- cross-posted to:
- android@lemdro.id
- cross-posted to:
- android@lemdro.id
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They’re not purchases, they’re leases.
Edit: it’s actually that you purchase access to their license of the media.
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Edit: Sorry, meant to reply to the comment above you!
They’re not really leases either. Leases last for a defined period of time, like “one year,” or they renew at regular intervals, like “monthly.” “Pay up front and we’ll let you keep this license for either forever or until we decide to revoke it without notifying you” isn’t the same thing.
Apple uses the word “Get” for free things and simply displays the price on the button of paid apps. No mention of the nature of the transaction. That’s in the Germa of agreement you “read” and agreed to.
Same thing that Sony did with movies on the PS. “You’re buying a revocable licence”
Pretty much all the big tech firms have done this. The problem is we only blame the middlemen. We blame Sony or Amazon, or Google or whoever. But the companies providing the licenses for them to “sell” are a big part of the problem. And nobody ever wants to listen when I say this but they should be on the hook too. Like, I appreciate that it’s messed up to have your purchased media shadow ganked. But at the same time it’s fucked up to have the licensing agreements be what they are to start with and that’s absolutely on companies that own the rights to digital media. Who continue to lobby to maintain the status quo.
All they will do is call it purshaces or some other made up bs
And this is why you don’t see apps selling for a price but rather being used to syphon users into subscriptions.
Well, they’re “purchases” of a license that can be revoked at any time for any reason.
Are they really? Didn’t you press a button that said “Buy”? Just because they want things to be something else, doesn’t mean that the meaning of the words changed.
They can argue that you “bought” the lease.
No they fucking can’t argue that! Words have meanings and Google is not entitled to change them.
It’s pretty clear that you’re leasing a car when you do it. Make it like that.
Exactly. It should say “lease” instead of “buy” or just “price” .
They know that too but you know why they don’t use “lease”? They would have WAY less sales. Almost no one would click that.
So they use “buy”/“price” to make you think you own it, and then think they are clever when they define it as “buying a licence” in the Terms.
That’s plain and sneaky so I don’t feel sorry for them when people pirate stuff.
I wish every dev had the option of “go to my website and buy this from me with an eternal licence included” as well as the option to lease it from the Play Store.
Same goes for music and movies.
It’s in the terms you agreed to. Didn’t you read them?
I wish the terms and conditions had reading times at the top of them, and I also wish there was a law saying something to the effect of “buying a movie shouldn’t require you to read 35 minutes of ALL CAPS TERMS AND CONDITIONS while holding a dictionary and a thesaurus after gaining a legal degree”
Agreed there should be a max word count for this kind of things.
If it’s in the term and you sign it, then, for better or for worse, then that is true.
There are usually loads of unenforceable terms and definitions in the ToS you sign. Just because you sign it doesn’t make it true or enforceable, and many won’t hold up in court even if you’ve signed the document. But that requires you to spend the energy and money to fight these fuckers.
If a car dealership put a sticker on the front window of a car saying “Buy this car for $250 a month for 4 years” and then took the car from you after 4 years because their terms had some fine print, the dealership would likely be sued.
If they weren’t sued they’d at least lose business. Unfortunately for everyone, that’s not going to happen with Amazon or Sony or any other big company doing this shit because we’re just letting them get away with shady business practices.
I’m not saying the terms are wrong or that what the companies are doing is illegal right now, but I do think it should be looked at closely by someone who can dish out some massive fines, or ideally change the situation.
Maybe that’s true in a legal sense, depending on the jurisdiction, but in a moral sense, it’s only true if you read and understood what you were agreeing to. You can’t consent to something you were tricked into.
On some storefronts the relevant button is labelled “Get”
I’ve just had a look on the Play Store, and they notably don’t use the word “buy” anywhere that I can see. The button to “buy” the app is just a button with the price on it, and clicking through that it uses the language of “install”.
Can’t help but think that that’s deliberate.
It does say “Buy” and refers to a “purchase”, but everyone’s arguing semantics; the Terms of Service say that you are buying a limited license to download and use the software. You may have a “one-click purchase”-type option enabled?
It’s also a private company and they can do whatever they want on their platform and their property.
It’s like renting space in an apartment … don’t be surprised if the landlord decides to change the agreements and do things you don’t like. You’re renting things, you don’t own anything.
