I think it bothers OP less that they take a 15% tax than the fact that google provides terrible support for their own play store. If they would take that tax and provide good feedback and speedy version reviews, nobody would ever complain - it is expected to pay something since the play store doesn't run on good thoughts and prayers.
But because they're a monopoly (or a duopoly if you count apple, which is a different platform altogether) they can afford to act this way.
> it bothers OP less that they take a 15% tax than the fact that google provides terrible support for their own play store.
The terrible support is really deeper than support. You literally stopped doing business here, because the lack of a feedback channel that allows Google to improve their business (i.e. realize they need a way to quickly correct stupid automated decisions) been Google's worst enemy and best friend. By ignoring support & feedback, the friction for internal decision making is low (no pesky customer demands, the product manager is king, management gets their way), but it leads to I think a lot of Google's products failing because they do not really understand their users, and the why behind the what they use.
I'm not sure being a monopoly alone explains Google's behavior here, but it could be as simple as that: who cares about one small customer... it's not like they have a viable alternative.
Yeah, I spend my free time making it accessible to bike in my area. Some of that is providing google with free street view data and other stuff. The amount of broken stuff and lack of support, when I'm literally giving them free work, is insane. I hate to do it, but the good outweighs the bad imo (I also provide it to open alternatives like OSM, Mapillary etc).
Like, their pipeline has been broken for months. No way to contact them. There is a support page for the api, but they close all issues as "the api is working". Well, sure, you accept the street view so the api is technically working, but haven't processed any for months.. It's probably a different team, but no way they would bother talking to each other..
Being a monopoly alone does not explain Google's behavior here. Google has a long history of not providing support.
The company's philosophy on the issue seems to be rooted in the hacker ethos of not giving repetitive work to humans if a machine could do it. When a machine can't do it, Google's thinking is to improve the machine. If the systems are good enough, nobody will need support.
The systems are not good enough, and that has been true for a long enough time that a reasonable company would have realized that a good support team is necessary until some far-future time.
> The company's philosophy on the issue seems to be rooted in the hacker ethos of not giving repetitive work to humans if a machine could do it. When a machine can't do it, Google's thinking is to improve the machine. If the systems are good enough, nobody will need support.
I have not worked at Google, but rather at 4 different companies that built automation machinery (ie multi discipline execution between mechanical, electrical, and software engineers). In none of those cases was it ever “the hacker ethos”. It was mid to upper level management whose incentive loops tended to be associated more with either shareholder perception or HR head counts. All of the engineers were usually begging the company to do a better job (allocate resources) to last mile customer support. Engineers build things, and are usually more satisfied if the products they build are well received because of the “last mile” bit where someone helps a customer appreciate their creation.
GP is not wrong, though. Google is well and publicly known for this approach. One of the most prominent example is their formulation of the role of SRE, which is now considered standard in the industry.
> I'm not sure being a monopoly alone explains Google's behavior here, but it could be as simple as that: who cares about one small customer... it's not like they have a viable alternative.
The last line contradicts the first line. Being a monopoly means they don’t have to care. If Apple and Google were required to allow competing app stores as first-class citizens then they would have to provide better service or no one would use their stores and they’d lose out on all of the rents they’re collecting from app developers.
Thanks for writing this out. I'd seen a lot of arguments for why we need multiple app stores, but I think this might be the first time I've seen someone crystallize the fact that an app store itself is a competitive business model that could provide better/cheaper services with competition.
My favorite quip in response to asking for something to get improved inside of Google is, "no one ever asked for this", knowing full well the opportunity to ask was near zero and no one ever looked.
Google is a crazy town, data driven by cherry picked post-hoc rationalizations driven by perf. The user never enters the equation.
> the friction for internal decision making is low (no pesky customer demands, the product manager is king, management gets their way)
I'd like to support that this goes "both" ways for companies who destroy their customer service. Not only do they not know what their customers want/problems they're having, but they don't know what their customers wouldn't want/problems they're not having. Like you say, it "lowers the friction," so some dumb, destructive idea that somebody has gets implemented based on title and force of personality.
But that's a monopoly. Nothing they do is destructive, other than putting any more work in than is necessary. If the store went down for weeks at a time, they might have a problem. The problem would result from this personally irritating and inconveniencing a regulator/politician, judge, or major stockholder/owner.
Author here: Indeed, 15% is fine. They do provide some services. They provide the CDN for downloading the APK. They handle sales taxes in the various countries, which would be a PITA to handle yourself. Similar-ish services like Patreon charge a fee too. The 30% they charged a couple of years back was bad. But I could live with 15% if the support were anything other than zero.
The problem is that it ISN'T a fee for services as it should be. Their platform power means that they can levy a tax, and they don't feel the need to do anything on exchange for that.
Yep, I'd hypothetically economically gladly build an alternative app store charging "only" 5% on app revenue. The blocker would be that Google has a hold on what store is installed by default on Android. Apple even more so. This is hardly a fair market.
There are other app stores on Android, e.g. OEM ones like the Galaxy store. The latter doesn't really compete on price though - 20% cut of one time payments and 15% of subscriptions. I think the Android app stores anchor to the iOS app store prices to piggy back on Apple's monopoly power - devs are used to having to pay Apple that much, so they will not resist if you charge the same.
Google is not developing Android for the IAP fees, they're doing it to sell phones loaded with their search, advertising, browser and services. They take hundreds of billions in revenue annually from this, they are being paid several times over for that work even if they get no IAP fees.
The speed of government is slow, incredibly slow. It's measured in election cycles. It takes government eight, twelve years to simply turn around and notice. But once it does, it's a juggernaut.
Nothing can stop it. Nothing can avert it. Nothing can prevent it. And as everybody from Facebook to Microsoft knows, once it starts moving, you're screwed.
In the US, the oil companies thought they were too big. Then the telco companies thought they were too big. What really happens is eventually people just get pissed off, and then it's too late.
Google is fast approaching that. They almost had chrome and other things ripped away from them, and now they've got requirements to have alternate play stores. If they don't turn course, and turn course blazingly fast, they're going to have their entire empire wrenched away from them.
> If they don't turn course, and turn course blazingly fast, they're going to have their entire empire wrenched away from them.
Unfortunately, that's no longer the case with the app store monopolies. While Apple is under some partial enforcement on parts of their app store policies, Google managed to play the game of regulatory brinksmanship better and largely avoided that for their app store. So the regulatory powers (such as they are) have already taken their best shot and this is where we are.
There is now a record of this. The next action against Google, will see people pointing out each step they took to avoid compliance.
A case a year down the road about AI, will see stubborn attempts to comply like the above cited.
Google, with the gold plated shovel, digging a hole for itself. Put another way, breaking up a company typically comes after other methods don't work. Such as being sneaky and making them not work.
Or even because the required competition didn't occur, regardless of fault.
It's not over. It's a step taken, with a positive outcome, and a judge who is making sure there's follow through. Next step will be more stark.
They also say they generate $57 billion ad revenue from being default search engine on iPhone, so obviously there is a cash value to being the default search (and everything else) on Android too even if their accountants can finagle reasons that doesn't contribute to Android's development costs.
If they didn't develop Android they'd be paying $10s of billions annually for the prime positioning their apps and services and search enjoy too, so even if you buy their accounting tricks the development is paying for itself many times over.
If Android did belong to someone else then there could be an argument that IAP fees are funding it and subsequently required, perhaps even under less-than-competitive circumstances.
But if the court allowed, Google would be paying that company $10s of billions for the prime real estate their software, search and services enjoy and it would then be a very weak argument that only IAP funds its development. Just like it is when Google earns $100s of billions in revenue from Android now.
Would it be OK for Microsoft to prevent Steam from running on Windows because Valve doesn't contribute enough to funding the Experiences and Devices org? I've never really understood why mobile platforms should be different from how we think about desktop ones.
Parasitic? Writing software for folks' devices and selling it isn't parasitic...it's just participating in the market. Weird that the overton window has moved so far that anything not built by the trillion-dollar duopoly is considered some kind of free-rider.
It's not weird - you've just completely misunderstood the situation. This is about the OS, which the software in question (the alternate app store) relies on, but generates no revenue for. The devices are still being sold, because their manufacturers are allowed to make money, the alternate store is allowed to make money. Only the OS maker will make no money, because that would be bad.
what you are arguing for is objectively extremely bizarre. if you take a step back, this is what is playing out: company C makes a device. it needs an operating system to run software, so they add it. if there was no operating system the device would be useless and no one would buy it. now person A buys said device. it's theirs, they have paid money for it, they own it. person B writes some software. it runs on the device's operating system. they want to sell it to person A. person A wants to buy it from them. why should company C be involved at all? I found this super weird and distasteful when game consoles were allowed to use this business model, and am even more taken aback that general purpose computers get away with it.
You seem to imply Google was forced to open source Android or even to give it for free: sounded like it was a purely business decision to capture more of the market.
Now that they have, they are also turning around on bits of that too.
That trillion dollar duopoly is probably the worst case of free riders. It’s an enabler/vehicle for all the other billion dollar free riders to steal from the population.
theres nothing parasitic about a competing app store.
it is parasitic to try and prohibit competing app stores and then leverage your monopoly by charging monopoly prices.
everything google is trying to do to discourage graphene, newpipe, competing app stores, etc. is parasitic and it's right that they are being fined by the EU for this behavior.
> theres nothing parasitic about a competing app store.
I think a more honest way to say this might be: Android OS development is massively funded by Google, and the Play Store feeds into this hugely. No other store does this, so it shouldn't be surprising that they can charge a lower fee. They're just doing the easy bit.
It is rent extraction which always feels like bullshit because it is. Competition is supposed to be the counterbalancing force but it barely exists here.
The basic services Google provides can effectively only be consumed by humans individually, creating an inevitable bottleneck.
Such bottlenecks impede interchangeability of goods, as you can't reasonably entertain multiple suppliers simultaneously there. And that means, you cannot have a free market, because you can't really have meaningful competition.
Google has captured services that really are public utilities. Them being "new" doesn't play a role.
Apple recently submitted in court filings that you'd have to pay ~8% for off-the-shelf solutions like Stripe or Paddle to be Merchant of Record anyway so 15% isn't really bad except for the high-earning apps, but Google should be doing something for that extra 7%.
It's a level of service above their payment processing, where they also collect and remit certain taxes which I believe is built-in to that ~8%. This is the same service that Google and Apple provide for in-app payments.
> Stripe and Paddle are leading full-service, turnkey payment processing, and merchant-of-record providers handling all the services necessary for link-out, including payment processing, tax compliance, fraud detection, and customer service. Across the top apps, the mean implied processing and merchant-of-record fee based on Stripe’s and Paddle’s rack rates (which few, if any, large developers actually pay because they negotiate discounts or provision in-house) is 8.1% using Stripe rates, or 7.8% using Paddle rates.
Yeah this the thing that grinds my gears about Apple too. These fools will argue in court out of one side of their mouth that the cut is used to police the store etc and do reviews then out of the other side of their mouth they just don’t do it or give the most mediocre half assed attempts and collect the revenue. Which is it? You shouldn’t be able to charge people and not provide the service your charging them for
This is a pretty common sentiment. I make iOS exclusive apps because I know when facing any problem Google support will be non-existent. Apple takes ages to respond but has been known to be humanly possible so far.
If different words exists why insist in making "creative" use of the wrong word?
Your local monopoly of water provider charges a fee not a tax (although many collect taxes on behalf of the state that sanctions the monopoly)
Platform apps stores tend to be a monopoly (specially in iOS case) and that decreases incentive to provide a decent service/product to their customers who hate that fact - not because customer have no representation.
I never submitted an app to play store but knowing how Google handles app customers (or any customer of their services/products) its believable that app devs are shafted too. I personally wonder if there's any differentiated service level between an app that results in revenue for Google vs one that is 100% free. I'd be pissed if my 15% fee is not buying me priority over the latest adware filled flashlight app
This definition doesn't work, because my only choice when buying a burger at Dairy Queen is to pay the burger's price or walk away too, but it's not taxation.
you have the choice not to purchase burgers from dairy queens, but from macdonalds, or five guys, or wataburger.
You don't have a real choice in an app store on android (except recently, and even then, the alternative stores don't behave well for google-based apps).
