondence says "For more information about alternative billing and external linking options available in some countries and regions, see the FAQ", and does not claim that such options are (or aren't) available to them. Page [2] says that this varies by country, and it's not clear to me what countries apply to them, but they seem to be in Japan. I am unclear on what they have/haven't done here, but it sounds like they have not followed all the requirements in [3] (or whatever the relevant requirements are), as [1] says: "Developers serving users in eligible countries/regions may offer users an alternative billing system within the app if they enroll in the applicable program and agree to the additional terms and program requirements."
I'm not sure if you have more information beyond this, but that's all I'm taking away so far. Perhaps I'm missing something?
And obligatory disclaimer (because this is HN): none of this is to suggest I like these circumstances; I'm just discussing the facts as I see them written.
[1] https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
[2] https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/topi...
[3] https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
And they were not right? The issue here is that Google doesn't define tax-exempt properly, but does tell you to not use play. And then throws a fitty when you do that and they decided it's not the right kind of tax exempt?
At least,that is how i read it.
And then the way google deals with these cases is the real problem: no communication, no recourse, just spam HN and pray.
And I am 99.99% certain they don't want such transactions for some other reason, perhaps they can't make as much money from them orso
I'm pretty sure they could support this if they wanted to, which implies they don't want such transactions. And they obviously aren't going to make it easy to get around something they don't want. So we agree on that. It sucks. I'm not debating any of that. I think our only disagreement is on whether the policy is clear, and AFAICT it is, as terrible as it might be.
So we don't devolve into semantics, I am just going to use the term "special tax status" to denote anything thab the regular payment flow. I'm doing that on purpose, because part of the argument is that tax exempt and tax deductible are different things. Your argument, as far as I understand, does not actually rely on this distinction. It just comments on it.
I read your comments and what I ended up inferring was that it relies on a few premises:
1. Google states in their policy that their billing platform cannot be used for [special tax status]. 2. Google would be presented with an undue burden if they had to alter their processes to process donations with [special tax status], which may potentially involv extensive manual review manually. 3. Therefore, despite the wording, the rules and undue burden are clear that you cannot use Google Play billing for [special tax status].
I've read the rest of your comments downthread and I think that I'm representing your position accurately. Again, if I'm not, I legitimately want corrections.
The issue with going from the premise to the conclusion is that if you look at their actual payment flow to the Open Collective it seems to be just a webview to their donation page. I mean, it doesn't look like Google's payment flow at all and I'm pretty sure Google doesn't accept ACH payments directly.
If Google wants to avoid extra work, they literally just can do nothing about it and the donations on that page will go to a tax exempt organization.
I'm going to take a look at the rules right now and either update this comment or reply to it. (Sorry, I figured I would post it because I'm not sure when I would be able to post another.)
P.S. I probably should have out of this to the top, but I do want to mention that several people pointed this out in the comments but I wanted to be a bit more specific about the payment flow, and what we're actually debating.
> the payment processor (who deals with sales taxes rather than income taxes) should worry about the taxability of the transaction rather than the tax status of the recipient
A donation is not a sale of a good or service. This is not a question of sales tax collection.
I didn't say it's a question of sales tax collections. I said a payment processor deals with sales taxes.
In this case they clearly have to exempt this transaction from sales tax in order to support it, when other transactions through their system do get sale tax applied. So the mere fact that they have to deal with sales taxes in general is likely to introduce additional complications for them even here, in cases where sales tax turns out not to be applicable.
Google don't even process the donations do they? It is a link to an external donation page.
They don’t have to exempt anything. Just let them have a link to the donate page like they always have. Which is also how nearly every donation works in the US.
It's a link to a page where you can donate. Google is not involved in the transaction. Google's rules say you can link out for donations. Google is then telling them they can't link out for donations.
> So whoever is writing their email is mixing these two up, but you're reading the policy itself and it is fairly clear-cut what it means for you, right?
This (rhetorical?) question seems to suggest that you have a level of understanding or have done the analysis required to come to such a meaning. It seems to me that it would be most beneficial if you simply shared that analysis.
To me, seeing this here for the first time, it is not at all obvious what the terms mean for someone seeking a donation, because of the past behavioral detail of WireGuard going through something similar. The terms you quote seem to me to state that since there is a tax exempt donation involved, the prohibition on routing to a non-Google Play billing workflow should not be in effect.
Yes, but unsurprisingly most people don't understand that distinction well enough.
> Donations are not tax-deductible
> Because we are a 501(c)(6), OSC is not a registered 501(c)(3) charity; donations to hosted member projects are not tax-deductible. This is consistent with IRS guidelines — open source donations aren't automatically classified as charitable simply because they are FOSS.
> If your project has a clear charitable purpose, a 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsor may be a good fit.
- https://docs.oscollective.org/welcome-and-introduction-to-os...
But the recipient of the donation is tax exempt, which is what Google says the requirement is.
IANAL, but it seems like the wording in the public-facing version of the policy is a little muddy. As far as I'm aware, "tax exempt donation" not a thing that actually exists in US tax law. It seems to be a conflation of "tax deductible donation" and "tax exempt organization".