You can’t arbitrarily change agreements for renting without consent or lease renewal. At least not in civilized countries.
You can do whatever the hell you want when you pay Congress.
Their property, their rules🤷🏿
That’s life.
By that logic citizens can say “our country, our rules”.
According to the Constitution, yes it is. The people are told to rise up if they believe we’re rules by an unjust government.
It’s just… who wants to go first?
Can they murder people on their property? Or is there some limit to their ability to make rules?
Try that in Spain.
The place that rhymes with pain?
Maybe in the US, you’d get fucked as a property owner where I live if you tried that.
why would you defend this
I’m not defending or condoning it … I was just pointing out something for what it is. I keep my purchases, rentals and anything paid for to a minimum with services like Google, Amazon or any other cloud or electronic service. They are not purchases of ownership, they are marketed as things that we buy and own indefinitely but in legal terms, they are more or less indeterminate rentals or leases from the company with terms that can be set by the company that controls them.
I agree, in terms of comparing to an apartment rental, there are more laws because the thing that is involved severely affects a person’s life because we’re talking about a roof over a person’s head.
But in terms of electronic or digital items or services that only exist online, it’s a lot easier to remove / change / delete them because these actions won’t put you out on the street, make you starve or physically hurt you in any way. We lose the convenience and we lose out on something.
I’m not belittling any of it, I wouldn’t want to lose anything I paid for either but at the same time, we have to understand that when we sign up to pay for something with a multi billion dollar corporation, we hardly have any rights to anything, agreed to or implied … and if we argue that in court, the one with the most money wins.
Your argument is cargo-cult libertarian bullshit. There are lots of things private entities can’t do on “their property!” Murdering visitors, for example. Fraudulently claiming a sale isn’t really a sale is right up there with that in terms of how clear-cut the rule is.
What we have here is squarely a failure of the FTC to do its goddamn job. Nothing more, nothing less.
I think everyone took there comment in the wrong light. They’re not defending Google, but rather pointing out that this behavior should be expected from a for profit company, and thus people should have avoided the situation in the first place. Not that it should be that way, but we live under capitalism unfortunately, and people need to be way more skeptical of these companies.
Rather than blaming inaction of the FTC, why not just stop using play store all together and encourage people to use Fdroid instead? Companies will never stop abusing ‘e-goods’ , it’s just not going to happen. People should just get beyond ownership and embrace the advantages of free software.
Rather than blaming inaction of the FTC, why not just stop using play store all together and encourage people to use Fdroid instead?
Because boycotts don’t fucking work and are not a replacement for meaningful consumer protection law!
I do use F-Droid myself, thankyouverymuch, but I’m not so naive as to think it’s an actual solution instead of a workaround. Even if it’s technically possible to continuously defend yourself from the avalanche of corporate abuse, it’s fucking exhausting. The masses not only aren’t capable of it, but shouldn’t have to be in the first place because abuse should be prevented, not worked around. That’s what government is for!
This shit about boycotting abusive companies instead of actually regulating them is just as brain-dead as arguing that we shouldn’t have police because we can just hire a personal security detail to follow us around instead.
Companies will never stop abusing ‘e-goods’ , it’s just not going to happen.
Not with that attitude. Companies could certainly be forced by the government to stop doing that, but apologists like you are letting government off the hook.
Well I personally think the FTC should do more, but until money out of politics, it will never happen. And pending some mass upheaval; that is probably in all reality unlikely as long as people are fed, money will almost certainly never be out of politics.
So all the more necessity to encourage people to just abandon these profiteering companies.
Does that single landlord control every apartment in the country? That is Google’s level of monopoly.
Because you signed (digitally) an agreement that lets them do that.
Pirate everything.
Also, don’t use Google. Wherever possible.
If you have an Android, they are increasingly making it impossible to not use them. They continue to punish users that choose to unlock the bootloader or root, and Google Play Services are an inescapable prerequisite to many apps, regardless of side loading ability.
“the boot loader is only safe if it is signed by Google”
How ever did I get out of the '80s with computers with dangerous unsigned boot loaders
I’ve used F-Droid without unlocking the bootloader or rooting or Google Play services integration. Developers are free to use F-Droid, most just choose not to. Hopefully it becomes even more popular as gplay has more issues.
Don’t buy games on Steam or Valve Corporation, they make you sign the User Agreement that legally waves your rights and ownership of games.
