The global south since forever

Congratz!

Hungary had record turn out to remove the russian puppet leading their country away from progress and community toward ruin.

I am having a baby too.

Yeah but your interpretation of events don't sell clicks and ads or encourage artificial outrage. 😄

I actually don't understand what is being portrayed in that post, what is the issue there? Maybe I am lacking some background information?

The original post by Muntashir Akon says that someone has registered his apps, but his image says something different, it says that the package name is registered in play already. And the app registration is not opened for those in Play.

I'm guessing he hasn't added his apps in the play store and that's what he means by someone taking over his app name? Just trying to understand...

Then the account of keep android open talks of an assault on fdroid. Which seems an overreach from the previous post and image, unless there's a lot of background well known that is missing from this particular context.

Now, I'm not defending google, I do think they are on full power grab with android and want to reduce the openness of it, and they can go fuck off with that shit. I just don't see how it all relates in this case.

If a dev would only publish in the past in fdroid, there was nothing stopping anyone from using your app id to upload something to the play store, right? So this whole developer verification doesn't seem to be the root cause here.

But that's assuming muntashir meant exactly that by having impersonators. If muntashir had uploaded the apps to the play store, then the message in the image seems to mean that because the package name is the same as in play he can't register it yet. Maybe that has an effect for fdroid but I can't see how quite yet.

OK I missed that I could gain more details opening the post by Muntashir (first thought it was a screenshot).

"UPDATE: #Google seems to have fixed the issue anyway. I was able to register both App Manager and Captive Portal Controller in the Android developer verification console."

"Google has added an “other ways to verify” option now. So, now it may be possible to bypass the 50% rule."

So it seems the issue was not impersonators, the issue was not fdroid, and there's no attack whatsoever with his apps from google or anyone. It's just a shitty implementation of this whole developer registration that just shouldn't even exist and yes, the whole registration is an attack on devs and open source, but the issues this dev was facing are not an example of it. This is not a story of a developer under attack because he doesn't want to be registered. This is a story of a developer who is following suit with google and registering, and finding the beta system is shit.

Thank you for sharing that

You know what's funny? That showed up a few posts below this one then I saw your response lol. Thanks for sharing.

The big concern is that once these apps are blocked from the official store then they lose a lot of the audience. And then there might be less interest in developing for a very niche community of people who jailbreak their phones.

Tons of great things happening in China. They're greening deserts at mind boggling scale, building out more clean energy infrastructure than the rest of the world combined, and building public infrastructure like it's going out of style.

good news

Is there like literally any positive news going on in the world right now or, is everything just competing for first place in the "things that are terrible" competition these days? Fuck.

Sorry mildly off topic just do frustrated. Feels like we can't have anything nice these days.

They basically require you to stop using the play store at this point. I guess you can only use Aurora to avoid this.

It is hit or miss with app updates, I don't mess with bank stuff breaking randomly

I have a degoogled phone (LineageOS) and I was able to get my banking apps working by isolating them in a work profile using Insular and also putting MicroG and Aurora Store in there. MicroG tricks the apps into thinking you are connected to Google Play Services. IMO its better than having a 2nd or 3rd phone.

Because the priority is not making secure apps, the priority is not being responsible for security incidents. The lawyers at the company making shitty apps (e.g.: your bank) want to be able to say "We followed industry best practices, which is whatever Google said to do".

That being said: root, unlocked bootloader, and custom ROMs can all be big security problems. But if your bank's app will not work on GrapheneOS, your bank just sucks.

Technically speaking the supernote nomad, but it's eink and a very stripped down version of android so unless you want a notepad and e-reader that can also e.g. use the NYT crossword app it's probably not what you're looking for.

To answer my own question, there's KashCal, but I'm not sure I want to share my email password with another app . . .

Eh, it's a good start but I wouldn't call it awesome. It needs a lot of improvement, like letting me set a wallpaper for one.

thanks

Why are "round videos" a feature?

You have the link formatted backwards. It cannot be directly opened.

Link

My Russian friends keep telling me about the services that are being banned. I tried to install MAX surveillance app but it doesn't work in New Zealand. Needs a russian or Belarusian number 😭

Never mind, at least VK is reliable.

BTW this is not the first time that American tech companies helped an "authoritarian" country. I bet all the Chinese apps are allowed too.

What did Google say when you reported the app?

That's a good point, I didn't really consider Xiaomi being Android based. If Google did go through with this, they could do the same thing Huawei did too, and just fork. I really wish I could get Chinese phones in Canada, maybe now that the relations with the US are souring, there might be a possibility.

I do think everything comes down to the ecosystem in the end, and that's what ends up being the lock in mechanism. If you live in a country using a western software stack, and you need to communicate with other people, it becomes really difficult using any platform that doesn't support popular apps everybody uses.

One of the worst developments in the tech space was proprietary protocols becoming the norm with stuff like Slack WhatsApp, and Discord. Now huge chunks of the public are locked into that because all their friends are on those platforms.