Knowing how big corporations do things, that document was likely written by someone who doesn't fully understand the jargon or even how pedantic you have to be about words when dealing with legal concepts, who didn't set the policy themself, and who is not responsible for enforcing the policy. So we should take its specific choice of words with a grain of salt.
AnkiDroid has been such a great boon for me, thank you for sharing the link and reminding that they would benefit from my donation.
I made hundreds of cards to get me through the ACR core exam, and I'll be teaching my kids to make cards when it's time for them to do intensive memorization. Paper is just fine, but I think this is a situation where digital is better.
Seconded here. So far only used ready made sets, especially the fantastic CCNA one from Jeremy's IT Labs. But I guess that if I fix few more errors, I'll break into creating my own cards.
I found that creating and adding to my own decks is the best way to learn. It's also a lot of fun creating the cards/notes structure, with some cards being created conditionally upon state of certain fields in the note, etc. It's a bit like creating a database schema.
Creating a card is a first step in learning that card. Worth it! And you don't have to do that on your phone - there's a desktop app available.
If only PWA were not made invisible by Apple. The install button has been moved voluntarily to the share menu.
The UE should make it mandatory to permit PWA install popups on all platforms.
Such problems wouldn't arise, because this app could be installable as a cached Web app. A native mobile application could be installed only for specific functionalities.
> The UE should make it mandatory to permit PWA install popups on all platforms.
"It works better in the app?". No thanks. In 99.95% of cases the reasons for that popup are predatory, not in the interest of the user.
PWAs are not much more than webpages, basically just a separate launcher icon and less browser chrome making it look and feel more native. It's in the user's best interest to use these, since they get the good parts of using an app while avoiding full-featured-app junk like persistent background services that constantly monitor you.
> PWAs are not much more than webpages
... when I want them. Not when the site owner tries to cram them down my throat.
How would you like it if HN and every link you followed today from HN started with an "install me" popup?
The point is it's something the user should initiate, and no one else.
This is on Android, though.
Android and iOS keep each other in check
I wish. It's not like the (former) openness of Android pulled iOS any more open; in fact, it feels more like the reverse.
The difference here is iOS has an official Anki app and buying it (it costs $25) is the best way to support Anki.
Every slop website would then repeatedly try to pop up and install button.
>clarification on whether an IRS 501(c)(6) determination satisfies "tax exempt donations".
These donations aren't tax exempt. 501(c)(3) are tax exempt. If users are paying via Google pay these payments must be tax exempt to the *user*.
Digital infrastructure became so important that it must be regulated. We can't leave app stores at the whim of mega corporations.
The mega corporations need to be broken up.
Nooo what you are saying communist. I also think so, but each time someone (typically the EU) does something in the direction (e.g. digital market act) the US government, companies and citizens accuse us to be communists, against progress, that we overregulate, that the "free market" regulates by itself, and similar bullshit.
The irony is that just in communist China the corporations must submit to the Government.
You may argue that it is terrible. They don't have a democratic gov. But the alternative looks worse every day.
"Everything I don't like is communism"
Just because Google built something valuable that doesn't mean the government should take control of it. This line of reasoning also leads to the government taking over YouTube and changing the rules there due to how "important" it is.
The things mega corporations built could be even more valuable (for society) if they didn't intentionally restrict for their own and their shareholders' benefit what you can do with them.
"Regulating" also doesn't mean "taking control".
>shareholders' benefit
Since they are public companies the shareholder's benefit is to society's benefit.
>"Regulating" also doesn't mean "taking shareholders' benefit
Technically true, but if the regulations are just suggestions then they won't accomplish anything. When people suggest regulation they want to control how these companies are acting, not just sending them a strongly worded letter.
you're not making a good argument for privatization lol
Yes, throw more government involvement into a fire that was started through the government giving billions of dollars to Google, Microsoft, and apple through tax cuts, and buying services from them instead of their smaller competitors.
My next phone won't be an android, but a Linux phone, and I'll keep this old phone as a secondary device for banking apps.
> I'll keep this old phone as a secondary device for banking apps
Our bank has just bumped the minimum Android level again to the point where the Play Store reviews are flooded with people complaining they can only access their banking via the web now.
Being a developer, I can say that working with Google is a pain. There is no possibility to talk with a human, all communication is answered by the same AI-generated response that links you to the same AI-generated documentation.
And if such AI does something wrong (which it does) no matter what they WILL REMOVE your app. Because they don't care about you. Sometimes the only way out is to publish the app again with another package identifier, because once they flagged it even if you remove all reference to the offending feature there is no way that they will accept it (it unfortunately happened, fortunately before releasing the app to the public so we could switch without affecting users).
In some sense I prefer Apple (and I say it as an Android user), you surely pay an annual fee to publish to the store, but if you have some issues you can open a ticket where a fucking real human will look into it and answer you, and explain what to to.
