this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
508 points (98.5% liked)
Technology
58692 readers
5425 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
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"Allowed and supported" is something different then "its possible". The article mentions some points that seemingly haven't been "supported" in the past:
Thanks Mr. Epic Judge
This is all about the Play Store though, it has literally nothing to do with competing stores. I use F-Droid today and there are no restrictions from Google about what apps I can install through that store, whether I can pay for apps through that store (some apps have donation buttons inside), etc. There's nothing stopping Epic from distributing their own app store like F-Droid does even before this decision.
So I really don't understand what "cracking open Android" means here. All that seems to be happening is that Google is restricted from certain actions within its own store, which is absolutely fine by me (I don't use the Play Store), but I don't see any actual changes to Android or third-party app stores.
The closest is this one:
But Samsung already has its own app store, no? So is there any actual evidence that this was ever a thing?
They should place these restrictions on Apple, not Google, because Apple is the one doing all of this nonsense. Yeah, Google should be reigned in a bit, but they're really not the problem here.
Yes but only through sideloading, this order requires Google to allow third-party app stores to be distributed from within Play Store, i.e. you can search for "F-Droid" from directly within Play Store and install it.
Which also comes with a bit of a positive reputation to truly allow a competitor to rise. Before, non-technical people (read:the average person) saw sideloading as dangerous because of "viruses", which led to low uptake of Epics own store (Which they did try to distribute through sideloading)
Now if an average person sees F-Droid or other app store in the play store they're automatically going to think "It's in the Play Store and vetted by Google so it MUST be safe to check out"
How can Google vet an app store without vetting everything it could serve?
That's just the perception with the average person, not that they would actually do it