Actually, Steam is usually one of the best places when it comes to refunds. The process is simple, and they’re willing to make exceptions to the rules. And the company is run by one of the few CEOs in the gaming industry who seem to actually understand gaming.
And a large portion of the steam community will be super sad if Gaben retires or passes away. We can only hope it continues to be run as well as it has been over the past 15 years.
AU lawsuit against Valve proves Valve didn’t want to refund their customers. Valve is guilty of this violation of Australia law. Many people who used Steam before 2010 tell people they were never given refunds oran option for refunds.
Valve is not good guys, they fought the Australia government to the very top to not pay or offer refunds. They are greedy.
They literally had to be sued by multiple jurisdictions to even offer refunds. The cult of Valve needs to die.
Read by almost no one, it is interesting because in many countries contracts are considered invalid if one of the parties is not properly informed and still accepts, affirmative consent is legally crucial.
Everyone knows that EULAs violate it systematically, tens or hundreds of millions a day, but it doesn’t seem to be a matter of interest.Whenever I see a checkbox or something that just says “Check here to confirm you accept our privacy policy” I think it’s funny because all I am legally agreeing to are the words actually in front of me. Sure, I agree with the standalone words “our privacy policy”. I’m not sure what that does for you, but i guess “our privacy policy” is an acceptable string of words.
My last order in a questionable shop had a ‘return policy’ pop up, i had to screenshot. It was empty.
Imagine how hard it would be to buy stuff or use free services if you actually had to read and understand the contracts every time.
Ok, I’ll just quickly check on Google maps what’s south of Mongolia. Oh, I need to read all that before seeing the map? Well, maybe later. Don’t really have the time for that right now.
If that’s what life was like, laziness would win nearly every time and companies would have hardly any users or customers. Eventually some companies would probably make super short contracts in order to lower the threshold.
I can already see it: “We’ll do whatever we want without accepting any responsibility and we’ll spy on you to monetize it. Click here to accept.”
It’s a complicated issue, maybe with summaries, requiring affirmative consent only for certain actions, or splitting them up? I don’t know, it all seems messy. But I hope it leaves behind the expectation that we lie by agreeing to sell your firstborn’s soul after reading for hours in legalese.
LOL, that was a brilliant summary about what these contracts usually boil down to. However, they should probably include these things too: “You’re not allowed to do anything cool. If anything goes wrong, it’s always your fault.”
These brutally honest super short contracts could be fun to read.
Additionally, we can try to change the laws so we do actually own a copy.
But we never owned a copy of any software or movie ever. We always had a license to watch or use the copy we purchased.
Why does that matter to my point?
“But we’ve always been enslaved. We’ve never had rights as individuals in the first place.” Is not an argument against change.
This is rage inducing.
Imagine if your car dealer was allowed to confiscate your car on a dubious claim such as “it doesn’t meet the latest emissions standards,” but not even telling you that.
Google needs to be fined twice the value of the apps that it stole from it’s paying customers.
“Tesla has a new feature that will disable your seat controls if you keep messing with them”
https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/31/22911072/tesla-seat-controls-disable-lock-out-brose
This is so stupid. Why would a company put this much effort to lock down the seat controls, as if they didn’t already exist without limits on every other car? Not even with a toggle? These companies are really trying to destroy the “cars = freedom” association.
They get disabled for 5 minutes, probably to give the motors time to cool down.
If the motors need to cool down, they need to rethink their motors.
Motors get hot and it’s quite reasonable to not include tons of cooling just so that you can adjust your seat for hours on end.
That said the implementation is still stupid as time isn’t the right measure to judge motor temperature, motor temperature is. Thermocouples cost fractions of a cent, the motors probably already include one or two as they already have smarts (being hooked up to the CAN bus and not straight voltage). Which would also take care of differing environmental temperatures as obviously the motors are worse at shedding heat when it’s scorching hot in the car.
Rethink a motor designed to be used for 5 mins initially then occasionally in future? It’s fine for the design purpose. It’s even fine for the mode where it operates every time you get in the car (where it waits in fully back position, and moves forward when you operate a control)
Why should they think it to let it be used as a fidget toy?
Phew, that makes a lot more sense. I thought it permanently locked them
So revolutionary
One of the most important parts of purchasing a car is the title being signed over and that transfer being registered with the state. You never own the title to an app.