I have apps published to both the Play Store and App Store, and I agree. Despite the stereotype, Apple is much nicer to deal with. If you work within the Google ecosystem, you enjoy none of the benefits of the supposedly open Android system, but need to deal with more bureaucracy, more limitations, and worse support.
My experience was that my person got banned from ever submitting apps. I could try making a new account, but I'd have to provide ID so their AI might know to ban me again.
It's becoming more and more clear to me that my next phone won't be an Android
I suppose there might be a way to sign up for the alternative billing scheme:
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
but make sure to "pay the relevant Play service fee, starting October 1, 2026."
Very cool, Google.
"pay the relevant Play service fee"
We were promised alternative app stores in the EU, but the European Commission does not stop them.
Just remove the open collective link. Point to your homepage where the motivated donors will certainly pay. You already should know how many of the motivated users actually care about donations. The goal of this story and publishing it in HN seems to catch more eyeballs and marketing of Ankidroid, under new leadership. All I am suggesting is, just play along with Google. No harm here.
I am sorry, if I am wrong. Happy to be wrong too.
> The goal of this story and publishing it in HN seems to catch more eyeballs and marketing of Ankidroid, under new leadership
Ugly and wrong. I am sorry.
AnkiDroid is still independent and is not managed by a new leadership like the computer app, if that's what you're suggesting.
Oh I see. I mistook it then. Sorry, my bad.
Play blocking the donation link on a free app that actually needs those donations is a weird hill
Apps need to exit the Play Store. I have a whole slew of apps which haven't been updated for a while now because Aurora Store isn't working because of whatever Google of doing. Meanwhile the ones installed via FDroid and other means are perfectly up to date. It's a crappy state of affairs as Google continues to close the boiling Android frog.
I think there are more and more apps on f-droid.
On my end the experience was more pleasant on f-droid than on Google. On f-droid I had to manually push some things, in repositories. That I solved in a week or so.
On Google end I had to verify my account. Which was not easy feat.
- had to provide my ID several times, because it got rejected multiple times
- I uploaded driving license
- the verification process was stuck
- only after help ticket google employee pushed it forward
- I had to provide many more details, also had to use banking to pay substantial amount of money
- I currently trying to create app, but it requires 14 testers, and it can still be rejected, if their involvement was too poor
I am wondering what more things Google will invent to make my life worse.
By the way my app: https://github.com/rumca-js/OfflineWebSearch
From a user perspective I think F-Droid is really good too, mainly because it only allows FOSS apps by default, which cuts out a lot of the BS you see in Play Store apps.
You can go download a random, no-name app from F-Droid and be very confident it does what it says on the tin and won't be riddled with ads or spam you with notifications.
I am a little wary how many of the newer apps on F-Droid seem fully vibe-coded. there's only so many 'brain training' games and 'fully offline notes' that one really needs
I wish there was a 'ranking' feature that periodically (maybe daily?) pulled down star/contributor numbers so you could at least look at projects that are more likely to receive continuing support and have basic hygiene like Dependabot alerts
that said, migrating off so many of the Google-native or phone manufacturer apps has been such a liberatory feeling. I do some community organizing in my free-time and am a huge FOSS evangelist in those spaces. there's so many similar values, namely anti-surveillance, and but for resistance to change and preference for hyperpalatable UX, it's such a natural fit
F-Droid was a blow of fresh air. Nice apps that help me do something, instead of exploding ads in my face. It's my first stop of new apps.
This. I was looking for a quick Dart board score tracker app to keep scores for family games.
The play store results were ATROCIOUS and user hostile, forcing account creation, full screen video ads and other BS.
I remembered I had f-droid and I found a perfect, no bullshit app that does exactly what I needed and no ads.
Thats the only reason for at least me to use f droid and I have for the last decade I think.
It "just works".
As opposed to play store apps requiring "play store services" meaning having to sign into play store. It refuses to do so on a FOSS principle so I am literally cut off from a lot of apps.
Aurora store helps but apps that "require play store services" don't work.
> "play store services" meaning having to sign into play store
Not necessarily. Most apps that require Play Services should work fine even if you’re not logged into Google. You do, however, have to have the “gapps” installed. (Some apps would also actually check whether you’ve installed them from the Google Play store and not, say, Aurora, but from my experience most don’t bother.)
Also, perhaps look into microG? It reimplements the Play Services APIs, but is FOSS and only connects to Google servers when it’s necessary for some functionality (e.g. if you enable push notifications): https://microg.org/
I have microg installed but it doesn't do anything? It also needs to be logged in?
Gapps is what exactly. I have stock android on oneplus, just don't have play store signed in.
Many apps refuse to work.
On the user side my experience with F-Droid is auto updates dont work and I constantly get a "repository not reachable" f-droid error every now and then popping up on my phone (that little small middle-of-screen toast) when im doing something else completely unrelated. Might be a regional thing.
I use the Droid-ify client and rarely get issues: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.looker.droidify/
I get the F-Droid toasts once every few weeks or so. To me, it's worth it. Finding a tolerable weather app on the Play Store is impossible nowadays. Finding one on F-Droid is easy.