That's why it's not a tax when you choose to buy DQ burgers, but a tax when you choose to deploy an app to google app store.
Your town prohibits you from making your own burger?
Because burger meat is commonly sold in the smallest of grocery stores, and is not technically dependent on what buns, sauces, tomatoes, lettuce … or other ingredients you pair them.
And you can grow your own veggies, and bake your own bread.
It is an entirely componentized market. No gatekeepers.
Even single groceries in tiny towns continue having to compete with larger stores in bigger towns. Because they carry small selections most people make the drive to load up their larder regularly.”
You need to find an example that matches the point you are trying to make.
TLDR: Analysis reveals burger markets are nearly perfect economic opposites of centralized app store markets.
> You don't have a real choice in an app store on android
You do, and you also can pick iPhone. Or not a smartphone. Or not use apps.
> (except recently, and even then, the alternative stores don't behave well for google-based apps).
Google provides planetscale services like Google Maps for free and you want to build apps that use their services but not pay them 15% for their store, and still complain they don't work perfectly? You seem to be outsourcing a lot to Google but expect to give them nothing in return.
Bringing up Google Maps here does nothing for your point because on web or native mobile you pay money to use the API for Google Maps (outside of the store fee). Offering a free version to end users does financially benefit Google.
There are numerous examples of people needing a smartphone to do things in their daily lives. I’ve read compelling stories of people who ran into trouble after ditching their smartphone.
There are lots of parallels to the railroad monopolies. Choice is not as available as you say it is.
You don’t get Maps “for free”, you pay with your data (your searches, your preferences, etc.). For Google maps is the bait to reel you in, you are the product they sell to their real customers: businesses. Google can shape your preferences by showing you what their paying customers want you to see.
I thought it’s self evident that products like Gmail, Search, Maps and others aren’t free because Google is aiming to do charity but because your personal data allows them to build a digital model of you and charge other businesses for access to that knowledge.
Around me I can’t think of a bank that allows any remote operation without a TAN only available on iOS or Android. That’s the root of a lot of future problems, not the least of which being that the bank charges you more for in person operations.
I understand that, but how does that factor into the larger conversation? Are you saying that Google should want to make sure these services should work flawlessly on other stores so we can be tracked by them even if we don't use the Play Store?
No, this analogy doesn't work because of switching costs. If I want a different burger, I drive across the street. If I want a different app store, I have to buy a new phone.
if the only way to use government services was to purchase either a dairy queen or McDonalds burger first that is a duopoly and they would be way more expensive and shittier quality than regular burgers as a result.
some smart alec would then point out that because even the cheapest, shittiest beef isnt free that this price is justified.
Nobody has said what Google is doing is justified. People are (correctly) saying that "taxation" is not the correct term for what they are doing. Google is in the wrong, but that doesn't make bad arguments correct just because they are aimed at Google.
In my country if I do not pay my taxes I do not get thrown in jail. Tax fraud gets you thrown in jail, but correctly declaring income but just not paying does not get you thrown in jail since we abolished debtors prison. And when we had debtors prison any debt could throw you in prison so that was a terrible definition since it means Sweden has no tax right now and in the past any debt would have been tax.
At the level of customer service they provide (ie ~none), Google Play would be "sustainable" at a 1% cut. Everything above that is pure profit. Which is exactly why they're doing everything they can to lock people into Google Play and lock people out of distributing/accessing apps outside of it. This isn't some kind service Google is providing at cost out of the goodness of their hearts, it's their attempt to corner the market and extract a massive amount of economic value without doing any meaningful work.
The revenue funds more than just support, it funds the development of an entire OS and various SDKs to support the apps that it distributes from the store.
Nothing added to android in the last 10-15 years has been of any benefit to me, mostly just pointless interface churn, the addition of nag screens, and removal/deprecation/awkwardification of features I actually use.
Given that, I think the world would be improved by reduction of such “development”.
If you are unable to recognize the improvements Android has made from 15 years ago with Android 3.2 Honeycomb I think your use of devices is incredibly niche.
The 100s of billions they get from being installed in so many devices and advertising doesn't fund that? Could have fooled me. The result is the same. Play Store doesn't do anywhere enough to justify a 15% cut.
And that's my problem with such business practises in general. Take an example of Claude. Not only, at this point, their models might be just marginally better than the open weight competition, they also also makes it entirely impossible for you to reach human support in case of an issue (and I am talking about real money related issues). You just can't do it. Yes, there's an email but that is also handled by the same bot.
I just don't understand how these companies can get away with that. These are the aspects of life that tells very clearly how most Govts are not chosen and ran for "the people" but the few, not the conspiratorial spirals. These are the smaller, but harsh Kafkaesque realities of life that says we lost this to the power of the "rich" - and it's an abstract power, it's not fixed, and if someone from the "masses" manages to become part of it they also reap the benefit but by the design of things that number has to be really small.
Okay, it deviated. The point is
> provides terrible support for their own play store.
Something like this is so abhorrent and yet is it normal and I didn't even start at how they can just charge 15 and 33% for of the incomes.
Of course people would complain, it's unrealistic to expect everyone to have the same expectation of what a fair fee is that somehow exactly matches the current fee (even if the service is great)
Customer support has gotten so terrible. Now that all big companies have terrible support, none of them are punished for it. You can still occasionally find people who give a shit in small business, but that is it. Google is probably one of the worst offenders of all. I don't know what the solution is, it seems like the only way to get any satisfaction on an issue at a big corp anymore is a social medial call-out like this one.
If you are here, thank you for Conversations, Daniel, it has been my go-to for years for communicating with friends and family.
Some eight years ago I worked on a Chrome extension with monetization support. I could not get payment working using Google APIs, no matter what I tried it errored with obscure undocumented error messages. Finally I reached out to their customer support and got swift overly friendly response. Several messages later, I still got these overly friendly elaborated messages, but the issue did not proceed anywhere. I kept explaining my problem and they assured me that they are working on it. Eventually I got bounced to their Android support (my problem concerned Chrome store), which made me think either they were taking a piss or used this tactique on purpose. I eventually abandoned the whole idea.
Nowadays I would attribute their response to chatbots considering how elaborated and friendly, but yet totally useless their messages were, but this was before LLMs
That's because you the user are not the customer of Google and such services. You are actually the product being sold to the customer, namely advertising companies, by Google.
The farmer take care of his pigs but only to the point they get slaughtered.
Google has captured what really is a public utility and should be either state-owned or heavily regulated.
(Long) distance communications, just like public roads, breathable air, potable drinking water and so on do not fit into a "free market economy" paradigm.
They simply don't fulfill the basic requirements that make the "market" idea work.
Specifically, a free market needs goods from different suppliers to be easily interchangeable. You cannot sensibly build multiple roads parallel to each other, or have multiple water pipes installed and you have only one airway to breath through.
> Google has captured what really is a public utility and should be either state-owned or heavily regulated.
I think part of what makes a utility a utility is that the nature of the service is naturally a monopoly. For example, you can only realistically have one set of waterways, so the company providing tap water as a service is a utility. Same with power lines, you can only realistically have one set, so the electricity-supplying company is a utility. With phone/internet service, I imagine that also requires sharing infrastructure.
Google doesn't fit in that paradigm. The nature of their services don't naturally require sharing resources to compete. They a monopoly simply because they amassed a ton a money to do things that other people can't, like drive on all roads on Earth with special cameras, or host however many videos there are on YouTube, serving those videos throughout the world, and even pay livable wages to the creators of the videos.
it doesnt need to be a utility. they just need to crack down on every attempt google uses to kill the competition.
There should be an agency you can complain to for monopolies which has the power to dictate new rules to the monopolist with far reaching power to crack down on anything that smells like anti competitive behavior.
e.g.
- force banking apps that try to secure themselves with google play services to make that dependency optional.
- force google to stop blocking newpipe, aurora, etc.
- force google pay to make itself available on any platform that wants to integrate it (apple, graphene)
- force google to allow alternative app stores to become first class citizens.
That never works in the US, the monopolist will just wait it out 4-8 years until there is a friendly administration. You have to break them up any time you have the chance, it’s the only effective remedy.
That's the legal paradigm that we used to stop the railroads from choking America. But the real killer of their power was the Interstate Highway System - i.e. government funded infrastructure. Prior to the IHS there wasn't really ANY nationally funded infra[0] of that scale, we'd outsourced building it to private industry instead. After that it's basically assumed that infrastructure was the government's job, to the point where even the most conservative among us would point to "roads" as a thing governments do well and should be empowered in doing.
So anyway, the US government should run an open-access, quad-track railroad and fiber backbone along every highway. Maximize the ROI on that ROW. Also they should nationalize Android and iOS.
[0] Because slavery. The South really, REALLY hated any government roads because it diminished the economic power of literally owning a lot of people. Hell, one of the stipulations of the Confederate Constitution was to strip the General Welfare clause out of the constitution.
While I agree with where you're coming from, I think you're overstating it just a little. It only seems like something that should be considered a public utility because Google has anticompetitively bundled what should be several distinct types of products together as one take-it-or-leave-it package. Android (really Google Play Services) should not be tied to the Play Store App (think how MS was forced to include a browser choice screen in the EU). Likewise the Play Store Curation/Hosting Service should not be tied to the Play Store App (ie Aurora store etc should work and be fully supported by Play Store Curation/Hosting Service through the Service having a well-documented open API). Then Play Store Curation/Hosting Service would have to compete on its own merits, rather than anticompetitive tying with two instances of Metcalfe's law (Android users plus app developers).
> Tell me about the different OSes each of Samsung, Huawei, Tencent MyApp, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Honor etc. run then that we can choose from.
Other companies using Google's incredible R&D spend and selling phones that use it is not Google's failing.
And we're talking app stores. They all have app stores disconnected from Google's app store.
> It's like saying Windows doesn't have a monopoly in the PC space because HP, Dell, Lenovo, ASUS.
No, on two counts. One: - and it's the same with Android - Apple exists, and so there's definitely not a monopoly from a lowercase personal computing perspective. Two: the conversation is about app stores. There are many app stores. It's like saying Microsoft doesn't have a PC hardware monopoly because HP, Dell, Lenovo, ASUS.
Samsung is, as pointed out elsewhere in the thread, one among many. Like Dell. It's different in kind, not in degree.
If you make that comparison you clearly don't understand the point being brought up by others here. Which is fine. I'm not going to convince you, I'm just informing you how I'll be voting.
Android OEMs largely don't do that either except for some specific markets where Google isn't a thing. Google does have rules for when you want to be certified and have Google Play and Google services on board, which you mostly do in the West and so OEMs comply.
Sure, they may ship a Samsung skin or preload some of their own junk, same as on Windows. That doesn't make what they ship a different OS.
The one exception would be HarmonyOS, but that's somewhat China specific.
> Xioami, Huawei and Samsung all have the points I mentioned, with Android forks
If I buy a Samsung phone in North America or Europe today I get Google Play as the main app store, Google services etc. and if I want to develop an app for a Samsung Android phone, I use the official Google SDK and Kotlin like for every other Android phone.
They have their own skin and store, but nobody really uses that. Google Play it is, be it Samsung or Xioami. They're very far from offering any kind of genuine alternative to Google Play, Google or Android. Their stores are junkware no different than ASUS preinstalling some antivirus nobody wants.
> Harmony NEXT is no longer based on Android.
That's my point. Huawei is the only OEM offering something different, but not easy to get in Western markets and thus doesn't have app mindshare.
This gotcha only works if you are a user of only their free services.
When Google charges me a monthly fee for storage, takes a percentage of my Play Store sales, or manufactures a Pixel that I purchase from their online store, I am absolutely their customer. I may also be providing data they will sell, but I am still paying them for goods or services and that makes me a customer.
The problem is that they continue treating their customers like livestock, and it seems they have little incentive to change.
The real problem here is that all those businesses are rounding errors on the balance sheet compared to ads, so the CEO doesn't care (or even know) about the issues and isn't motivated to improve anything.
Then have they repeatedly fought so hard legally to get to keep extracting three revenue? If they didn't care about it, they wouldn't do it in the first place.
The problem is that there's no pressure on them to act any differently. If they made 100x as much money from app purchases, they wouldn't suddenly treat app developers better just because of that. They might treat them better if the app developers had better alternatives, but that would also be enough to force Google to behave differently even with the current amount of revenue.