You don’t transfer title and register a hammer when you buy it. Are you saying you fan’t own one?
It’s purchasing ≠ owning, then piracy ≠ stealing
Piracy is never stealing, since you are not removing anything from anyone. This does not include actual piracy, the one with ships and rum.
I don’t believe piracy is treated as stealing from a legal sense, already.
That’s true. If I steal 20 copies of some avengers movie from Walmart and give them away on the street, I’ll pay a couple thousand dollars in fines, tops. If I’m caught seeding an avengers movie to one person downloading from me in Serbia, I’ll be fined more money than most people make in their entire lives
Partially agree, because if purchasing == owning (which it should), then piracy is still != stealing
!= is better
Outside of programming circles I’ve been surprised how little people know what != means.
Despite claims, math and logic are not important skills according to many.
Are you implying that my math professors do not think math and logic are important just because they used
≠instead of!=?
I paid for the whole Unicode, so I’m gonna use the whole ꙮ𐐘彁 Unicode
Ok but this isn’t purchasing outright it is basically leasing. It says so in the tos. The issue here is ppl don’t read tos or they don’t care and pay anyway. Ppl like that have zero right to complain.
Lol everyone of you idiots are proving my point and making tons of idiotic assumptions like I’m anti piracy. Y’all need some logic lessons.
Amazing how you can talk so coherently with that corporate dick taking up so much space in your mouth.
How dare the average person not have the time or attention span to read a 28 page document in legalese that explains what exactly they’re doing
It’s not like purposefully dense and overlong TOS is a known strategy to hide bullshit that later gets thrown out in court or anything
That person probably also think people who get shot are stupid for not moving out of the bullet’s path. “It is not so hard, it moves in a straight line you idiots”.
“Daniel Shaver should have just listened to philip brailsford’s commands”
Obviously, Brailsford was found not guilty by an infallible jury after all.
So you don’t have time for that? Spend two hours reading stipulations for a service that you might use for a decade or longer? That you might spend thousands of your currency on? What happened to the world. So fast. So furious.
The button to install a paid app literally says BUY. If that doesn’t mean purchase I don’t what else it could mean.
I can buy a vacation doesn’t mean I own the place I’m going.
It’s literally just a convention, a design choice. It doesn’t really mean anything.
From Wiktionary:
buy (third-person singular simple present “buys,” present participle “buying,” simple past “bought,” past participle “bought” or (archaic, rare, dialectal) “boughten”)
(transitive, ditransitive) To obtain (something) in exchange for money or goods.
“I’m going to buy my father something nice for his birthday.”
When I search the Play Store for Geometry Dash, and click the lil button that says “$1.99,” I get this page. It sure as shit looks like what I’m about to buy is Geometry Dash, the video game. When I click “Buy,” I’m not at all expecting to “buy” a temporary, permanently revokable license to play the game for now. I’m expecting to own the 1s and 0s that are downloaded to my device. Hiding legalese in the T&C that nobody clicks saying “actually buy means lease” is legal, and it should not be legal, because it’s misleading as hell. They should not be allowed to redefine widely understood words in T&C in a way that misleads consumers into paying for something they didn’t expect to be paying for.
OK but piracy isn’t stealing it is basically a harmless free copy. The issue here is corporations want to have their cake and eat it too, but to prohibit us all from either having or eating any cake ever. Corpos like that have zero right to my consideration or care.
Yeah, okay, except the iTunes and Facebook TOSes are longer than King Lear. Eventually a judge nullified a TOS on the basis that no-one ever reads those anyway.
Thanks to odious TOSes, the average American commits three felonies a day, violations of the CFAA for which some whistle-blowers and journalists are serving sentences similar to [assassin] Scott Roeder (for the murder of Dr. George Tiller). The rest of us are not serving such sentences but for one officer or official who wants us to disappear.
In the meantime journalists continue to get charged with such violations, usually when their investigating something embarrassing to current administrations. The EFF has repeatedly raised a stink about this, but hasn’t yet been able to change the law.
If your kid is under 13 and has social media accounts on specifically kid-friendly platforms (that, themselves teem with predators, salesfolk and law enforcement) then your kid is committing major federal crimes. On the light side, they totally have haxxor cred.
You 👏 should ,👏 expect 👏 this 👏 it 👏isn’t👏the👏first👏time
TOS documents are designed not to be read.