I have never seen this error, and auto updates do work for me.
They are a blessing when auto updates were finally possible with the official F-Droid app.
You might consider one of the alternative front ends. Won't fix the repos being unavailable, but will fix notifications about it.
Same problem here, but only for a few apps (e.g. signal)
There are downsides to F-Droid too: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/android/obtaining-apps/?h=f...
F-Droid is a nerd solution and will be used by 0.00001% of the total market. There are more people that will use Linux on desktop than will use F-Droid.
We need governments to mandate both Apple and Google to allow web installs of apps. No requirement for Apple/Google pay, Apple/Google login, or Apple/Google services.
Total freedom for users, for developers, and for competitors.
This duopoly has fucked over America and the EU by training us to think only these two companies have the right to decide what gets to be on your phone that you pay for.
They've created a moat so strong that it's impossible to compete with Android/iPhone, so the market cannot even have healthy competition.
F-Droid is not the answer. Regulation is.
And I'll have none of this fangirl/fanboy "but my grandma will fall for scams" nonsense.
Google and Amazon and all the platforms have scammy ads on their platforms. Nobody's doing anything about that.
Technology can be sandboxed, permissioned, signed, fingerprinted, attested, scanned, and blacklisted. It's easy to make this safe in the year of our lord 2026. Don't pretend we don't have a million ways to make this safe for your meemaw. She's more likely to fall down the stairs or get a scam call.
Regulate Google. Regulate Apple. Make our phones free.
On Youtube just now I got hit with an ad whose first 5 unskippable seconds were an AI person saying "Did you know the cure for dimentia is in the Bible!?!?" - considering who that ad is targetting, Google can F off with any stance about protecting people from scams.
Use NewPipe and you won't see an add ever again.
I have YT premium and I subscribe to a bunch of creators. So they receive a portion of the subscription, depending on the number of views.
NewPipe doesn't support it :(
I use grayjay. Downloaded from grayjay.app. will that be a problem ?
That's good, but don't forget that the point is that Google's pearl clutching about security doesn't apply when they are making money. They'll sell you straight to scammers if it makes them money.
> Technology can be sandboxed, permissioned, signed, fingerprinted, attested, scanned, and blacklisted.
Many of the things you're listing are the exact things the platforms would have to be banned from doing by the regulation you're proposing because they're the mechanisms used to exclude competitors.
If you put all apps in a sandbox then they can't perform certain operations (e.g. install other apps) which inherently means they can't compete in the market for doing those things. If apps have to be signed by the platform then the signing fee becomes the vig they charge to everyone even if they're using a competing store, and both that and scanning/fingerprinting provide a mechanism to revoke competing apps under arbitrary pretexts and otherwise grief their developers and users.
Attestation is the thing you would have to ban the most because it's not just subject to abuse, its very mechanism of operation is to prevent existing apps that use it from running on a competing new system at the point in time when the new system has too few users for all the apps to explicitly add support for it, thereby preventing the competitor from getting enough users for that to ever happen.
But attestation doesn't prevent grandma from getting scammed anyway. When the scammer calls pretending to be the grandchild who needs money for an emergency, they use the official signed bank app on the attestation-passing device to transfer money to the scammer. When the scammer is using a fake bank app to steal the user's credentials, the fake app doesn't require attestation.
The actual problem here is that you want to have someone vetting apps for grandma, but you don't want the platforms to be able to insist it be them rather than F-Droid or Aurora etc. Which the platforms will try to claim is chicken and egg (how do you know you can trust F-Droid?) while hoping you don't notice that they don't actually get you out of it -- how do you know you can trust Google?
> Many of the things you're listing are the exact things the platforms would have to be banned from doing by the regulation you're proposing because they're the mechanisms used to exclude competitors.
And they should still be banned from forcing apps to do it under their arbitrary judgements in order to participate on their platform. That isn't the same thing as preventing them from doing it. Some people honestly think they love walled gardens (they don't), but some people honestly need walled gardens. There should even be competing walled gardens. Let me install the best kids app store for my kids, and the best grandmas app store for my grandma.
I'm also not sure that attestation should be banned at the app store or platform level; it's a service. I'd ban it at the bank and merchant level. Attestation should be a tool for the user of the device (just like everything else on the phone they own.) They should be able to get it to attest to whatever they want to get it to attest to - if I'm a company and I issue my employees phones, I might want to make sure those phones haven't been tampered with. If I'm a parent and I issue my children phones, I might want to make sure those phones haven't been tampered with. The problem comes when arbitrary people are using it to make sure that the user hasn't tampered with their own phone since it came from some official list of blessed companies.
Let me install the best kids app store for my kids, and the best grandmas app store for my grandma. Let me be able to use attestation to make sure their phones haven't been altered since the last time I checked.
> If apps have to be signed by the platform
I'd like to get back to apps being signed by upstream, so we know they actually come from the author. I couldn't care less if the platform offers a service which verifies those signatures, and if almost everyone uses that service. That's just DNS. If your platforms service becomes hostile, there will be cheap/free competitors, just like DNS.
