95
Google originally did not want to make any money from Android's app store
(www.androidauthority.com)
And shareholders were originally happy with their profits
this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
95 points (92.8% liked)
Technology
59174 readers
3167 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Narrator: They never were.
Said no Google exec ever.
I heard Google was a non-profit and they care about us very much.
Remember Open Handset Alliance (https://www.openhandsetalliance.com/)?
Or when it was actually possible to make an app for Android using open source tools?
Or when it was actually possible to make an app for Android using open source tools?
Is it not now? There are lots of actively-maintained apps in F-Droid, and as I understand it anything in F-Droid must at least be buildable with open source tools.
Android SDK source code is available, in theory and in theory you can build yourself. In practice binaries provided by Google come with restricting licence how you can use them while source is so scattered around weird control systems that noone knows if it's actually complete source and possible to use.
There was a project to provide FOSS builds of the SDK, but is unmaintained. https://gitlab.com/android-rebuilds/auto Debian also has android-sdk in it's repos, but 23 is the max API level now.
I don't know how F-Droid build apps today, it seems like a big problem.
I'm not sure, but F-Droid does state:
We cannot build apps requiring Non-Free build tools, including Oracle’s JDK or some pre-release toolchains.
They've been pretty consistent about their requirement that everything be open source.
I mean they make money syphoning personal data, they could have left everything free I guess
That's the thing with big mega corps. They could lower prices, make some products free, give more to app makers in this case - and it won't hurt a single person in their firm.
But they won't. They just want a higher green number, that's so high it's not possible to spend in a lifetime.
And you get nothing, because they won't even pay their taxes.
I miss 2008 Google
Hahahahaha
25% went to carriers
2008 was different. It's amazing how much power carriers had at the time.
Of course they make bank on their app store. It's a monopoly.
It is not a monopoly. They have Apple as a major competitor and Google allows sideloading within their own ecosystem.
Apple is the one where a monopoly is starting to become a concern, especially as their app ecosystem is completely locked down.
Real talk: sideloading is allowed on android in the most maliciously compliant way possible.
Google restricts what other app stores can be included with devices that ship with play services
User-sideloaded app stores can't auto-update apps
Play protect will flag any app that the play store has hashes of, but was installed by another app store. (Developers cannot, for example, upload a list of valid hashes for their apps to Google to prevent false positives here, effectively making other install routes appear as malware if they're different.)
User-sideloaded app stores can’t auto-update apps
I think they've changed this in recent versions. While I disable auto-update everywhere, Neo Store (my f-droid app) has a setting for auto-update.
This is from wikipedia: "In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with a decrease in social surplus." As a side note, I find it really distasteful when people say, "It is not a monopoly," because it adds nothing to the conversation, and is almost always wrong.
It is not a monopoly. They have Apple as a major competitor
Thank god! Where can I download the Apple App store on to my Android phone? I can't? Then it's irrelevant to this conversation around Google's monopoly on Android.
Google allows sideloading within their own ecosystem.
As @logicbomb points out, just because a ecosystem is open, doesn't mean a monopoly doesn't exist. All the other stores are pretty niche and Google controls 90%+ of the market, so by definition it is a monopoly. A monopoly on it's own isn't illegal or even bad, and we have to dig in further to determine that. As you pointed out, it's pretty clear-cut that Apple has a forced monopoly where users have to actively work against the system to load apps outside of Apple's ecosystem. While Google's case isn't as clear many have argued that Google's Android has kneecapped alternative stores like Amazon's, possibly in anti-competitive ways.
I personally love f-droid, but Google does not make it an easy process to sideload!
The fact that it is called sideloading implies the monopoly. It'd just be "installing" otherwise
Apple isn't really a major competitor when android has 80% of the market.
Apple isn't really a major competitor when android has 80% of the market.
It has most of the paying customers/revenue though.