I recall a while back someone did a study that there are not enough hours in the day for an average person to actually read all the TOS documents they’re expected to agree to. The idea that people can or should be responsible for knowing what’s in a TOS is a legal fiction.
Maybe we should get a GPT started to make short and understandable TOS.
I never said or implied what you assume I’m implying.
Get some literacy.
Some people don’t get how you can separate understanding the logic of something and not supporting it at the same time.
Don’t worry, that is normal. Im getting laughed at left and right for having my own root-server with all my services running on it, all FOSS.
Most of them were born with google already existing, it is part of nature. They haven’t seen a giant go down yet.
Nice try, Google
Hey look it’s the libertarian I was talking about in my other comment
Honestly, as somebody who really loved the early era of Android gaming, I’m really disappointed how ephemeral it all was between the Play Store delistings and the absolutely atrocious approach to backwards compatibility in the Android OS.
Yep I found out myself pretty quickly. With a simple App which was maybe 10K lines of code I started targeting Android 10 and so far every new major version caused some issue with the code as Google constantly messes around with files, permissions, …
I can’t imagine what a task it is to maintain a game.
I just wish Google would release some kind of 32-bit Android 4.4 sandboxed compatibility layer for old games. Android 4.4 was the standard Android version for a super long time for a zillion devices, and I’d bet 99% of the dead .APK games out there would run on that version.
Give me a tool with a crapload of slow, clumsy emulation wrappers covered in tedious config options and a launcher any time I want to run an app through this compatibility layer and let me play Amazing Alex again.
edit: it occurs to me I basically want an Android emulator for Android. Or like, a psuedo-emulator that’s not really an emulator like WINE/Proton.
and let me play Amazing Alex again.
Why not just buy a top notch 4.4 phone off eBay? Looks like you can get a Galaxy Note 4 for about 40$
Ahh, you know, it’s about the convenience of not having to juggle another device. I still have an old Galaxy Tab kicking around the house that plays all that stuff pretty well, but it’s not the same as being able to pull it out of my pocket on the bus.
Ya know, I actually had the idea a while back to run an android emulator on one of my servers and then setup remote access to it with some software that hopefully had an android client app.
The idea being I would use the android remote client on my actual phone to use a “phone in the cloud”, ofc my original intentions for it wouldn’t have been affected too terribly by things like latency, but for games it may or may not work all that well (I never really got past the sketch out phase lol)
Why not try emulating it locally on your phone instead of a remote server, to eliminate the latency? Was it not possible at the time you got the idea?
I thought about it, but the pros didn’t outweigh the cons for me. The biggest con being limited resources on a phone and a remote server would have relatively endless resources, and my use case could handle a little latency so the biggest pro wasn’t so big
There exists stuff like this.
Virtualxposed. Sandvxposed.
The most popular one I heard about vmos, https://www.vmos.com/
But that one was android 8 (I think?) closed source, and probably spyware inside and outside the thing.
Also, new changes by google may break these emulator type apps:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SamsungDex/comments/16r1tg8/phantom_process_killer_solution_in_android_14/
Seriously, I can’t run a 32 bit game on a 64 bit processor? How is that even a problem on newer phones?
They probably removed certain libraries that are used by 32 bit programs
They removed the 32-bit libraries from the system so they don’t have to be loaded, to save RAM.
Yep, I never bought a game again after my CAVE shmups all stopped working when I switched phones, there’s also no way to try and make it work on your phone unlike any other operating system on PC since it’s so locked down, completely dependent on devs to care.
At least we have forums archiving the games themselves.
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I remember my brother once telling me this:
How is it stealing if it’s still there?
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So if I use your toothbrush to clean my asshole it’s fine cuz it’s still there right?
If you can exactly copy said toothbrush and then clean your filthy bunghole with the copy it is totally fine, yeah.
But the thing they are selling to you is not only the data. Also the right to use it. When a studio makes a game spending millions of dollars they don’t do it so one can buy it for 60$ and others can copy from him/her eh? Try moralizing it as much as you want. (If your being sarcastic sorry about that but doesn’t look like it)
PrivacyPiracy is stealing, and I am accepting I am stealing. No need to think otherwise.Sharing pirated content to millions of people is stealing, I agree. But it started differently. You bought the CD and you could lend it to friend, your game worked. Right now you buy games and only you can play it. Which is different with any other form of physical good. I buy a car I can let someone drive it for a day. Why shouldn’t this apply to digital goods as well? That’s how piracy started, because we couldn’t share our goods with friends anymore. Digital companies decided it’s loss for them.