Android and Chrome exist as moats primarily. Pichai came up in Chrome and understands moats. Obviously if you can get the moat to be self-funding (Google Play IAP revenue) even better. Things like "the developer experience on Android is bad" don't prevent the moat from doing its job, but "Google and Chrome aren't defaults on Android" are very much losing the moat.
I don't disagree with this. I don't honestly see how it relates to your previous comment that I responded to though. It seems more like support for my rebuttal, which is that the moat is what matters, not whether the revenue is a "rounding error" compared to their other businesses.
This article in one sentence: "the developer of a small app switches to a third-party app store because Google Play ignores him." This doesn't hurt the balance sheet ($150 a month to Google is nothing), and doesn't affect the moat (this app isn't strategically meaningful and didn't even go away--it just moved).
They chose to not monetize at all anymore because they decide it's not worth the hassle due to having other sources of income. If they didn't have the other sources of income, it doesn't sound like he'd choose to move somewhere else.
They can treat their customers like livestock because their customers are okay with it. Why is that?
My hypothesis: turkeys think the farm is an amazing life until the week before Thanksgiving. Nobody really groks that Google is shit until it's too late.
That's every time Google does something bad to a customer. Such as the one who was banned for his son's medical photos. Or the one who was tricked into enabling passkeys and then couldn't sign in any more and called support.
With such a perversion of definitions why not call the stock holders the true customers? Services can have multiple classes of users. Some YouTube users can be content creators. Some users can watch Shorts. Some can watch long term videos. Some can pay to run ad campaigns. This idea that there is only one true kind of "customer" is not how people think of these services.
I remember that once my flight was cancelled and I figured out that if I buy a bus ticket "right now" I'd be able to reach my destination in a sensible time. I quickly bought the ticket... for the wrong day.
I called the bus company, a native speaker of my language immediately picked up, rescheduled the ticket, and told me to pay €2 extra to the bus driver.
I was shocked that customer support could be so simple.
BTW I spent 6 hours total spread along 12 months calling an Indian customer service before I got my money back for the cancelled flight.
Google play went from being a cool place to upload hobbyist projects to a Real Business Platform.
You now need a business address and a bunch of other documents for apps that will probably lose money.
Google has also decided they really don’t like users installing apps outside the Play Store. Today it’s a bunch of scary warnings, soon it’s a convoluted process to enable all installs and eventually they probably just ban it all together.
Literally nothing about Android is worth while to me now. iPhones are more stable , easier to use and have vastly better end user support.
The App Store is also a living hell for developers. They will look for any excuse to deny you an account and later reject your app.
Dare I say programming isn’t as fun anymore. I guess I can still build WebGL games. Best not speak too loudly, Apple and Google might go after that next
I would love to be able to list our product in the Google Play store /s ... but after a year of trying we haven't been able to.
They introduced a phone verification step for the support phone number that you provide. But their apparent assumption is that app authors are individuals or tiny companies. They expect to be able to send a text to the support number, or have it answered instantly by a human to validate the number. Any kind of IVR means the number can't be validated.
I have been going back and forth with their support for a year. It takes months at a time for them to respond, to say "we fixed it try again" and I try again and the process is identical.
Is is annoyingly ironic because I am sure that Google themselves could not pass this process to get listed in the Play Store. Their advice of "just redirect your corporate number to someone's cellphone to get validated" is laugable.
What I do not like about Android is how difficult it is to unlock the bootloader without ever connecting the device to Internet. Any device with flash memory should be re-programmable and it should be illegal to prevent user from doing this or adding measures (like locking components to CPU via cryptography or adding anti-reverse engineering measures) that make it difficult.
I had a business account that got banned due to inactivity. I make apps and I often update them ota, long story short the account it took ages to verify via DUNS and the phone number requirements got nuked. Can’t even reopen it, had to create a new one with a new email, no human to speak to, a nightmare due to the same duns number being on both accounts. Plus the recent forced 14 days of app testing. It’s comically bad, when I compare it to iOS it almost feels intentionally antagonistic to devs. Android has always been challenging (fragmented phone os mainly) but now has gotten to the point of not even being worth spending time there, especially since iOS tends to convert dramatically better
I get excited every time I learn about another E2EE messaging app where the server can be self-hosted. But as I understand it, the server that triggers push notifications for any android app must be hard-coded into the app's binary. Are there any good architectural workarounds for this? I've read a little bit about VAPID[1] but I don't know if it is actually a viable approach and I don't think I've ever seen it promoted in an E2EE messaging app with a self-hosted server.
Conversations is a XMPP client, it's essentially the same protocol that delivers reliable notifications to every Android, Nintendo switch, etc. Unless you have an Android distro that kills every background app indiscriminately, you will be fine with Conversations delivering messages and notifications to you.
Interestingly, the link you posted relates to Unified Push, which is a protocol that relies on a "distributor" app which acts as a proxy, receiving reliable notifications on behalf of other applications. And it happens that Conversations can be configured as a UP distributor, because of how good it is at that/how well the XMPP protocol lends itself to it.
Long way to say you should give XMPP a shot, it really works well!
It's possible for the app to poll the server for new messages. iOS also supports light background work that can poll server from time to time and trigger notification on the device, rather than using apple's push notification infra.
The trade off is that you gain some extra privacy with simpler architecture and accept that some notifications will be delayed as ios decides when to run the bg job for the app.
source: I develop e2e app with self-hostable server (145 lines of zero deps python for the whole server).
I assume the only way it to be a good citizen: an app someone uses often, app itself is low cpu/memory, BG app refresh quick/cheap/doesn't drain much energy.
But yeah, if you need a predictable way is either APN or safari push notifications.
Yeah that "there is no way to talk to a human at Google" is one of the reasons I never recommend a Google solution at current workplace... Or to family.
I've abandoned my Google apps after all the requirements over the last year or so. It's too much of a hassle. Apple is friendlier. Also, it wasn't worth justifying 1% of the income and 99% grief compared to Apple.
I know this is a stupid question even before I ask it, but is there any chance at this point of seeing something out of the scope of Apple and Google for mobile?? Will the bank apps ever allow people out of these two players
We can’t even get some of the largest banks to do competent 2 factor, after all these years. The idea that they’re going to produce feature parity on peculiar platforms does seem like a big stretch.
No, because it is near impossible to compete with "free" and totally impossible to compete with "free-and-you-can-use-ad-block."
The truth is that these corps are so entrenched because people love love love the ad model. I mean, they hate the ads, but they are so sold on access being free that introducing a cost would come off like charging money to walk in a public park. Totally confusing.
And frankly the other path wouldn't be all roses either. There would be a wealth divide in technology where poor people wouldn't be able to afford to use all the stuff available to them now for free.
If you are referring to banking apps, I just don't use banking apps that don't work on my degoogled phone thus granting them the low fraud risk they so strive for with forcing locked devices.
You're free to make one, and bank apps are often less locked down than you think - try them yourself instead of accepting possible FUD. Also your bank 100% has a checkbox on your account they can click to disable any phone hardware requirements on your account.
> your bank 100% has a checkbox on your account they can click to disable any phone hardware requirements
I was going to thank you. I still thank you if this is true.
How do you know about the bank checkbox?
My bank is huge and I’m skeptical they give a crap about me any more than Google. Their app certainly doesn’t look like it.
(I noticed your account has been posting a lot of what I consider to be “garbage comments” in this article, so I’d like some kind of claim to fact check.)
Motorola is planning to release phones with GrapheneOS. So far only expensive models have been confirmed, but I assume cheapos should follow.
Of course they're not doing this out of good heart. My theory is that China wants to have a popular smartphone that is completely independent from US companies. But hey, once upon a time Google were "the good guys" too, so enjoy the party while it lasts.
An interesting point is that it's important to have powerful China around because they're a capitalist competition to the US.
> An interesting point is that it's important to have powerful China around because they're a capitalist competition to the US.
Semi-capitalist at best. They're good for cloning things invented in the West, but the problem is that that is much cheaper than inventing, so things get commoditised and the places that can do expensive R&D have to find other ways to make money all the time.
1. That's not true. More and more segments of technology are being dominated by China. China sells lots and lots of everyday objects that are wholly desgined in China, with quality beating western products. They're just small improvements over existing designs of relatively simple things, so nothing makes the headlines.
2. Lots of Chinese technology never leaves China for political reasons, rather than economic/technology ones.
3. If you want to buy a semi-professional machine as an advanced hobbyist, often your only option is China.
4. Apple is wildly known for taking existing designs and improving on them. Why is it good for Apple to do that, but bad for China to do that?
Isn't graphene completely dependent on what Google ships though? Ok they may be able to support Motorola devices longer than Googles releases facilitate supporting Google devices, but it's still ultimately android, which is still ultimately controlled by Google.
I'm not saying it isn't an improvement but this feels like choosing centos because you don't like the direction fedora is taking.
App release reviews take at least 1 week now. They take 15% of revenue and I had to pay $25 to create an account. And I'm sure I spent more hours on setting up my business + bank account, dun's number, google account creation & verification, app listing configuration/verification and only then getting to the review stage. My first round took exactly 1 month from having a signed app release on my laptop ready to go to it showing publicly on the store.
Same here
My build was ready like for a month and all that was stopping me is the requirement for the 12 testers being active for 14 days. When I applied to both stores, I thought apple is gonna be a problem, but google is a bigger unmovable wall
Unfortunately google is now a massive juggernaut that has 20+ layers before you can ship anything, and thats bled out to the users of their services. I wish we had better alternatives. In fact, I now just focus on shipping a PWA.
Btw thanks to the author. I got Conversations to work with Micro (https://micro.mu), the personal assistant I'm building. Its a nice XMPP client. Now just need to figure out how to do encryption for queries going into the model itself.
I've tried to publish an app in Play recently to get a taste of the experience. And I must say the taste was sour. Contrary to the experience of many I was able to reach a real human about my problem, but the human was less helpful that an AI pointed at the documentation. The AI was at least able to unrestand the issue, while the human simply talked past me.
That's the problem with all big billion dollar companies, they don't have enough people for support! You can't talk to a real human to explain your problem anymore :-(
The only thing these CEOs, managers and noards care about are profits, they don't care about their users.
Very easy: offer them a long trial (numbers will show that your revenue is hurt, but don't care). Eventually the trail runs out, and they search how to renew or they ask support. The first result appears: your payment subscription page.
If a customer has used your product already for long time 20 days+, extra steps to set up payment one time, especially when you do not auto charge short trials, the customer is happy.
so you offer a free trial on google play that is long enough to get people hooked. but there is no paid app on google play. instead people have to pay through other means to unlock the app?
it's actually Google being parasitic on all the apps' infra. I paid for the app store infra when I bought my phone, and every time I open it and see ads, and with my tracking data for the NSA. They don't need to be allowed to quadruple dip.
Regardless of my whataboutism, I still think tax is an very apt description of what the Google Play and App Store fees effectively represent. I would be happy to call it a fee if the stores would actually allow effective competition. But as it stands right now, the "government" like behaviours make the wording tax fairly accurate.
> This effectively means I’m paying Google more than 1000 Euro per year for their services. 1000 Euro per year is 1.5x what I’m paying for my internet access. It’s roughly what I’m paying for my notebook per year if you assume I use it for three to four years. When my internet breaks, someone drives to my house and fixes it. When my notebook breaks, someone drives to my house and fixes it.
Couldn’t have said better. We all allowed it to come to this.
Receiving 1000 euros without having any real work or accountability is the epitome of free profit. No wonder these platform gatekeepers are fighting so hard to maintain it (at the cost of you, the consumer).
And yet people (in general) just dont care, because they don't truly feel the pain until it's too late - issues like privacy and such are like that.
It's the arrogance. "You wouldn't have made 10 euros if I didn't give you the storefront and the one click install". Unfortunately they are right about this too. Why would they then also provide customer support that costs them money. They have enough "happy" customers as it is. Literally millions of apps are there.
It's called "Rent-seeking" when a powerful entity extracts wealth without providing any commensurate value.
Google wants you to believe the only way to get an app is through them. They have programmed society to believe this - despite the fact that you have never needed Google to download and run apps on your laptop. Apple also wants you to believe this, which is why they keep making it more impossible to run Mac apps without the Apple Store. They too want to extract your wealth and control you.