Just agreeing loudly. But the problem with F-Droid is that it is to be a store that has been blessed by Google in order to avoid legal questions. I know that this is not their fault, and that they hate it. I exclusively use F-Droid and don't even have a Google Play account, but if they started making decisions that I couldn't stand (they haven't, ever) I wouldn't have any alternative.
I remember the bullshit settlement of Microsoft antitrust is that they had to place a modal popup do select a default browser (that I never saw, once, in any context.) No reason why the platform's store can't be demoted to one of a number of stores other than that it is a profit spinner.
> And they should still be banned from forcing apps to do it under their arbitrary judgements in order to participate on their platform. That isn't the same thing as preventing them from doing it.
If they do it and it's enabled by default then they still get to grief their competitors because by default anyone who tries to use the competitor gets a big scary red box that deters adoption and has to jump through a bunch of hoops to get past it. It also thwarts adoption of competing signing alternatives because >90% of people will use whatever the default is even if the alternatives are at least as good.
> some people honestly need walled gardens
"Walled garden" is an Orwellian term. It's meant to imply that someone is curating what's inside it and not letting in things you don't want, and that is indeed a useful thing. But then people use the same term to mean a "garden" that locks you inside of it rather than locking bad things out. The only people who need that are small children and adults with mental illnesses severe enough to justify them having a guardian assigned to make their decisions for them.
> I'm also not sure that attestation should be banned at the app store or platform level; it's a service.
It isn't a service at all. The device contains hardware to sign the state of the device using a protected private key. Solving the problem is very simple -- you ban the device from coming with any private key already installed that the user can't freely extract. Then the root of the chain of trust is the customer's public key, not the vendor's, and whether a device is authorized comes down to whether the user's public key is authorized rather than the vendor's, which in turn makes the system vendor-agnostic.
> That's just DNS. If your platforms service becomes hostile, there will be cheap/free competitors, just like DNS.
DNS is actually a pretty terrible model because the "competition" is a fraud. There are registrars and registries and the registrars compete with each other but the registry still sets the price the registrars pay and the registries have a monopoly over every name in that TLD, so the competition can't actually get you a lower price than the monopoly registry itself sets. And the registries only compete with each other to the extent that you think that example.dental is valid substitute for example.football (no, sorry, those are both the same registry anyway) and to the extent that example.co.uk is a domain you could get instead of example.com rather than needing both. Meanwhile ICANN charges an extortionate amount to anyone who wants to become a registry and the entire system is set up to encourage squatting, to the point that the registries are now doing it themselves rather than making any attempt to impede it.
In general if you want something to work well you need to make it a protocol rather than a service. As soon as you allow a central chokepoint to exist you'll have a troll jumping out from under the bridge and trying to collect tolls.
Android is Google's billboard/surveillance tool they've invested deeply in.
Why on earth would they let anyone else participate?
Exactly. Thus regulation and enforcement.
The government is not going to regulate them, any more than they are going to fix the countless other cartels that operate with impunity.
Defeatism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Having a theory of power that doesn't unrealistically imagine a control over government which one demonstrably doesn't have is not "defeatism." Limiting yourself to only one impossible way of doing things is more insidious than learned helplessness, because they can give you a dramatically scripted mini-game to fool yourself into thinking that you're progressing. See slacktivism.
The trouble with controlling the government is that nobody actually does. Nobody will ever get it to do everything they want, or everything it "should", or anything like that. It's a giant uncoordinated bureaucracy full of inefficiency and perverse incentives. Relying only on the government is a time-honored way to die with regrets.
This is not the same as being unable to affect it at all. It can very easily go from being hot garbage to being flaming toxic waste in a tornado when the only people who show up are the ones trying to steal from everyone else.
Lina Kahn had the mandate but took too long. She did not appreciate the urgency or limited time with which she had to put together the cases.
Both the Democratic and Republican parties have lots of members who are fed up with big tech.
American labor unions are fed up with big tech and both parties are trying to court them.
Actions speak louder than words, and there has been no real action for my entire gray-haired life. Politicians can talk all they want about anti-trust reforms, but both parties equally have lots of members with vested interests in these cartels and who profit from the status quo. I think that ultimately overrides the will of the people more often than not.
> Lina Kahn had the mandate but took too long.
She didn't "take too long," she did all she could as long as she could, and is still doing it. The problem is that she was opposed by both political parties and the administration, for whom she was a token to hand to the Bernie and AOC people so they could sell out without being called sellouts.
If Biden had promoted Khan not only would she have had vastly more success, but he would have won the election - demented or not. Instead, if you listened to his press conferences, you would have no idea that she existed. He did not support her. He was a tool for financial scammers his entire career. His tiny little state was to domestic financial scams as Ireland is to worldwide tax dodging.
> Both the Democratic and Republican parties have lots of members who are fed up with big tech.
Few members, with no power. All of the leadership is on the big tech payroll. It's the population which hates big tech, and their opinions don't matter.
https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th...