Also, it’s legal to make a backup copy of something you own for personal use. And yet we can’t make backup copies of games even for personal use. I guess we don’t own them.
Right now you buy games and only you can play it. Which is different with any other form of physical good. I buy a car I can let someone drive it for a day. Why shouldn’t this apply to digital goods as well?
Yeah absolutely. Which is something I am completely agreeing of. But the thing is that doesn’t give us the right to steal it or make ourselves think it is not stealing. What I am doing is not buying such companies’ products + pirating if I really need it. But I don’t try to make it seem like how it is not (e.g. as it is not stealing).
That’s how piracy started, because we couldn’t share our goods with friends anymore. Digital companies decided it’s loss for them.
I am pretty sure when Napster was a thing music CDs were still a thing as they are now too.
I don’t know about you guys, but I share my digital games all the time. Steam and Switch have pretty decent share setups.
Technically you don’t get the copy rights to a book when you buy it either, but you do get that one copy of the book and publishers can’t knock on your door demanding it back. You can even lend it or resell it.
However as far as respecting the customers rights, game and digital media companies want to set their own terms.
Is it Piracy to restore access to something you bought and got taken away from you? Well, if it is, I’m pro piracy.
Didn’t really think this one through.
Sure. I can even spit extra on it no charge if that makes your day. Just download me a clean one afterwards will you.
No, because you’re still tampering with the original product. That is not analogous to piracy. If you make a perfect 1:1 replica of my toothbrush, and use that to pleasure yourself, I don’t care, because my toothbrush is still in my bathroom untouched.
's alright sweetheart, you can say it, there’s no longer a megacorporation to shadow ban or lecture you
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Piracy is always justified. I don’t do it because I’m afraid of consequences and my fear of fucking up is greater than my desire to watch TV, but if you’re confident in your abilities, do it. Fuck Netflix, they wouldn’t use your money to make shows you like anyway.
Not only that. If you buy an app, you are at the mercy of its creator. If they decide they want to fill it with ads and tracking, or switch to a subscription model, there’s nothing you can do. You can’t rollback updates, you can’t install an older version from the play store. If they decide to remove it from the store, you won’t be able to install it any more.
I had one of the flight tracker apps, used it to identify planes passing my work lunch room’s window, and paid $5 for it to get it ad free. Then it went to subscription and made it’s free tier time limited instead of ad supported, so now I don’t use it. I can’t use an old version as it doesn’t work on newer versions of Android
Edit to add: It’s worth learning how to side load apps. While on a driving holiday in Sicily I was told that it was vital to have the ZTL app so I could know what areas were closed to cars (zero traffic limit), but it was only available on the Italian play store, so I had to download the APK and install it that way
Zona a Traffico Limitato - buy I like the way you made the acronym work in english :)
Edit: Limited traffic area, typically only residents, emergency services, deliveries etc.
That’s it. I was allowed to drive into one as I was booked into a hotel in the zone, I think that’s the slowest I ever drove for more than three metres
Story of pretty much every good app ever.
On that note, I bought a GIF viewer app’s full version via in-app purchase and about a year later, they updated the app to have ads again regardless and my “full version no ads” app got ads again and now i had to buy a subscription per month to be “ad free” needless to say I uninstalled
Well you can always use https://blokada.org (version 5, which runs on your phone). It stops most ads.
I set up a VPN tunnel to my home network and use pihole to block ads which worked on this app too, so that wasn’t a problem but the audacity to remove my paid-for full access was astoundingly awful
i use Adblock dns
Did you let them know why you uninstalled?
I got into technology because I loved it. Now, ever bit of news I get I hate it a little bit more. What happened with improving things, sharing information and making the world better?
The “best” thing is when someone makes legitimately the best application for its purpose (arguably the only good application for it), so you convince your friends to use it because it’s so useful, and then they cram it full of ads and bloat and make it borderline unusable, but your friends won’t switch to a different app (or even leave the app altogether) because it’s the only way they know how to do the thing
I’m talking about the 5e Companion app on Android. Anyone know any good alternatives? It used to be so good, but then they started adding Unearthed Arcana garbage to it, which almost entirely sucks ass, and when UA gets officially added, they have to add the official version separately because some people have already used the UA version to make characters. I want so badly to switch away from it, but I can’t find any good free alternatives that have all of the content from 5e.