FOSS was created because people didn't have a way to cooperate and share the source code for their programs, to let users fix their own problems. Like the "right to repair" but for software. But Apple and Google wouldn't exist in the forms they do today without our FOSS. Our own software is being used to manipulate us, take our money, and take away our freedoms. Ironic.
Maybe it's time for a new software license that does discriminate against the rent seekers. Not because we deserve money when someone uses our free software. But because our freedoms are being trampled by the companies who use our software.
I think we should define that new license, abandon the old projects using the old licenses, and start using new ones. We already did this for Rust tools, I think we can do it for new licenses too.
I think GPLv3 already does this, with its anti-tivoization requirements. People just need to switch to an up-to-date copyleft license rather than permissive licenses.
"Fortunately, I’m no longer economically dependent on Google Play Store revenue. Google doesn’t deserve me and my money anymore. I’m done. Fuck the gatekeepers."
Sorry this is a bit of a long rant. To many people here this will be a very old hut but I've only recently realized that Apple and Google are basically extortion rackets and have made the online world way worse and enshittified than it should be. Why? They deliberately make it as hard as possible to sell true cross-platform apps. "Buy one license, install our software on all of your devices." That should sound reasonable, yet it's impossible as a business model. If you put an app on the Apple Store or on Google Play, you cannot have it unlocked by a license code. So you have to sell it on their platform. That means that if you want to sell one license for all platforms, you'd have to force your users to buy the license in one of those stores, then generate desktop license from that store purchase. That's not just nonsense, it still wouldn't work because the user can still not switch from iOS to Android and vice versa.
Okay, so sell mobile platforms separately but make desktop platforms with one license. That would still be nice and comparatively hassle-free for your customers. Not so fast, though! Desktop app stores also prohibit free apps with unlock mechanism. So you have to put unlockable versions on your website. However, app stores explicitly prohibit even just mentioning that the user doesn't have to buy an app if they have already bought it elsewhere. They strictly prohibit pointing the user elsewhere to check whether they could use it for free. Consequently, unless your users are extremely well educated about those platform quirks, many of them will erroneously buy your app twice.
But wait! There is an exception in Apple Store and Google Play Store. You're strictly prohibited from putting an app on there that needs to be unlocked by a license key, but you are allowed to ask the user to create an account or log into an existing account with a user name and email address. As long as users can also purchase the app on the respective store, that's allowed. So you can tie the app to an account and unlock it if the user already bought it for another platform. For some reason, unlocking an app with a code is strictly prohibited but unlocking it by providing your email and a password and then contacting a server is totally fine. That's why so many apps have those shitty login requirements. I wasn't really aware of that.
In a nutshell, apart from "freemium models" there are two major ways to sell cross-platform software that really is cross-platform. First, make the user pay individually for each platform, make them buy your app again and again with all the hassle that brings. Second, force them to login with an email and a user name with some direct contact to some centralized hub server.
IMHO, all of these options are strictly worse than just allowing your users to buy the app anywhere they like and unlock it for all other platforms.
All these stores, Apple Store, Google etc... must be
opened up. They constitute an illegal monopoly. Why does
the US government protect monopolies? This is against
the core tent of capitalism, aka more competition in
a free, open market, to have prices be as low as reasonable
possible for the customer. The USA shifted towards de-facto
monopolistic mafias. Financial kickbacks to the US government
must logically exist here - otherwise one can not explain
why the US government works for the interest of mega-corporations
only now.
To the author.
Go buy yourself some socks.Maybe a wallet, and go to the resturaunt that never fails you, or more generaly put in a concerted shameless effort to catch up, relax, fit the worst little personal bugs and recuring inconvieniences, essentialy put the same attention that you put into maintaining your product, into your self, remember to say fuck you google as you put the new
" toothbrush * " you got by the sink, that you have reminded yourself but failed to get for the last six months, because thats what we give up, when we are blamming ourselves for the rejections we get from nameless faceless functionaries, that doom loop of 'engagement' is the point behind the delays and mindless activity, and reversing it is almost magical.
* 'toothbrush', anything that is a constant tiny irritant going away can be absurdly triumphant
And they're annoying and often screw up the review process.
Google is always going to make money off any work they do. That's just business. They're not going to put more money towards better reviews without taking more money. And without the reviews, even as crappy as they are, a lot of really crappy software would be on the store. And a lot more would be actively malicious
And you were making like 7x as much as they were taking. Without them, you would even get noticed and you'd have made nothing.
We know this because almost nobody installs FDroid, and the other stores like Samsung make basically nothing for developers, even though they're preinstalled on so many devices.
It's not just business - it's basically a monopoly. Enough to extract rent while providing a minimal service.
Imagine if all streets were owned by two large companies who charged you enough to use them that you'd be paying as much in fees as you are in paying for gas. People would still use cars. The streets could be in horrible condition, the two companies would be making an insane amount of profit, but there would still be people out there saying that if it wasn't for those companies we wouldn't be getting anywhere and it's just business.
Ironically, the Apple App store was found to not be a monopoly. Or the playstation store, or xbox store for that matter.
In fact the legal system punishes you for having an open platform. The very reason the author can leave the play store is the same reason why the play store is a "monopoly". So sure, maybe the play store is a monopoly with some rigid definitions that lack nuance, but lets not throw away logic here.
If Apple/Google v Epic is what's on your mind, it was not having an open platform that resulted in the judgement. More what they did beyond just operating the platform. Being a monopoly in the US is legal, abusing market position less so. Maybe that lacks nuance and is a bit rigid, but it's the law in the States and what courts are bound by.
Something like the DMA and gatekeepers exist in part exactly because of the status quo and entities like Apple. I personally see the gatekeeper approach as a solid base, but know that it can be quite unpopular within the industry.
If I had an app, I'd have to pay Apple whatever they want to charge in order to get access to one part of all mobile phone users and Google whatever they want to charge in order to get access to the other.
Maybe calling that a monopoly wouldn't be good enough in an economics paper, but I don't see much of a practical difference. I get to accept the price or not do business.
And to set off some more bots: We desperately need regulation in this space.
It's an absolutely fair argument and it just doesn't show great intelligence to go straight to namecalling rather than bringing up counter arguments.
I do believe that while Google and Apple are evil gatekeepers they also made it easier for non-tech people to install their own app without always calling their kids or neighbours. That's already a big win.
I think it bothers OP less that they take a 15% tax than the fact that google provides terrible support for their own play store. If they would take that tax and provide good feedback and speedy version reviews, nobody would ever complain - it is expected to pay something since the play store doesn't run on good thoughts and prayers. But because they're a monopoly (or a duopoly if you count apple, which is a different platform altogether) they can afford to act this way.
> it bothers OP less that they take a 15% tax than the fact that google provides terrible support for their own play store.
The terrible support is really deeper than support. You literally stopped doing business here, because the lack of a feedback channel that allows Google to improve their business (i.e. realize they need a way to quickly correct stupid automated decisions) been Google's worst enemy and best friend. By ignoring support & feedback, the friction for internal decision making is low (no pesky customer demands, the product manager is king, management gets their way), but it leads to I think a lot of Google's products failing because they do not really understand their users, and the why behind the what they use.
I'm not sure being a monopoly alone explains Google's behavior here, but it could be as simple as that: who cares about one small customer... it's not like they have a viable alternative.
Yeah, I spend my free time making it accessible to bike in my area. Some of that is providing google with free street view data and other stuff. The amount of broken stuff and lack of support, when I'm literally giving them free work, is insane. I hate to do it, but the good outweighs the bad imo (I also provide it to open alternatives like OSM, Mapillary etc).
Like, their pipeline has been broken for months. No way to contact them. There is a support page for the api, but they close all issues as "the api is working". Well, sure, you accept the street view so the api is technically working, but haven't processed any for months.. It's probably a different team, but no way they would bother talking to each other..
Just don't upload to Google. Their maps navigation is terrible anyway. Fuck them. But do continue to provide your valuable data to alt maps.
Just don't upload to Google. They'll take the data from OSM anyway, after some time.
Specifically, no one will earn a promotion by talking to another team or improving customer service
Being a monopoly alone does not explain Google's behavior here. Google has a long history of not providing support.
The company's philosophy on the issue seems to be rooted in the hacker ethos of not giving repetitive work to humans if a machine could do it. When a machine can't do it, Google's thinking is to improve the machine. If the systems are good enough, nobody will need support.
The systems are not good enough, and that has been true for a long enough time that a reasonable company would have realized that a good support team is necessary until some far-future time.
> The company's philosophy on the issue seems to be rooted in the hacker ethos of not giving repetitive work to humans if a machine could do it. When a machine can't do it, Google's thinking is to improve the machine. If the systems are good enough, nobody will need support.
I have not worked at Google, but rather at 4 different companies that built automation machinery (ie multi discipline execution between mechanical, electrical, and software engineers). In none of those cases was it ever “the hacker ethos”. It was mid to upper level management whose incentive loops tended to be associated more with either shareholder perception or HR head counts. All of the engineers were usually begging the company to do a better job (allocate resources) to last mile customer support. Engineers build things, and are usually more satisfied if the products they build are well received because of the “last mile” bit where someone helps a customer appreciate their creation.
GP is not wrong, though. Google is well and publicly known for this approach. One of the most prominent example is their formulation of the role of SRE, which is now considered standard in the industry.
> I'm not sure being a monopoly alone explains Google's behavior here, but it could be as simple as that: who cares about one small customer... it's not like they have a viable alternative.
The last line contradicts the first line. Being a monopoly means they don’t have to care. If Apple and Google were required to allow competing app stores as first-class citizens then they would have to provide better service or no one would use their stores and they’d lose out on all of the rents they’re collecting from app developers.
Thanks for writing this out. I'd seen a lot of arguments for why we need multiple app stores, but I think this might be the first time I've seen someone crystallize the fact that an app store itself is a competitive business model that could provide better/cheaper services with competition.
My favorite quip in response to asking for something to get improved inside of Google is, "no one ever asked for this", knowing full well the opportunity to ask was near zero and no one ever looked.
Google is a crazy town, data driven by cherry picked post-hoc rationalizations driven by perf. The user never enters the equation.
> the friction for internal decision making is low (no pesky customer demands, the product manager is king, management gets their way)
I'd like to support that this goes "both" ways for companies who destroy their customer service. Not only do they not know what their customers want/problems they're having, but they don't know what their customers wouldn't want/problems they're not having. Like you say, it "lowers the friction," so some dumb, destructive idea that somebody has gets implemented based on title and force of personality.
But that's a monopoly. Nothing they do is destructive, other than putting any more work in than is necessary. If the store went down for weeks at a time, they might have a problem. The problem would result from this personally irritating and inconveniencing a regulator/politician, judge, or major stockholder/owner.
Author here: Indeed, 15% is fine. They do provide some services. They provide the CDN for downloading the APK. They handle sales taxes in the various countries, which would be a PITA to handle yourself. Similar-ish services like Patreon charge a fee too. The 30% they charged a couple of years back was bad. But I could live with 15% if the support were anything other than zero.
The problem is that it ISN'T a fee for services as it should be. Their platform power means that they can levy a tax, and they don't feel the need to do anything on exchange for that.
Yep, I'd hypothetically economically gladly build an alternative app store charging "only" 5% on app revenue. The blocker would be that Google has a hold on what store is installed by default on Android. Apple even more so. This is hardly a fair market.
There are other app stores on Android, e.g. OEM ones like the Galaxy store. The latter doesn't really compete on price though - 20% cut of one time payments and 15% of subscriptions. I think the Android app stores anchor to the iOS app store prices to piggy back on Apple's monopoly power - devs are used to having to pay Apple that much, so they will not resist if you charge the same.
> they will not resist if you charge the same.
Sure, but they also won't generally bother if the fees are the same as the installed-on-every-device Play Store
That would work because someone else "Google" is doing all the development of Android etc etc. Of course you can create a parasitic service for less.
Google is not developing Android for the IAP fees, they're doing it to sell phones loaded with their search, advertising, browser and services. They take hundreds of billions in revenue annually from this, they are being paid several times over for that work even if they get no IAP fees.
It's sad that Google has absolutely no foresight.
The speed of government is slow, incredibly slow. It's measured in election cycles. It takes government eight, twelve years to simply turn around and notice. But once it does, it's a juggernaut.
