How about the Google Play as system app? I would like to see that gone too. Just make every app stores normal apps. No special privileges.
The problem is that there are very good reasons to have specific authoritative app stores/package repositories. and it is a lot harder to have privileged and unprivileged accounts on a phone versus a computer.
But yeah. Something has to be done about that since it is the fundamental issue with mobile devices.
I mean as someone running Graphene OS it hasnt been that difficult having the playstore being a sandboxed non system app
The issue is less the app store itself and more the applications in it. Because while I agree that basically everything should run sandboxed unless specifically given permission, the problem is more about sourcing the apps themselves.
Google and Apple are far from perfect but they do a good job of protecting big companies. So if you download “Chase bank app” with 12 million stars from “Chase bank company” (like, their actual account and not just me half assing it) then you can pretty much trust that is legit. Whereas downloading that on a random app store you bought so you can play pubg mobile locally or whatever nonsense people were doing? You can pretty much trust that it is not legit but most people won’t understand that.
In a perfect world? I would love it if people got into a habit of checking hashes (which, is an inherently flawed approach but “works pretty well” if you aren’t already compromised) and so forth. As it stands? There are very good reasons to just tell grandpa to not install random APKs he found on the internet.
Exactly. I don’t even use the Play store on GrapheneOS, I use Aurora to get apps from Google Play, and F-Droid for everything else. I don’t even have Google Play services running at all on my main profile, it only runs on my “work” profile because I need an app that needs it.
Is it though? I have three profiles on my phone:
- main - all my normal apps; no Google Play whatsoever
- work - work apps; Google Play services running
- google - Google stuff (like Google Maps and whatnot); Google Play services running
This is on GrapheneOS, and they basically just ship AOSP with some patches on top.
Congrats. You just volunteered to teach all the boomers (and the zoomers who can’t do anything that isn’t google docs) how to set all that up and maintain it
May Erastil have mercy on your soul
I’m sure this will be done with consumers in mind and won’t contribute to enshittification of the phone ecosystem, like launching a game on steam launching a whole new launcher. Nah, companies want what’s best for us
“We’re going to tear the barriers down, it’s just the way it’s going to happen,” said Donato. “The world that exists today is the product of monopolistic conduct. That world is changing.” Donato will issue his final ruling in a little over two weeks.
The hero we need…
Now do Apple.
At least you can have a third party app store on Android. Samsung, Amazon, and Xiaomi have their own app stores on Android devices. And there’s F-Droid, too. But that’s flat out impossible on iOS still, right?
Apple has a larger share of the US smartphone market (55-some-odd percent vs. Androids’s 44) so not only do more people have Apple devices and are thus likely to be impacted by Apple’s stranglehold on their platform, but you literally cannot put any app on that platform without Apple’s approval and kowtowing to their policies for the same, in addition to them taking a mandatory cut. (Yes, I am aware of jailbroken devices which is a tiny statistically insignificant fractional corner of the iPhone user base). Apple has already provably stifled competition in the iPhone app space by, e.g., prohibiting any web browser that does not internally use the Safari rendering engine and previously banning emulators because they might allow “external code” to run on the device.
This case isn’t a “win” for anybody except one megacorporation over another. The crux of the issue originally was that Epic thought both Google and Apple were taking too big of a cut of their revenue, and didn’t want either tampering with their in-app microtransactions. Both Google and Apple retaliated by delisting Fortnite for having untaxed microtransactions in it, and then Epic sued both of them.
The decisions in the Epic vs. Google and Epic vs. Apple cases are basically opposites of each other, which makes zero sense when anyone could (and still can) sideload Fortnite onto an Android device if they wanted to and not deal with Google, but this is still not possible on an iPhone.
Other app stores that are approved by Apple while giving Apple a cut after a million downloads of an app.
You still can’t install whatever .ipa file you want on iOS, even in Europe. So if you want something like Revanced (uYou+ on iOS), then you have to go through the whole rigamarole of creating an Apple developer account, resigning the ipa file, and repeating the resigning process every week, optionally using something like AltStore to automate that process, or alternatively, jailbreak, which means that you have to stay on an old, exploitable iOS version and never update.
What really needs to happen is that the consumer needs to own the device they bought. What this means in the smartphone world (also other devices, like video game consoles, car computers, smartwatches, smart TVs, tablets, laptops, etc.) is a few things: root access, an unlockable bootloader, and replacable signing keys for the primary bootloader while providing a firmware package to go back to 100% stock (so no Samsung Knox that irrevocably triggers after unlocking the bootloader or DRM keys that get irrevocably wiped when unlocking the bootloader) (all of these being optional features that the user has to explicitly enable). Anything short of that is not ownership.
Google was giving preferential treatment to certain companies and had a bunch of backroom deals going on and generally very anticompetitive behavior.
Right but is that actually illegal given the fact that you can sideload apps it’s not like they’re locking people out of their devices.
I don’t like it but I’m not sure it necessarily meets the criteria for illegality.
This makes this decision seem stupid. I don’t quite understand how US law works but I thought it was precedent based which meant that once one case had been decided that essentially decided all similar cases unless they were demonstrably different. I don’t understand why that isn’t the case here.
Having a “monopoly” isn’t illegal.
Using your “monopoly” position to pick winners and losers is.
Google | Microsoft | Apple
If we can break these companies into dozens of pieces we may be able to get back the world we lost