The public are also easily movable over time and under great pressure. The public have become aggressively pro-Big Pharma and Free Trade globalists in a single generation. Libs have become militantly pro-FBI and CIA anti-Soviet warriors. They literally revived the 50's anti-Commie language to describe everything they didn't like, and worship The Lincoln Project, David Frum, and even goddamn Bill Kristol which I never thought would work. It's literally the same generation that reviled them and anyone who would tolerate them just 20 years ago.
They didn't even have to die for success of the submissiveness revolution. They just had to keep watching, and consuming. And you had to threaten their jobs, all the time.
Google already allows web installs on Android, no regulation required. But yes, iOS allowing that would be excellent.
Behind eight menu settings, a scare wall, and unfriendly UX with additional constant scares.
Oh, and also they're rolling it back by adding additional hurdles. Directionally, they're starting to remove it.
90% of my apps (all except for banking, streaming and ev charging app) are installed without play store. Beyond FDroid with custom repos, I actually came to like Komi-Store in combination with obtainium. I really wonder what will happen when Google enforces their own registered developer signatures. I hope there is a crucial mass of apps outside of Play store until then to generate some heard protests.
If you think average person buying an Android smartphone will use something like Komi-Store, obtanium or anything like that, you are in for a treat.
I've started to see more B2C business apps not be on the Play Store, like Veed is online web
Apps can only exit the store after users do.
But users won't exit while they can find apps they want there. It's the apps doing the primary pulling.
Not everyone publishes apps to make money or get the highest number of users though.
if i had a commercial app that i wanted to distribute off the play store, what are the options?
Put an APK file download on your website, but it won't help discoverability.
You can also publish your own f-droid repository, like Threema did. (And ask users to buy a license.)
Build it on the web. Almost no software needs to be in an app.
it certainly worked few days ago, I see last successful updates on August 26, tried just now and it doesn't work now
Crappy state of affairs is that the tax payer funded regulators twiddle their thumbs and do nothing about it.
Corporation like Google should have been fined to the edge of bankruptcy for such predatory behaviour.
>Corporation like Google should have been fined to the edge of bankruptcy for such predatory behaviour.
Google has an alternative at least (can download other app stores, apks, and have been able to for 15 years), I have no idea how Apple has been allowed to get away with what they do.
Better framing in their lawsuits- being a ‘market’ is less a thing in a monoculture- i.e. the market for Apple phones vs the market for all Android phones from a variety of makers.
Also in the worldwide market it most definitely isn’t a monopoly in phones at all- which is exactly why the EU had to reform their laws (DMA ect)to get regulatory powers over them.
"It's not a monopoly" is exactly the framing. Antitrust isn't inherently concerned with monopolies, it's concerned with market power. It's just that a monopolist has no room to move in claiming that they don't have market power.
They also play this trick where they pretend the only market is "phones" and ignore all of the complementary markets they're tying together with their phones, like app distribution and browser engines etc., since the market definitions for those shouldn't be the same as it is for "phones" when an app store that can be used on Google and Samsung phones can't be used (and therefore doesn't compete) on Apple phones and vice versa.
I never understood the argument that Apple's hostility to developers was unfair. The business proposition is simple: "Buy our overpriced hardware with our famously inflexible and invasive software and sign this massive, legally-binding contract agreeing that you understand all of the above to extract further value out of the Apple ecosystem."
The "App Store" is just a natural extension of the club. As far as I'm concerned, they can gatekeep and sloppify as much as they want. Apple users agree to this.
I've never felt slighted that I couldn't hack apart my iPad - though I will absolutely do it once somebody cracks the code and gets a proper Linux kernel running.
> The "App Store" is just a natural extension of the club.
If by "club" you mean Apple's digital fiefdom.
We Americans collectively voted for this for decades. Virtually everyone who has cast a ballot for a national race has voted for this state of affairs.
Especially in the software community, overwhelmingly self-described libertarian, all voted for this.
It takes a big government to stop this from happening. (It also takes a big government to stop structural racism, etc., which means higher taxes, which means there's no such thing as a fiscal conservative who is also socially liberal. But I digress.)
Of the last 10 Presidential terms spanning 40 years, Republicans have held the office for 5 and Democrats for 5. Each party has likewise held around half the seats in the House and Senate. This has nothing to do with the voters, it's the structural outcome of a FPTP voting system. You get two parties and they each get around half the votes/seats.
The US federal government has also played a major role in causing this by passing laws like DMCA 1201 and the CFAA which incumbents use to threaten competitors who attempt adversarial interoperability.
Moreover, the DoJ budget is ~$33B whereas e.g. the military budget is ~$1T, so arguing that the only way to allocate more resources to antitrust enforcement or similar is to raise taxes would imply that all of the existing spending is critically necessary and Congress never e.g. buys tanks the Army doesn't want or otherwise poorly allocates existing funds.
The US Government spends a preposterous amount of money, and the number only ever goes up. It doesn't need to be bigger, it needs to be less inefficient.
This just should not be the top comment here. HN being HN, it's way, way too bent out of shape about the company name attached to the app store and not the minutiae of tax policy, which is what this is really about.