Nothing can stop it. Nothing can avert it. Nothing can prevent it. And as everybody from Facebook to Microsoft knows, once it starts moving, you're screwed.
In the US, the oil companies thought they were too big. Then the telco companies thought they were too big. What really happens is eventually people just get pissed off, and then it's too late.
Google is fast approaching that. They almost had chrome and other things ripped away from them, and now they've got requirements to have alternate play stores. If they don't turn course, and turn course blazingly fast, they're going to have their entire empire wrenched away from them.
Oh well.
> If they don't turn course, and turn course blazingly fast, they're going to have their entire empire wrenched away from them.
Unfortunately, that's no longer the case with the app store monopolies. While Apple is under some partial enforcement on parts of their app store policies, Google managed to play the game of regulatory brinksmanship better and largely avoided that for their app store. So the regulatory powers (such as they are) have already taken their best shot and this is where we are.
Once this starts it never ends. Regulatory action has been steadily increasing around the world, and it will continue to do so.
Juggernauts do not have to be fast. And the judge has seen Google being intractable and sneaky with alternate app stores too:
https://www.theverge.com/policy/979852/that-is-not-acceptabl...
There is now a record of this. The next action against Google, will see people pointing out each step they took to avoid compliance.
A case a year down the road about AI, will see stubborn attempts to comply like the above cited.
Google, with the gold plated shovel, digging a hole for itself. Put another way, breaking up a company typically comes after other methods don't work. Such as being sneaky and making them not work.
Or even because the required competition didn't occur, regardless of fault.
It's not over. It's a step taken, with a positive outcome, and a judge who is making sure there's follow through. Next step will be more stark.
You can already stand up an alternate store.
Google is funding Android fully from Play Store, since previous CFO the ad revenue isn't shared between parts.
They also say they generate $57 billion ad revenue from being default search engine on iPhone, so obviously there is a cash value to being the default search (and everything else) on Android too even if their accountants can finagle reasons that doesn't contribute to Android's development costs.
If they didn't develop Android they'd be paying $10s of billions annually for the prime positioning their apps and services and search enjoy too, so even if you buy their accounting tricks the development is paying for itself many times over.
That would then go against the wishes of people here for Google to be broken up and Android to self-fund, no? ;)
If Android did belong to someone else then there could be an argument that IAP fees are funding it and subsequently required, perhaps even under less-than-competitive circumstances.
But if the court allowed, Google would be paying that company $10s of billions for the prime real estate their software, search and services enjoy and it would then be a very weak argument that only IAP funds its development. Just like it is when Google earns $100s of billions in revenue from Android now.
Would it be OK for Microsoft to prevent Steam from running on Windows because Valve doesn't contribute enough to funding the Experiences and Devices org? I've never really understood why mobile platforms should be different from how we think about desktop ones.
Only Apple is. Android supports alternate app stores, and has done since 2008. Samsung's app store for Android has been running since 2009.
Parasitic? Writing software for folks' devices and selling it isn't parasitic...it's just participating in the market. Weird that the overton window has moved so far that anything not built by the trillion-dollar duopoly is considered some kind of free-rider.
It's not weird - you've just completely misunderstood the situation. This is about the OS, which the software in question (the alternate app store) relies on, but generates no revenue for. The devices are still being sold, because their manufacturers are allowed to make money, the alternate store is allowed to make money. Only the OS maker will make no money, because that would be bad.
what you are arguing for is objectively extremely bizarre. if you take a step back, this is what is playing out: company C makes a device. it needs an operating system to run software, so they add it. if there was no operating system the device would be useless and no one would buy it. now person A buys said device. it's theirs, they have paid money for it, they own it. person B writes some software. it runs on the device's operating system. they want to sell it to person A. person A wants to buy it from them. why should company C be involved at all? I found this super weird and distasteful when game consoles were allowed to use this business model, and am even more taken aback that general purpose computers get away with it.
You seem to imply Google was forced to open source Android or even to give it for free: sounded like it was a purely business decision to capture more of the market.
Now that they have, they are also turning around on bits of that too.
Ah yes, Microsoft famously never made money off of Windows.
Are you not following? The OS maker in this case is Google.
That trillion dollar duopoly is probably the worst case of free riders. It’s an enabler/vehicle for all the other billion dollar free riders to steal from the population.
theres nothing parasitic about a competing app store.
it is parasitic to try and prohibit competing app stores and then leverage your monopoly by charging monopoly prices.
everything google is trying to do to discourage graphene, newpipe, competing app stores, etc. is parasitic and it's right that they are being fined by the EU for this behavior.
> theres nothing parasitic about a competing app store.
I think a more honest way to say this might be: Android OS development is massively funded by Google, and the Play Store feeds into this hugely. No other store does this, so it shouldn't be surprising that they can charge a lower fee. They're just doing the easy bit.
It is rent extraction which always feels like bullshit because it is. Competition is supposed to be the counterbalancing force but it barely exists here.
It doesn't exist because it can't:
The basic services Google provides can effectively only be consumed by humans individually, creating an inevitable bottleneck.
Such bottlenecks impede interchangeability of goods, as you can't reasonably entertain multiple suppliers simultaneously there. And that means, you cannot have a free market, because you can't really have meaningful competition.
Google has captured services that really are public utilities. Them being "new" doesn't play a role.
Apple recently submitted in court filings that you'd have to pay ~8% for off-the-shelf solutions like Stripe or Paddle to be Merchant of Record anyway so 15% isn't really bad except for the high-earning apps, but Google should be doing something for that extra 7%.
8% for Stripe? Why would anyone have to pay that when my tiny company pays 1.5%?
It's a level of service above their payment processing, where they also collect and remit certain taxes which I believe is built-in to that ~8%. This is the same service that Google and Apple provide for in-app payments.
https://stripe.com/managed-payments
This is what Apple said about it:
> Stripe and Paddle are leading full-service, turnkey payment processing, and merchant-of-record providers handling all the services necessary for link-out, including payment processing, tax compliance, fraud detection, and customer service. Across the top apps, the mean implied processing and merchant-of-record fee based on Stripe’s and Paddle’s rack rates (which few, if any, large developers actually pay because they negotiate discounts or provision in-house) is 8.1% using Stripe rates, or 7.8% using Paddle rates.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
They also develop the OS and development platforms that the apps are built upon. The apps don’t exist on islands.
Yeah this the thing that grinds my gears about Apple too. These fools will argue in court out of one side of their mouth that the cut is used to police the store etc and do reviews then out of the other side of their mouth they just don’t do it or give the most mediocre half assed attempts and collect the revenue. Which is it? You shouldn’t be able to charge people and not provide the service your charging them for
This is a pretty common sentiment. I make iOS exclusive apps because I know when facing any problem Google support will be non-existent. Apple takes ages to respond but has been known to be humanly possible so far.
people hate taxation without representation. That's why this model has to be unsustainable, but the legislation has not caught up at all.
If different words exists why insist in making "creative" use of the wrong word?
Your local monopoly of water provider charges a fee not a tax (although many collect taxes on behalf of the state that sanctions the monopoly)
Platform apps stores tend to be a monopoly (specially in iOS case) and that decreases incentive to provide a decent service/product to their customers who hate that fact - not because customer have no representation.
I never submitted an app to play store but knowing how Google handles app customers (or any customer of their services/products) its believable that app devs are shafted too. I personally wonder if there's any differentiated service level between an app that results in revenue for Google vs one that is 100% free. I'd be pissed if my 15% fee is not buying me priority over the latest adware filled flashlight app
"Representation" means ability to hire an alternative should the original relationship sour.
We don't need better support. We need a way to fire Google via a robust market full of alternatives.
This isn't taxation. It's just a silly name for a fee. Fees are what make things sustainable.
It's taxation when it's imposed by a monopoly over users who have no choice except walking away.
This definition doesn't work, because my only choice when buying a burger at Dairy Queen is to pay the burger's price or walk away too, but it's not taxation.
you have the choice not to purchase burgers from dairy queens, but from macdonalds, or five guys, or wataburger.
You don't have a real choice in an app store on android (except recently, and even then, the alternative stores don't behave well for google-based apps).
That's why it's not a tax when you choose to buy DQ burgers, but a tax when you choose to deploy an app to google app store.
If there's no other burger joint in the small town it's the only place I can get burgers.
I agree Google is using a tax here but the rule you suggested doesn't work
Your town prohibits you from making your own burger?
Because burger meat is commonly sold in the smallest of grocery stores, and is not technically dependent on what buns, sauces, tomatoes, lettuce … or other ingredients you pair them.
And you can grow your own veggies, and bake your own bread.
It is an entirely componentized market. No gatekeepers.
Even single groceries in tiny towns continue having to compete with larger stores in bigger towns. Because they carry small selections most people make the drive to load up their larder regularly.”
You need to find an example that matches the point you are trying to make.
TLDR: Analysis reveals burger markets are nearly perfect economic opposites of centralized app store markets.
Who is stopping me from strapping a Raspberry Pi to a battery pack? Nobody, that's a componentized market too.
but that raspberry pi won't be able to run google apps (or other apps like your bank's) that require play store certification.
I can't make a DQ burger at home either.
Yes. But what is your point?
This is getting confused. Just find an example that does make your point.
> You don't have a real choice in an app store on android
You do, and you also can pick iPhone. Or not a smartphone. Or not use apps.
> (except recently, and even then, the alternative stores don't behave well for google-based apps).
Google provides planetscale services like Google Maps for free and you want to build apps that use their services but not pay them 15% for their store, and still complain they don't work perfectly? You seem to be outsourcing a lot to Google but expect to give them nothing in return.
Bringing up Google Maps here does nothing for your point because on web or native mobile you pay money to use the API for Google Maps (outside of the store fee). Offering a free version to end users does financially benefit Google.
There are numerous examples of people needing a smartphone to do things in their daily lives. I’ve read compelling stories of people who ran into trouble after ditching their smartphone.
There are lots of parallels to the railroad monopolies. Choice is not as available as you say it is.
> Offering a free version to end users does financially benefit Google.
How so?
> I’ve read compelling stories of people who ran into trouble after ditching their smartphone.
It'd be helpful if you mentioned them instead of just saying everyone should trust that you were compelled by stories.
You don’t get Maps “for free”, you pay with your data (your searches, your preferences, etc.). For Google maps is the bait to reel you in, you are the product they sell to their real customers: businesses. Google can shape your preferences by showing you what their paying customers want you to see.
I thought it’s self evident that products like Gmail, Search, Maps and others aren’t free because Google is aiming to do charity but because your personal data allows them to build a digital model of you and charge other businesses for access to that knowledge.
Around me I can’t think of a bank that allows any remote operation without a TAN only available on iOS or Android. That’s the root of a lot of future problems, not the least of which being that the bank charges you more for in person operations.
I understand that, but how does that factor into the larger conversation? Are you saying that Google should want to make sure these services should work flawlessly on other stores so we can be tracked by them even if we don't use the Play Store?
Google maps makes money through its API as well as accepting sponsored results to appear before correct results.
I'd agree you have a choice with 3rd party stores but they're working on limiting/killing those tiny markets, already.
Google Maps has its own billing model.
> and you also can pick iPhone.
"Reee!! It's not a monopoly!!! It's a duopoly!!!!" screeched the pedant.
> Or not a smartphone. Or not use apps.
"Submit to the duopoly or else you're not allowed to develop for the most common consumer computing device on the planet"
No, this analogy doesn't work because of switching costs. If I want a different burger, I drive across the street. If I want a different app store, I have to buy a new phone.
if the only way to use government services was to purchase either a dairy queen or McDonalds burger first that is a duopoly and they would be way more expensive and shittier quality than regular burgers as a result.
some smart alec would then point out that because even the cheapest, shittiest beef isnt free that this price is justified.
Nobody has said what Google is doing is justified. People are (correctly) saying that "taxation" is not the correct term for what they are doing. Google is in the wrong, but that doesn't make bad arguments correct just because they are aimed at Google.
It’s not a fee, thats just a silly name for a tax. Taxes are what make things sustainable.
See what I did there?
How do you define taxation?
Something you pay or you're thrown in jail.
In my country if I do not pay my taxes I do not get thrown in jail. Tax fraud gets you thrown in jail, but correctly declaring income but just not paying does not get you thrown in jail since we abolished debtors prison. And when we had debtors prison any debt could throw you in prison so that was a terrible definition since it means Sweden has no tax right now and in the past any debt would have been tax.