I wish 5e.tools had a character sheet builder
Actually there’s websites with archives of old apk files for apps.
Kinda hard to just trust those sites not to hide malicious shit in there.
That’s why Android apps must be signed. Tools can show an app’s certificate hash and if two app versions’ hashes match, they’re equally trustworthy / from the same source. I think APKMirror does this and it’s actually quite trusthworthy.
Google them and see which one is safe.
There are usually archives of versions for most apks for android. App updated to be shittier? Uninstall and install an older version of it from IA.
Yup, looking at you, Vocabulary.com
mercy of its* creator
Because our government representatives are idiots and don’t care about us.
A “purchase” or “buy” option, especially when you get an invoice, should ALWAYS mean ownership of the product.
A “borrow” or “rent” option is one that you expect to have to return the product.
Google can’t have it both ways. They either sold people software or they rented it out. Since it was never advertised or marketed as the Google Play Rental Library, they should be forced to give people the products they paid for.
Yup, I’ve said it a million times, it needs to be made flatly illegal to use language that implies ownership if the company has any method of revoking your ownership of that product in the future. These threads always get the same libertarians that show up in discussions about non-functional slack fill saying “it’s not illegal, so what’s the problem?” The problem is that it isn’t illegal. Imagine if Toyota could come grab your car from your driveway, because even though you paid it off, subclause 74 of section G(2) says that the company retains the right to repossess property made by them at any time for any reason. You didn’t read a 200 page contract at the dealership when you bought the car, you just trusted that they wouldn’t fuck you. Toyota would get their ass reamed in court if they tried that, so why are Google and Microsoft and Sony and Steam allowed to do it?
Between this (which happened to me on both Google play and Amazon) and audible audio books not being “mine” unless of course I log in to Amazon etc to get my DRM key, I am starting to reconsider how I obtain my stuff.
This whole techno serfdom thing ain’t for me.
I am starting to reconsider how I obtain my stuff.
This is a good thing. I don’t know why modern business models for these companies seem to be intentionally anti-consumer, but people will find other ways to get what they are looking for. And if that means spending money with a more ethical company, or simply pirating, they’ll find the path of least resistance.
I used to spend hundreds on the Google Play Store, buying apps and music all the time. Then they started playing stupid games, and I haven’t spent a dollar on the Play Store in years. My money goes to someone else.
At this point I’ve spent $12/mo for 4 years on Amazon music. That’s $576 dollars I could have spent on buying songs or CDs and that’s probably 576+ songs.
I regret that I’ve streamed all of these years. And let’s be honestly, I rarely branch out to far afield from my favorite songs and artists. Who have probably received less money from me than if I just bought their cd and ripped it like we did 15 years ago. I also have way more storage on my phone than I ever did 15 years ago. I could keep quite a bit of my music synced and enjoy it whenever I want without worrying about data limits or if I’m on WiFi.
Same goes with half the video streaming services. I watch a handful of shows and movies. I could have bought the ones I watch and never have to worry about “oh man, did they take x off of Netflix? What service is it on now? Ew Hulu, I have to watch ads with that even though I pay”.
The 0% interest is drying up so these companies are trying to claw as much revenue and profit out of their services as they can and I wonder how many people it’s just going to drive away from it completely?
I’ll stop watching prime video when they add ads.
I don’t mind paying for services. I mind feeling like I’m getting shafted and duped every time I turn around. Raising the prices, making the experience worse, removing content, removing features, and then having the nerve to increase the prices by 50% in some cases. Get bent!
I lucked out last year and ended up scoring something like 1000 DVDs for cheeeeaap. Like $100 or something. I ripped them all (minus any duplicates I already owned) and put them on my NAS. No more worrying about ads, data mining, or even internet/service outages ruining my evening.
I did the same for all my CDs, and while we still do purchase CDs, they are way overpriced.
But purchasing digital music and movies has become harder since Google Play Music went away. It’s almost too much effort to try to buy digital content these days, and it makes no sense. I want to pay for content, but making it impossible just doesn’t work for anyone.
Amazon played their first ad for us on Prime Movies today… during a kid show no less. Just disgusting where things have ended up.