The app in question declares itself this way: AnkiDroid is a free, open-source flashcard app for Android with over 10 million installs, used worldwide for various purposes, primarily in medical education and language learning.
But it's registered as a 501(c)(6) non-profit, which is a designation for a "business league or industry association". This is what you use if you're a Chamber of Commerce, not a flash card app!
Obviously we're all reading this expecting that Anki is a 501(c)(3) charity, like most open source organizations, and it's just not. And the distinction is definitely impactful for tax purposes, something a payment processor is going to care about. Both organizations are exempt from tax themselves, but charitable donations are also deductable, and Anki isn't a charity. Likely Google isn't set up to record the distinction in an auditable way.
The bottom line is that Anki's lawyers messed up. Or plausibly are running some kind of scam (e.g. they take the "donations" and then hand them over to a for-profit "member" company). They need to fix their registration if they want to take money from people, this isn't how you do it and this is surely not the only problem they'll have. Seriously, my Fraud Meter is dinging at about 19.6% here...
Google is not the payment processor. This is about the app including a link to a donation page on opencollective.com.
Other 501(c)(6) organizations you might have heard of include the Linux Foundation and the Rust Foundation.
Do LF and Rust solicit individual donations via phone apps (or at all, really)?
Indeed, those are structured as corporate-funded consortiums of exactly the type you'd be very suspicious of if, say, your kernel or compiler logs started stuffing a donation link into the stream!
Note that GNU software does historically mention donations (not in the logs AFAIK), and indeed the FSF is a 501(c)(3).
> Do LF and Rust solicit individual donations via phone apps (or at all, really)?
"Phone apps" is irrelevant, because again, Anki was not taking donations via their app but rather via a link to OpenCollective, a separate website.
So the remaining part of your question:
> Do LF and Rust solicit individual donations (at all, really)?
Yep, the Linux Foundation has a PayPal donate button (with a simple note to U.S. taxpayers that it's not deductible): https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/donate
> "Phone apps" is irrelevant, because again, Anki was not taking donations via their app but rather via a link to OpenCollective, a separate website.
...Irrelevant? That's the whole point. "Taking donation via a separate website (emphasis in original)" is explicitly dissallowed in the Play Store (and App Store on iOS)! There happens to be an exception carved out for federally-registered charities. But no, you don't get to just hold out a link to a tip jar.
Does this link count as a charity? No, per the structure of federal tax law. Also no, per the set of rules of the app store it's trying to be listed on. Should it count? Well, maybe I guess? Open source projects are like charities in some cases. We should all want to support them. But doing it like this, through a middle-man organization that isn't a charity, just plain smells like fraud to me. Who's doing the auditing that this is just supporting development and not profit centers? Is the IRS doing it? Not as far as I can see.
The 501(c)(6) in question is Open Source Collective, which is a “business league or industry association” dedicated to providing financial and administrative assistance to Open Source projects. Anki does not have lawyers, Open Source Collective does.
https://oscollective.org
This is an interesting rabbit hole if you bother to go down it, I encourage you to do some more research.
Since you seem to have done the research, can you link some other iOS or Android apps that have been allowed to solicit donations for the Open Source Collective? Thanks.
I mean, come on. Just read their page. They're not a charity, at all. They're a "fiscal host" (which is a weird term right out of the gate) designed to solicit donations on behalf of other projects. They're literally a payment processor in competition with Google and Apple, and taking a cut of their own.
I mean, fine. They can do that. But that's not charity.
> The bottom line is that Anki's lawyers messed up.
Anki and Ankidroid are not the same entity and they have different owners, if you want to call it that.
Anki is owned by Nicholas Flint, a physician who sells med school-related decks online under the name AnKing, which controls Ankihub, which now controls Anki after the original founder (Damien Elmes) gave them control about six months ago.
Ankidroid is a non-profit project that arose when there was only an iPhone mobile version of Anki. Completely unrelated to Anki except that it was blessed by the original creator of Anki.
It's also just some nerd programmers who ported Anki to run on Android. It's not some org with a revenue stream and attorneys.
> Obviously we're all reading this expecting that Anki is a 501(c)(3) charity
No, no one is reading it thinking that Anki is a charity.
Anyway, when you are going to harp on about HN not caring about the minutiae of tax policy, you should make sure you understand that you're talking about two unrelated entities run by different people as if they were the same entity.
> Anki and Ankidroid are not the same entity
So... why is one soliciting donations on behalf of the other?! My Fraud Meter is rising, not falling here.
> It's also just some nerd programmers who ported Anki to run on Android. It's not some org with a revenue stream and attorneys.
"Just Some Nerd Programmers" don't, very obviously, have standing to solicit tax exempt donations. Rising further still...
I think a lot of people here are operating on the assumption that apps have the inherent right to ask for money on a proprietary platform that gives them a monetization path. They don't, on any such platform, and never have. There are specific carveouts allowed by the platform vendors for cases we all agree are valuable, like charitable donations. It's just really clear that Anki is playing games here and frankly I really doubt they qualify.