If your landlord requires you to pay rent with a phone app the phone is taxation?
A court ordered judgement isn't taxation, try again.
It kind of is.
It's when the guys who print the money pull some of the money back in from the market.
#mmt bay-beeee!
So countries without their own currency don't have taxation? Not all countries can print money.
At the level of customer service they provide (ie ~none), Google Play would be "sustainable" at a 1% cut. Everything above that is pure profit. Which is exactly why they're doing everything they can to lock people into Google Play and lock people out of distributing/accessing apps outside of it. This isn't some kind service Google is providing at cost out of the goodness of their hearts, it's their attempt to corner the market and extract a massive amount of economic value without doing any meaningful work.
The revenue funds more than just support, it funds the development of an entire OS and various SDKs to support the apps that it distributes from the store.
Nothing added to android in the last 10-15 years has been of any benefit to me, mostly just pointless interface churn, the addition of nag screens, and removal/deprecation/awkwardification of features I actually use.
Given that, I think the world would be improved by reduction of such “development”.
If you are unable to recognize the improvements Android has made from 15 years ago with Android 3.2 Honeycomb I think your use of devices is incredibly niche.
The 100s of billions they get from being installed in so many devices and advertising doesn't fund that? Could have fooled me. The result is the same. Play Store doesn't do anywhere enough to justify a 15% cut.
Android doesn't show advertising. Ads in YouTube get classified under YouTube's revenue and not Android.
mostly it funds google shareholders and their wildly overcompensated workforce.
And that's my problem with such business practises in general. Take an example of Claude. Not only, at this point, their models might be just marginally better than the open weight competition, they also also makes it entirely impossible for you to reach human support in case of an issue (and I am talking about real money related issues). You just can't do it. Yes, there's an email but that is also handled by the same bot.
I just don't understand how these companies can get away with that. These are the aspects of life that tells very clearly how most Govts are not chosen and ran for "the people" but the few, not the conspiratorial spirals. These are the smaller, but harsh Kafkaesque realities of life that says we lost this to the power of the "rich" - and it's an abstract power, it's not fixed, and if someone from the "masses" manages to become part of it they also reap the benefit but by the design of things that number has to be really small.
Okay, it deviated. The point is
> provides terrible support for their own play store.
Something like this is so abhorrent and yet is it normal and I didn't even start at how they can just charge 15 and 33% for of the incomes.
Of course people would complain, it's unrealistic to expect everyone to have the same expectation of what a fair fee is that somehow exactly matches the current fee (even if the service is great)
Customer support has gotten so terrible. Now that all big companies have terrible support, none of them are punished for it. You can still occasionally find people who give a shit in small business, but that is it. Google is probably one of the worst offenders of all. I don't know what the solution is, it seems like the only way to get any satisfaction on an issue at a big corp anymore is a social medial call-out like this one.
If you are here, thank you for Conversations, Daniel, it has been my go-to for years for communicating with friends and family.
Some eight years ago I worked on a Chrome extension with monetization support. I could not get payment working using Google APIs, no matter what I tried it errored with obscure undocumented error messages. Finally I reached out to their customer support and got swift overly friendly response. Several messages later, I still got these overly friendly elaborated messages, but the issue did not proceed anywhere. I kept explaining my problem and they assured me that they are working on it. Eventually I got bounced to their Android support (my problem concerned Chrome store), which made me think either they were taking a piss or used this tactique on purpose. I eventually abandoned the whole idea. Nowadays I would attribute their response to chatbots considering how elaborated and friendly, but yet totally useless their messages were, but this was before LLMs
That's because you the user are not the customer of Google and such services. You are actually the product being sold to the customer, namely advertising companies, by Google.
The farmer take care of his pigs but only to the point they get slaughtered.
Google has captured what really is a public utility and should be either state-owned or heavily regulated.
(Long) distance communications, just like public roads, breathable air, potable drinking water and so on do not fit into a "free market economy" paradigm.
They simply don't fulfill the basic requirements that make the "market" idea work.
Specifically, a free market needs goods from different suppliers to be easily interchangeable. You cannot sensibly build multiple roads parallel to each other, or have multiple water pipes installed and you have only one airway to breath through.
> Google has captured what really is a public utility and should be either state-owned or heavily regulated.
I think part of what makes a utility a utility is that the nature of the service is naturally a monopoly. For example, you can only realistically have one set of waterways, so the company providing tap water as a service is a utility. Same with power lines, you can only realistically have one set, so the electricity-supplying company is a utility. With phone/internet service, I imagine that also requires sharing infrastructure.
Google doesn't fit in that paradigm. The nature of their services don't naturally require sharing resources to compete. They a monopoly simply because they amassed a ton a money to do things that other people can't, like drive on all roads on Earth with special cameras, or host however many videos there are on YouTube, serving those videos throughout the world, and even pay livable wages to the creators of the videos.
it doesnt need to be a utility. they just need to crack down on every attempt google uses to kill the competition.
There should be an agency you can complain to for monopolies which has the power to dictate new rules to the monopolist with far reaching power to crack down on anything that smells like anti competitive behavior.
e.g.
- force banking apps that try to secure themselves with google play services to make that dependency optional.
- force google to stop blocking newpipe, aurora, etc.
- force google pay to make itself available on any platform that wants to integrate it (apple, graphene)
- force google to allow alternative app stores to become first class citizens.
That never works in the US, the monopolist will just wait it out 4-8 years until there is a friendly administration. You have to break them up any time you have the chance, it’s the only effective remedy.
That's the legal paradigm that we used to stop the railroads from choking America. But the real killer of their power was the Interstate Highway System - i.e. government funded infrastructure. Prior to the IHS there wasn't really ANY nationally funded infra[0] of that scale, we'd outsourced building it to private industry instead. After that it's basically assumed that infrastructure was the government's job, to the point where even the most conservative among us would point to "roads" as a thing governments do well and should be empowered in doing.
So anyway, the US government should run an open-access, quad-track railroad and fiber backbone along every highway. Maximize the ROI on that ROW. Also they should nationalize Android and iOS.
[0] Because slavery. The South really, REALLY hated any government roads because it diminished the economic power of literally owning a lot of people. Hell, one of the stipulations of the Confederate Constitution was to strip the General Welfare clause out of the constitution.
While I agree with where you're coming from, I think you're overstating it just a little. It only seems like something that should be considered a public utility because Google has anticompetitively bundled what should be several distinct types of products together as one take-it-or-leave-it package. Android (really Google Play Services) should not be tied to the Play Store App (think how MS was forced to include a browser choice screen in the EU). Likewise the Play Store Curation/Hosting Service should not be tied to the Play Store App (ie Aurora store etc should work and be fully supported by Play Store Curation/Hosting Service through the Service having a well-documented open API). Then Play Store Curation/Hosting Service would have to compete on its own merits, rather than anticompetitive tying with two instances of Metcalfe's law (Android users plus app developers).
Nothing has been captured, any more than a company inventing anything has "captured" it.
And there are other companies: Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Tencent MyApp, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Honor, K Telecom T-Store, Jio, MTN Play.
Not even close to a captured utility. And if it were, which state on the planet should own it?
> there are other companies: Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Tencent MyApp, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Honor,
Tell me about the different OSes each of Samsung, Huawei, Tencent MyApp, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Honor etc. run then that we can choose from.
It's like saying Windows doesn't have a monopoly in the PC space because HP, Dell, Lenovo, ASUS.
> Tell me about the different OSes each of Samsung, Huawei, Tencent MyApp, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Honor etc. run then that we can choose from.
Other companies using Google's incredible R&D spend and selling phones that use it is not Google's failing.
And we're talking app stores. They all have app stores disconnected from Google's app store.
> It's like saying Windows doesn't have a monopoly in the PC space because HP, Dell, Lenovo, ASUS.
No, on two counts. One: - and it's the same with Android - Apple exists, and so there's definitely not a monopoly from a lowercase personal computing perspective. Two: the conversation is about app stores. There are many app stores. It's like saying Microsoft doesn't have a PC hardware monopoly because HP, Dell, Lenovo, ASUS.
> Other companies using Google's incredible R&D spend and selling phones that use it is not Google's failing
On the contrary. I disagree.
It's possible to build something so successful and difficult that it rises to the level of public utility.
Why not say that Samsung's phone manufacturing is a public utility? That's successful and difficult.
Samsung is, as pointed out elsewhere in the thread, one among many. Like Dell. It's different in kind, not in degree.
If you make that comparison you clearly don't understand the point being brought up by others here. Which is fine. I'm not going to convince you, I'm just informing you how I'll be voting.
> They all have app stores disconnected from Google's app store
No they don't. Certainly not ones where my bank app or Netflix is. This is being obtuse on purpose.
> No they don't.
Yes. They do.
> Certainly not ones where my bank app or Netflix is.
Blaming Google for this is just insanity.
> This is being obtuse on purpose.
Agreed.
Except OEMS don't ship Windows forks with their own SDKs, UI frameworks, custom L&F, alternative stores.
Contrary to Google, Microsoft has a clear position on what OEMs are allowed to do with Windows.
Android OEMs largely don't do that either except for some specific markets where Google isn't a thing. Google does have rules for when you want to be certified and have Google Play and Google services on board, which you mostly do in the West and so OEMs comply.
Sure, they may ship a Samsung skin or preload some of their own junk, same as on Windows. That doesn't make what they ship a different OS.
The one exception would be HarmonyOS, but that's somewhat China specific.
Xioami, Huawei and Samsung all have the points I mentioned, with Android forks.
Harmony NEXT is no longer based on Android.
> Xioami, Huawei and Samsung all have the points I mentioned, with Android forks
If I buy a Samsung phone in North America or Europe today I get Google Play as the main app store, Google services etc. and if I want to develop an app for a Samsung Android phone, I use the official Google SDK and Kotlin like for every other Android phone.
They have their own skin and store, but nobody really uses that. Google Play it is, be it Samsung or Xioami. They're very far from offering any kind of genuine alternative to Google Play, Google or Android. Their stores are junkware no different than ASUS preinstalling some antivirus nobody wants.
> Harmony NEXT is no longer based on Android.
That's my point. Huawei is the only OEM offering something different, but not easy to get in Western markets and thus doesn't have app mindshare.
Nothing prevents you from using Samsung, Xiaomi or Huawei stores and cloud services, Google Play is only the main store if you configure it as such.
Google SDK naturally doesn't have the support for OEMs specific features.
Leaving just one Samsung example here, too lazy to dump everything else,
https://developer.samsung.com/mobile/galaxy-sdk-getting-star...
I am yet to see anyone disable OneUI, MIUI, HyperOS, EMUI for bare bones AOSP UI.
Google lets these forks do anything they want except things that take away money from Google.
Xioami, Huawei and Samsung have their own stores.
Does this fact take money away from Google?
Naturally.
Why are you pretending anyone uses them? These phones ship with Google Play and that's what people use.
Because people do use them as well, especially outside Western countries.
You're deluding yourself.
Pretending, some other company could come stroll along and take over Google's turf, completely ignores the underlying reality.
People don't talk on two phones at once, they only use one search engine regularly and they even only use one browser to surf the internet.
That bottleneck leads to market capture due to inevitable logical reasons, not because I say so.
If you want autonomous states, each one has to control their own infrastructure. Just don't forget to question your assumptions.
Ad blocking is what cements googles place.
But try telling the internet that their "morally pure" addiction to skirting compensation is actually what is killing (killed?) the web.
Every competitor dies in the cradle because 40% of the internet won't pay them while using their service.
Youtube with ad-blocking is the best video service on the internet, and no one can touch that.
This gotcha only works if you are a user of only their free services.
When Google charges me a monthly fee for storage, takes a percentage of my Play Store sales, or manufactures a Pixel that I purchase from their online store, I am absolutely their customer. I may also be providing data they will sell, but I am still paying them for goods or services and that makes me a customer.
The problem is that they continue treating their customers like livestock, and it seems they have little incentive to change.
The real problem here is that all those businesses are rounding errors on the balance sheet compared to ads, so the CEO doesn't care (or even know) about the issues and isn't motivated to improve anything.
