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by saul_goodman 1544 days ago
Sadly its cases like these that reinforce basic life concepts. Does developing Android apps really hold enough value for someone to wrap their entire livelihoods around? I realize people can make big money doing this, but is this really something worthwhile spending your life doing? Maby from an ecosystem standpoint it's no different than developing on some other environment. But the Google pool is simply too small to put years of your life into something that can be canceled at the drop of a hat by an uncaring robotic overlord. Or maby I'm making too big of a deal out of it, maby this was just a side-project that only received 10 hours a week of their time. It still sucks as it was a fun passion project. The same question rises up though. If you are making money with a project, try to not to give too much value away to the landlord. If one landlord can with a single robotic keystroke wipe you out rethink what you are doing from the ground up.

It's not dissimilar from others in the FAANG ecosystem. Someone that's all in on Apple: uses Apple Pay, @mac.com email, etc. They change the credit card they have tied to Apple pay, some mistake happens, and then a month later they lose access to their email and other majorly important services they rely on. Very inconvenient, if it happens when you are traveling abroad you could be screwed pretty bad. People are learning slowly: never keep all your technology eggs in one landlords basket. Some day, some how, you will make a mistake. Whether it's your fault or not, or you expressed an unpopular opinion, your project/livelihood/life/etc. will get deactivated with no remorse.

4 comments

I agree with you, I could never bring myself to invest my own livelihood into these walled garden ecosystems where you're a digital serf beholden to an overlord who can take your years of effort whenever they want.

Open web is where it's at, and windows application though even windows is starting to get locked down and having other problems.

The future is clearly web, for me at least.

Can you give some practical advice also with that soliloquy? Are you saying we shouldn't develop native mobile apps but stick to web-apps ?
The difference is that with Apple when things get messed up like that you can call a human on the phone and fix it.
*maybe