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by Zambyte 673 days ago
Personally I don't care if Google removes any apps from their repo; I get all of the apps I actually care about through other means anyways.

The thing that makes this particular case feel weird to me is that the organization playing gatekeeper is also competing directly with this app.
1 comments
quitit 673 days ago
Seems like the solution is to make that approval process independent. (As for who would pay for that, who can say, should it be government run?, should it have application fees? etc)

While I sympathise with developers who are the victim of mistakes, we have no transparency to know who is actually in the wrong.

There is also constant subjective criticism about what is too little or too much protective oversight. Fortnite was approved by both Apple and Google despite the FTC fining Epic for intentionally tricking children into making unwanted purchases, (Epic would also kill the account if the parent did charge backs), other scam apps have snuck onto the various stores over the years, and it wasn't too long ago that both Facebook and Google used side-loading to distribute data collection apps that wouldn't pass official channels.

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Zambyte 673 days ago
> As for who would pay for that, who can say, should it be government run?

Distribute the cost by distributing sources. The GNU/Linux ecosystem has been operating just fine on this model for decades.

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quitit 673 days ago
The app is already available outside of Google's store. Those who wish to self-moderate their software downloads can already obtain the software. (Let the men eat meat! tick )

This scenario is for a curated marketplace which needs to demonstrate that they are not acting improperly towards those with which they could have a potential conflict of interest.

There is no opportunity to debate whether such marketplaces have a software discovery and security benefit, that is already established. Implying to dissolve the marketplace is unserious and not an answer to the problem, and not helpful to the ideals of computing for the masses.

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Zambyte 672 days ago
> Implying to dissolve the marketplace is unserious and not an answer to the problem, and not helpful to the ideals of computing for the masses.

My implication was busting the monopoly into its logical components, not out of existence.

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