Then have they repeatedly fought so hard legally to get to keep extracting three revenue? If they didn't care about it, they wouldn't do it in the first place.
The problem is that there's no pressure on them to act any differently. If they made 100x as much money from app purchases, they wouldn't suddenly treat app developers better just because of that. They might treat them better if the app developers had better alternatives, but that would also be enough to force Google to behave differently even with the current amount of revenue.
Android and Chrome exist as moats primarily. Pichai came up in Chrome and understands moats. Obviously if you can get the moat to be self-funding (Google Play IAP revenue) even better. Things like "the developer experience on Android is bad" don't prevent the moat from doing its job, but "Google and Chrome aren't defaults on Android" are very much losing the moat.
I don't disagree with this. I don't honestly see how it relates to your previous comment that I responded to though. It seems more like support for my rebuttal, which is that the moat is what matters, not whether the revenue is a "rounding error" compared to their other businesses.
This article in one sentence: "the developer of a small app switches to a third-party app store because Google Play ignores him." This doesn't hurt the balance sheet ($150 a month to Google is nothing), and doesn't affect the moat (this app isn't strategically meaningful and didn't even go away--it just moved).
They chose to not monetize at all anymore because they decide it's not worth the hassle due to having other sources of income. If they didn't have the other sources of income, it doesn't sound like he'd choose to move somewhere else.
They can treat their customers like livestock because their customers are okay with it. Why is that?
My hypothesis: turkeys think the farm is an amazing life until the week before Thanksgiving. Nobody really groks that Google is shit until it's too late.
These pithy sayings are not adding to the dialog.
Please try to engage more deeply.
For example, connect your turkeys more explicitly to a point you are making about Google. When is Thanksgiving coming? What will it look like?
That's every time Google does something bad to a customer. Such as the one who was banned for his son's medical photos. Or the one who was tricked into enabling passkeys and then couldn't sign in any more and called support.
Except we read here stories of ad customers - their main buisness - here indicating they don't give a shit about them either.
They are just so big, they can afford not giving a shit at all.
> Except we read here stories of ad customers - their main buisness - here indicating they don't give a shit about them either.
> They are just so big, they can afford not giving a shit at all.
You have to realise your idea that people use them for no reason is not very likely, don't you?
Are you sure you replied to my comment?
Yep! It appeared right underneath it.
So where exactly did I wrote anything like that?
"your idea that people use them for no reason"
I definitely know my reasons why I still use google despite knowing they don't care about me. That does not change the complaint.
I'm not talking about what you know. I'm talking about what you wrote: They are just so big
That's not why.
With such a perversion of definitions why not call the stock holders the true customers? Services can have multiple classes of users. Some YouTube users can be content creators. Some users can watch Shorts. Some can watch long term videos. Some can pay to run ad campaigns. This idea that there is only one true kind of "customer" is not how people think of these services.
I remember that once my flight was cancelled and I figured out that if I buy a bus ticket "right now" I'd be able to reach my destination in a sensible time. I quickly bought the ticket... for the wrong day.
I called the bus company, a native speaker of my language immediately picked up, rescheduled the ticket, and told me to pay €2 extra to the bus driver.
I was shocked that customer support could be so simple.
BTW I spent 6 hours total spread along 12 months calling an Indian customer service before I got my money back for the cancelled flight.
Google play went from being a cool place to upload hobbyist projects to a Real Business Platform.
You now need a business address and a bunch of other documents for apps that will probably lose money.
Google has also decided they really don’t like users installing apps outside the Play Store. Today it’s a bunch of scary warnings, soon it’s a convoluted process to enable all installs and eventually they probably just ban it all together.
Literally nothing about Android is worth while to me now. iPhones are more stable , easier to use and have vastly better end user support.
The App Store is also a living hell for developers. They will look for any excuse to deny you an account and later reject your app.
Dare I say programming isn’t as fun anymore. I guess I can still build WebGL games. Best not speak too loudly, Apple and Google might go after that next
I don't see how "android isn't worth it" when you go on to admit iOS is worse... App Store also a big pain and no usable workaround
Google is doing everything they can to slowly remove those work arounds.
https://keepandroidopen.org/
I listed my reasons for IOS. It’s ultimately just a much better user experience. You just have to give up on writing your own code to run on it.
The world is rarely black and white. Both can be true.
Android jumped the shark when the default launcher introduced a search bar that couldn't be removed.
I would love to be able to list our product in the Google Play store /s ... but after a year of trying we haven't been able to.
They introduced a phone verification step for the support phone number that you provide. But their apparent assumption is that app authors are individuals or tiny companies. They expect to be able to send a text to the support number, or have it answered instantly by a human to validate the number. Any kind of IVR means the number can't be validated.
I have been going back and forth with their support for a year. It takes months at a time for them to respond, to say "we fixed it try again" and I try again and the process is identical.
Is is annoyingly ironic because I am sure that Google themselves could not pass this process to get listed in the Play Store. Their advice of "just redirect your corporate number to someone's cellphone to get validated" is laugable.
yeah buy a burner, and validate, and throw out the burner
What I do not like about Android is how difficult it is to unlock the bootloader without ever connecting the device to Internet. Any device with flash memory should be re-programmable and it should be illegal to prevent user from doing this or adding measures (like locking components to CPU via cryptography or adding anti-reverse engineering measures) that make it difficult.
I had a business account that got banned due to inactivity. I make apps and I often update them ota, long story short the account it took ages to verify via DUNS and the phone number requirements got nuked. Can’t even reopen it, had to create a new one with a new email, no human to speak to, a nightmare due to the same duns number being on both accounts. Plus the recent forced 14 days of app testing. It’s comically bad, when I compare it to iOS it almost feels intentionally antagonistic to devs. Android has always been challenging (fragmented phone os mainly) but now has gotten to the point of not even being worth spending time there, especially since iOS tends to convert dramatically better
I get excited every time I learn about another E2EE messaging app where the server can be self-hosted. But as I understand it, the server that triggers push notifications for any android app must be hard-coded into the app's binary. Are there any good architectural workarounds for this? I've read a little bit about VAPID[1] but I don't know if it is actually a viable approach and I don't think I've ever seen it promoted in an E2EE messaging app with a self-hosted server.
[1] (Disclosure: the AI gave me this link) https://unifiedpush.org/news/20250131_push_for_decentralized...
Conversations is a XMPP client, it's essentially the same protocol that delivers reliable notifications to every Android, Nintendo switch, etc. Unless you have an Android distro that kills every background app indiscriminately, you will be fine with Conversations delivering messages and notifications to you.
Interestingly, the link you posted relates to Unified Push, which is a protocol that relies on a "distributor" app which acts as a proxy, receiving reliable notifications on behalf of other applications. And it happens that Conversations can be configured as a UP distributor, because of how good it is at that/how well the XMPP protocol lends itself to it.
Long way to say you should give XMPP a shot, it really works well!
It's possible for the app to poll the server for new messages. iOS also supports light background work that can poll server from time to time and trigger notification on the device, rather than using apple's push notification infra.
The trade off is that you gain some extra privacy with simpler architecture and accept that some notifications will be delayed as ios decides when to run the bg job for the app.
source: I develop e2e app with self-hostable server (145 lines of zero deps python for the whole server).
How do you trigger that in iOS? iOS can decide not to trigger it all from what I have read - https://mertbulan.com/dont-rely-on-bgapprefreshtask-for-your...
Even Android is not predicatable from my testing or I'm doing something wrong
I assume the only way it to be a good citizen: an app someone uses often, app itself is low cpu/memory, BG app refresh quick/cheap/doesn't drain much energy.
But yeah, if you need a predictable way is either APN or safari push notifications.
What's your app? I'd love to try it out!
TUI + iPhone: https://github.com/achempion/tlx
> I was in a toxic relationship with Google[/Apple/Amazon/X/Instagram/Facebook/TikTok], and the only reason I stayed was economic dependency.
That just about sums up Big Tech
Yeah that "there is no way to talk to a human at Google" is one of the reasons I never recommend a Google solution at current workplace... Or to family.
I recommend the book “sacred economics” regarding this play.
Free to read online - https://charleseisenstein.org/books/sacred-economics/
I've abandoned my Google apps after all the requirements over the last year or so. It's too much of a hassle. Apple is friendlier. Also, it wasn't worth justifying 1% of the income and 99% grief compared to Apple.
I know this is a stupid question even before I ask it, but is there any chance at this point of seeing something out of the scope of Apple and Google for mobile?? Will the bank apps ever allow people out of these two players
Why would you ever use a bank app? It's just going to end up storing financial information on your mobile which will then get stolen.
We can’t even get some of the largest banks to do competent 2 factor, after all these years. The idea that they’re going to produce feature parity on peculiar platforms does seem like a big stretch.
No, because it is near impossible to compete with "free" and totally impossible to compete with "free-and-you-can-use-ad-block."
The truth is that these corps are so entrenched because people love love love the ad model. I mean, they hate the ads, but they are so sold on access being free that introducing a cost would come off like charging money to walk in a public park. Totally confusing.
And frankly the other path wouldn't be all roses either. There would be a wealth divide in technology where poor people wouldn't be able to afford to use all the stuff available to them now for free.
If you are referring to banking apps, I just don't use banking apps that don't work on my degoogled phone thus granting them the low fraud risk they so strive for with forcing locked devices.
You're free to make one, and bank apps are often less locked down than you think - try them yourself instead of accepting possible FUD. Also your bank 100% has a checkbox on your account they can click to disable any phone hardware requirements on your account.
> your bank 100% has a checkbox on your account they can click to disable any phone hardware requirements
I was going to thank you. I still thank you if this is true.
How do you know about the bank checkbox?
My bank is huge and I’m skeptical they give a crap about me any more than Google. Their app certainly doesn’t look like it.
(I noticed your account has been posting a lot of what I consider to be “garbage comments” in this article, so I’d like some kind of claim to fact check.)
I know that because of all the reports of people going to their bank and complaining the app won't work on their phone, then getting it fixed.
Motorola is planning to release phones with GrapheneOS. So far only expensive models have been confirmed, but I assume cheapos should follow.
Of course they're not doing this out of good heart. My theory is that China wants to have a popular smartphone that is completely independent from US companies. But hey, once upon a time Google were "the good guys" too, so enjoy the party while it lasts.
An interesting point is that it's important to have powerful China around because they're a capitalist competition to the US.
> An interesting point is that it's important to have powerful China around because they're a capitalist competition to the US.
Semi-capitalist at best. They're good for cloning things invented in the West, but the problem is that that is much cheaper than inventing, so things get commoditised and the places that can do expensive R&D have to find other ways to make money all the time.
1. That's not true. More and more segments of technology are being dominated by China. China sells lots and lots of everyday objects that are wholly desgined in China, with quality beating western products. They're just small improvements over existing designs of relatively simple things, so nothing makes the headlines.
2. Lots of Chinese technology never leaves China for political reasons, rather than economic/technology ones.
3. If you want to buy a semi-professional machine as an advanced hobbyist, often your only option is China.
4. Apple is wildly known for taking existing designs and improving on them. Why is it good for Apple to do that, but bad for China to do that?
> Apple is wildly known for taking existing designs and improving on them. Why is it good for Apple to do that, but bad for China to do that?
I'm not saying that's the case.
Isn't graphene completely dependent on what Google ships though? Ok they may be able to support Motorola devices longer than Googles releases facilitate supporting Google devices, but it's still ultimately android, which is still ultimately controlled by Google.
I'm not saying it isn't an improvement but this feels like choosing centos because you don't like the direction fedora is taking.
Writing a new OS from scratch simply ain't gonna work, because people rely on Android apps working on their phones.
App release reviews take at least 1 week now. They take 15% of revenue and I had to pay $25 to create an account. And I'm sure I spent more hours on setting up my business + bank account, dun's number, google account creation & verification, app listing configuration/verification and only then getting to the review stage. My first round took exactly 1 month from having a signed app release on my laptop ready to go to it showing publicly on the store.
Same here My build was ready like for a month and all that was stopping me is the requirement for the 12 testers being active for 14 days. When I applied to both stores, I thought apple is gonna be a problem, but google is a bigger unmovable wall
maybe for a brand new app submission.
my apps take maybe 1-2 days max. usually hours.
With accrescent.app you will be able to sell apps or distribute closed source apps in a privscy-focused way.