> So... why is one soliciting donations on behalf of the other?! My Fraud Meter is rising, not falling here.
It's not... AnkiDroid was soliciting donations to AnkiDroid, via OpenCollective, which essentially "owns" them financially, for the purpose of soliciting donations.
This is all explained very clearly in the linked GitHub issue:
> AnkiDroid's donations go to Open Source Collective, a US non-profit which acts as our fiscal host.
> AnkiDroid is the Anki client for Android, developed and maintained by volunteers. Nothing is sold in the app and our Open Collective is the sole source of funding for maintenance and development. AnkiDroid is independent from Anki, AnkiWeb, AnkiMobile, and AnkiHub.
While some confusion is understandable, continuing to press on about your "Fraud Meter" just puts egg on your face when you're misunderstanding things through multiple replies explaining them to you.
> I think a lot of people here are operating on the assumption that apps have the inherent right to ask for money on a proprietary platform that gives them a monetization path.
no one here thinks that there is an "inherent right" to ask for money on a proprietary platform. That's a strawman.
You're also still wrong about the nature of AnkiDroid, and it's making you look silly when you're so confident and rude about it.
In Iran, we have a reverse market competition rule that is "instead of the market lowering prices to be competitive with the lowest price, as soon as one actor pushes the prices up, all other actors raise their own prices as fast as humanly possible."
I'm amazed to see the exact playbook be used here. Instead of people opposing Apple's horrible App Store, it seems that every other store is studying their strategies.
I think by the time of Apple's next court case on the App Store, the judge will pay them something back as they'll arrive at the conclusion of Apple doing nothing out of the ordinary.
Just chiming in to say that, as a user, F-Droid is so nice and comfortable. Never have I ever had to worry about predatory bs. Thanks to everyone involved :)
Can't you construct the link at run-time from obfuscated pieces, and only show it according to some halfway clever condition?
I hope they can solve this is one of my favorite apps on android.
every single comment in this thread about leaving the app store and using fdroid etc...
are we forgetting google already announced they will shut it all down in a few months?
we think complying by removing donation links is a bad idea because it just lets google get away with this and won't cause any users to notice. you need to let disruptions like this reach the users so that google might do something about this
Shit like this is yet another reason why we don't have apps in the app store. In app purchases are a non-starter for us.
As I understand it, there are ways to work around accepting payments or donations outside of the app stores.
It adds one more thing to have to do and explain to users. And even with that piece taken care of, we would need to be constantly vigilant about changes in Apple or Google policies that might eject our app from the storefront.
Every day Google commits to more Evil. How much more Evil can this world take from Google?
Also - all those monopoly-stores need to be broken up. It can not be that these mega-corporations continue to be protected by a selfish US government wanting to install monopolies globally.
When they first said "Don't be Evil," I guess they meant this to others; as in "we want all that evil for ourselves."
Good Work!!!
I've been more minimal and focused in my technology usage, specifically lucky enough to keep my phones and devices in "no notifications" mode for much of their lifecycle. My desktops and screens also have 0 apps on them ever, if I want to open something I just open a search UI and tap it and open it.
It works great on Mac, and iPhone. I imagine as more people try this sort of user experience, they might wonder like I am "Why use a Google experience device at all?" Most of what I use these days is simple and the extra value-add AI features, attention driven designs that justify new OS and new hardware, and even app stores barely feel necessary. OK some people say "but banking software" but very rarely do I have to use my banking software in a way I couldn't get to in the web browser?
I believe we're very close to having a 80:20 experience designed out in both hardware and software for laptops, phones and smart watches. I can't see these monopolies holding out much longer.
we need an Android app to "actively" complain to and about Apple, and an iPhone app to collectively agitate against Google
It sounds like Epic Games v Google must be heard again? Does that precedent apply to this, or did they settle?
Epic Games v. Google: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Google
GitHub Sponsors is another way to raise for an open source organization.
> GitHub Sponsors is another way to raise for an open source organization.
Which they do in fact use, with OSC as a fiscal host. Still doesn’t help here though – Google is unhappy with the nature of transaction (donation that is not tax-exempt in the U.S.), not with the platform on which it occurs.
If they instead made the donations go to e.g. the lead developer, it would probably be allowed (“peer-to-peer payments” can’t use Google Play billing, so the app can “lead users to [another] payment method” [1]). Whether this is a good idea is a whole another question.
[1]: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
A majority of the people that have contributed to Android did not contribute with the understanding that Google would monopolize payments in all apps on the app store.
They must have updated their terms.
anki nerds unite
Google has gone full rouge and DGAF.
This is not a great look for what is likely shoddy AI application affecting a free/open source/non-profit project.
Google's AI can't even line up the facts of it's own TOS as laid out in the ticket. If it's covert AI running in the background, it should at least throw out a bone as a github issue or something to let people submit on it.
In a time where marketplace options are supposed to be opening up, an app for learning ends up in the crosshairs.
Make web apps.
>We are forced to remove donation links immediately from our Play Store build in 2.24.X, and are doing so under protest
So you are still complying.