Unfortunately google is now a massive juggernaut that has 20+ layers before you can ship anything, and thats bled out to the users of their services. I wish we had better alternatives. In fact, I now just focus on shipping a PWA.
Btw thanks to the author. I got Conversations to work with Micro (https://micro.mu), the personal assistant I'm building. Its a nice XMPP client. Now just need to figure out how to do encryption for queries going into the model itself.
I've tried to publish an app in Play recently to get a taste of the experience. And I must say the taste was sour. Contrary to the experience of many I was able to reach a real human about my problem, but the human was less helpful that an AI pointed at the documentation. The AI was at least able to unrestand the issue, while the human simply talked past me.
That's the problem with all big billion dollar companies, they don't have enough people for support! You can't talk to a real human to explain your problem anymore :-( The only thing these CEOs, managers and noards care about are profits, they don't care about their users.
Our app has 17,000+ users and has never paid a cent to Google :) With a little out of box thinking, you can avoid Google tax.
How do you do it?
Very easy: offer them a long trial (numbers will show that your revenue is hurt, but don't care). Eventually the trail runs out, and they search how to renew or they ask support. The first result appears: your payment subscription page.
If a customer has used your product already for long time 20 days+, extra steps to set up payment one time, especially when you do not auto charge short trials, the customer is happy.
so you offer a free trial on google play that is long enough to get people hooked. but there is no paid app on google play. instead people have to pay through other means to unlock the app?
They push the user to their website where subscriptions are.
It's not a tax. It's you being parasitic on someone else's infra.
it's actually Google being parasitic on all the apps' infra. I paid for the app store infra when I bought my phone, and every time I open it and see ads, and with my tracking data for the NSA. They don't need to be allowed to quadruple dip.
> I paid for the app store infra when I bought my phone
How do you know that?
Money was deducted from my bank account.
Given what google search/AI/data tracking is, there should be no shame in using their infra for free. Hell,it should all be free by default.
Good thing the companies that participate in the current AI craze would never ever behave in any way parasitic.
Whataboutism is just so pointless.
pointless, yes. Entertaining, also yes.
Regardless of my whataboutism, I still think tax is an very apt description of what the Google Play and App Store fees effectively represent. I would be happy to call it a fee if the stores would actually allow effective competition. But as it stands right now, the "government" like behaviours make the wording tax fairly accurate.
As long as they can lock you up for not paying it, it's a tax.
At least in Europe - these rouge corporations need to be reined in or just leave the market.
Google Play's app registration is so much more complicated now that Good Luck getting to production ever.
And even then the same thing on every update. If you're a small business and your livelihood depends on that then it's a nightmare to deal with.
And no, kicking them out won't be a problem. No sky is going to fall. Vacuum would be filled in very quickly.
You should just be able to give them secure access to your git repo and they can get an LLM to do a code review.
Conversations is pretty nice for self hosted xmpp. Wish there was an iOS client!
Monal is decent on iOS.
> This effectively means I’m paying Google more than 1000 Euro per year for their services. 1000 Euro per year is 1.5x what I’m paying for my internet access. It’s roughly what I’m paying for my notebook per year if you assume I use it for three to four years. When my internet breaks, someone drives to my house and fixes it. When my notebook breaks, someone drives to my house and fixes it.
Couldn’t have said better. We all allowed it to come to this.
Receiving 1000 euros without having any real work or accountability is the epitome of free profit. No wonder these platform gatekeepers are fighting so hard to maintain it (at the cost of you, the consumer).
And yet people (in general) just dont care, because they don't truly feel the pain until it's too late - issues like privacy and such are like that.
It's the arrogance. "You wouldn't have made 10 euros if I didn't give you the storefront and the one click install". Unfortunately they are right about this too. Why would they then also provide customer support that costs them money. They have enough "happy" customers as it is. Literally millions of apps are there.
so why doesn't this happen on the PC?
The fact is, google engineered their app store to be monopoly, following apple's model (which is also engineered - they had more foresight about it).
There are no good artificial monopolies, and natural monopolies should be regulated to prevent undue influence (and unwarranted profit).
It makes sense to leave, but it also seems like the overall sentiment would be more positive given the “it paid my rent for many years” part.
You rarely leave with a positive sentiment when you felt trapped and abused in the relationship.
> For years I’ve felt like I was in a toxic relationship with Google, and the only reason I stayed was economic dependency.
Slavery: one party makes you pick cotton or you aren't allowed to eat or sleep.
Not slavery: one party makes you supply widgets or you aren't allowed to eat or sleep. Another party gives you widgets for picking cotton.
We should all be happy to participate in the not slavery society, right? We should all feel great because we aren't slaves.
I've used an Android phone for about 10 years now, and I have never once used Google Play.
Yes, Android is a rather Google-ified experience, but there is life outside of Google. Let's live it.
It's called "Rent-seeking" when a powerful entity extracts wealth without providing any commensurate value.
Google wants you to believe the only way to get an app is through them. They have programmed society to believe this - despite the fact that you have never needed Google to download and run apps on your laptop. Apple also wants you to believe this, which is why they keep making it more impossible to run Mac apps without the Apple Store. They too want to extract your wealth and control you.
FOSS was created because people didn't have a way to cooperate and share the source code for their programs, to let users fix their own problems. Like the "right to repair" but for software. But Apple and Google wouldn't exist in the forms they do today without our FOSS. Our own software is being used to manipulate us, take our money, and take away our freedoms. Ironic.
Maybe it's time for a new software license that does discriminate against the rent seekers. Not because we deserve money when someone uses our free software. But because our freedoms are being trampled by the companies who use our software.
I think we should define that new license, abandon the old projects using the old licenses, and start using new ones. We already did this for Rust tools, I think we can do it for new licenses too.
I think GPLv3 already does this, with its anti-tivoization requirements. People just need to switch to an up-to-date copyleft license rather than permissive licenses.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#Tivoization
"Fortunately, I’m no longer economically dependent on Google Play Store revenue. Google doesn’t deserve me and my money anymore. I’m done. Fuck the gatekeepers."
+1.
Sorry this is a bit of a long rant. To many people here this will be a very old hut but I've only recently realized that Apple and Google are basically extortion rackets and have made the online world way worse and enshittified than it should be. Why? They deliberately make it as hard as possible to sell true cross-platform apps. "Buy one license, install our software on all of your devices." That should sound reasonable, yet it's impossible as a business model. If you put an app on the Apple Store or on Google Play, you cannot have it unlocked by a license code. So you have to sell it on their platform. That means that if you want to sell one license for all platforms, you'd have to force your users to buy the license in one of those stores, then generate desktop license from that store purchase. That's not just nonsense, it still wouldn't work because the user can still not switch from iOS to Android and vice versa.
Okay, so sell mobile platforms separately but make desktop platforms with one license. That would still be nice and comparatively hassle-free for your customers. Not so fast, though! Desktop app stores also prohibit free apps with unlock mechanism. So you have to put unlockable versions on your website. However, app stores explicitly prohibit even just mentioning that the user doesn't have to buy an app if they have already bought it elsewhere. They strictly prohibit pointing the user elsewhere to check whether they could use it for free. Consequently, unless your users are extremely well educated about those platform quirks, many of them will erroneously buy your app twice.
But wait! There is an exception in Apple Store and Google Play Store. You're strictly prohibited from putting an app on there that needs to be unlocked by a license key, but you are allowed to ask the user to create an account or log into an existing account with a user name and email address. As long as users can also purchase the app on the respective store, that's allowed. So you can tie the app to an account and unlock it if the user already bought it for another platform. For some reason, unlocking an app with a code is strictly prohibited but unlocking it by providing your email and a password and then contacting a server is totally fine. That's why so many apps have those shitty login requirements. I wasn't really aware of that.
In a nutshell, apart from "freemium models" there are two major ways to sell cross-platform software that really is cross-platform. First, make the user pay individually for each platform, make them buy your app again and again with all the hassle that brings. Second, force them to login with an email and a user name with some direct contact to some centralized hub server.
IMHO, all of these options are strictly worse than just allowing your users to buy the app anywhere they like and unlock it for all other platforms.
All these stores, Apple Store, Google etc... must be opened up. They constitute an illegal monopoly. Why does the US government protect monopolies? This is against the core tent of capitalism, aka more competition in a free, open market, to have prices be as low as reasonable possible for the customer. The USA shifted towards de-facto monopolistic mafias. Financial kickbacks to the US government must logically exist here - otherwise one can not explain why the US government works for the interest of mega-corporations only now.
Open ALL stores.
To the author. Go buy yourself some socks.Maybe a wallet, and go to the resturaunt that never fails you, or more generaly put in a concerted shameless effort to catch up, relax, fit the worst little personal bugs and recuring inconvieniences, essentialy put the same attention that you put into maintaining your product, into your self, remember to say fuck you google as you put the new " toothbrush * " you got by the sink, that you have reminded yourself but failed to get for the last six months, because thats what we give up, when we are blamming ourselves for the rejections we get from nameless faceless functionaries, that doom loop of 'engagement' is the point behind the delays and mindless activity, and reversing it is almost magical.
* 'toothbrush', anything that is a constant tiny irritant going away can be absurdly triumphant
15% is a lot. I'm not trying to say it isn't.
And they're annoying and often screw up the review process.
Google is always going to make money off any work they do. That's just business. They're not going to put more money towards better reviews without taking more money. And without the reviews, even as crappy as they are, a lot of really crappy software would be on the store. And a lot more would be actively malicious
And you were making like 7x as much as they were taking. Without them, you would even get noticed and you'd have made nothing.
We know this because almost nobody installs FDroid, and the other stores like Samsung make basically nothing for developers, even though they're preinstalled on so many devices.
The app store is full of crappy and malicious software though. Why pay them for something they aren't doing anyway?
so how much do you think they should take?
what is "fair" in your opinion?
For the services they currently provide, zero. They provide negative value. If they shut down the play store that will be good.
It's not just business - it's basically a monopoly. Enough to extract rent while providing a minimal service.
Imagine if all streets were owned by two large companies who charged you enough to use them that you'd be paying as much in fees as you are in paying for gas. People would still use cars. The streets could be in horrible condition, the two companies would be making an insane amount of profit, but there would still be people out there saying that if it wasn't for those companies we wouldn't be getting anywhere and it's just business.
It's literally not. And your analogy is bad, because it describes inelastic demand, and not the platform effect.
How is the Play Store not a monopoly? It has been found such by multiple judges in multiple jurisdictions for a reason.
Ironically, the Apple App store was found to not be a monopoly. Or the playstation store, or xbox store for that matter.
In fact the legal system punishes you for having an open platform. The very reason the author can leave the play store is the same reason why the play store is a "monopoly". So sure, maybe the play store is a monopoly with some rigid definitions that lack nuance, but lets not throw away logic here.
If Apple/Google v Epic is what's on your mind, it was not having an open platform that resulted in the judgement. More what they did beyond just operating the platform. Being a monopoly in the US is legal, abusing market position less so. Maybe that lacks nuance and is a bit rigid, but it's the law in the States and what courts are bound by.
Something like the DMA and gatekeepers exist in part exactly because of the status quo and entities like Apple. I personally see the gatekeeper approach as a solid base, but know that it can be quite unpopular within the industry.
To me that's semantics.
If I had an app, I'd have to pay Apple whatever they want to charge in order to get access to one part of all mobile phone users and Google whatever they want to charge in order to get access to the other.
Maybe calling that a monopoly wouldn't be good enough in an economics paper, but I don't see much of a practical difference. I get to accept the price or not do business.
And to set off some more bots: We desperately need regulation in this space.
> And you were making like 7x as much as they were taking. Without them, you would even get noticed and you'd have made nothing.
Jesus Christ you can always count on HN for the most sycophantic, bootlicking comments sucking up to big tech imaginable.
It's an absolutely fair argument and it just doesn't show great intelligence to go straight to namecalling rather than bringing up counter arguments.
I do believe that while Google and Apple are evil gatekeepers they also made it easier for non-tech people to install their own app without always calling their kids or neighbours. That's already a big win.
It is not a win that we've given up our freedom and privacy to Google, Apple, Steam, etc. because people refused to learn how to click setup.exe.
There’s Huawei App Gallery but it is to the West a product of a commie so it needed to be suppressed and snuffed.