My father in law has thousands of CDs he’s collected over the years that he’d probably let me have.
And I just found out my local library sells old DVDs and Blu-rays for $.50 each. I should go drop $50 and buy em out. There were some great movies in there and a few that I’ve always wanted to watch.
This thread just made me realize that I’ve hit my limit of bs with these services. Over lunch, I wrote a script to download yt videos and put them in my Plex library.
And I just found out my local library sells old DVDs and Blu-rays for $.50 each.
Holy crap, I need to see if our local library offers something like that. I used to go to their book sales, but never considered that they would be selling movies.
As far as im concerned, the equivalent here, should be a raw downloadable file. Much like how music purchases work.
Anything other than that simply isn’t “buying”
I recall purchasing Photoshop for Android, before it became Lightroom for Android.
It was as close to the desktop Photoshop as you could get, and it wasn’t cheap.
Google (or adobe) took it out of the play store, effectively cutting customers off and preventing them from installing it on new devices.
Fortunately, I was rooted at the time and backed up the APK, which allowed me to use it for years longer and on newer devices. But the experience really had be second guessing whether I should keep “buying” apps on the play store.
There are quite a few other instances where games and apps I purchased simply disappeared. Such an unethical business model.
You don’t need root to extract apks.
True, but as I recall it was more than just the APK that I needed to backup/restore to get it to work.
It was so many years ago, so I really don’t remember the details, but the point was without a backup, I’d have lost access to the app I paid for.
Very shortsighted article calling repeatedly the GDPR a “crazy” law.
They have to promote piracy somehow
They want us to search for torrents!
Good to see more people are understanding how anti-consumer our digital distribution laws are. Sucks they had to find out this way, but people have been warning of this for years.
And these companies think piracy is unjustified. No, it’s just holding out an umbrella in the rain.
Piracy is ALWAYS justified! These companies are dead set on robbing me blind. Well guess what: if I never spent a nickel, there’s nothing to rob me of! To the high seas!
They all do this. I’ve had games or dlc vanish off my PlayStation account. When I called to complain, since they lost the records of my purchases, they won’t return them. I lost the receipts so long ago. I still have save files that require the DLCs
Nintendo just turned off whole stores instead.
I normally don’t advocate for piracy if you can afford games, but if company doesn’t even allow you to buy them, then what other option is there? It’s like they want people to pirate their games.
If it’s not on a shelf, then they don’t care about making money off it. Therefore they have nothing to complain about if you use it without paying.
I normally advocate for piracy. In cases like these, where some corpo comes in and STEALS from their customers (because let’s stop pretending this is anything else) I advocate for the other type of piracy, with sabers, cannons, rape, theft, pillaging and making some of these assholes walk a plank.
As a hobbist App developer I can tell its probably at least to some extent due to the ongoing “cost” to keep the Apps hosted and working.
Every year when a new Android beta comes out you have to go through your App, check if everything still works only to then discover something broke and now you gotta figure out how to fix it.
With a small App I hosted starting at Android 10 every major update so far caused me some trouble. Now with Android 14 this is the last version I’ll support for the simple fact that I don’t have the time to keep up with it.
And mind you this was a rather simple small App, I can’t imagine what a headache it is to maintain a game.
Sure, you don’t have to support it with updates indefinitely, but I think the possibility should exist to delist it so new people can’t buy it but people who bought it before would still be able to download it (with no guarantee it will work).
Agree, thats fair.
You say that like businesses in eras past haven’t had any overhead.
Overhead is a part of the profit equation. If you can’t make it work, you’re not profitable, and you lose.
It isn’t just about businesses. There used to be a lot more free apps on the Play Store, but keeping up with constantly-changing requirements makes that impractical. You can’t just put something up and leave it. You have to work on frequently or it gets dropped. You also have to keep up with their demands to limit certain features and to provide new information or it gets dropped.
I used to have a handful of free apps up on Play. Now they are all gone because I just don’t have the time to rewrite them every few months.
Try releasing them as apks to bypass Google’s insane rules.
I have already done that. My apps.aslanrefuge.org site has downloadable APKs for everything. It also has the code, for anyone who wants to tinker with it.
I just wish there was a better way. I need to look into F-Droid and other options.
The website doesn’t load unfortunately.
Sorry about that! I fixed it in the message above. I typoed the actual link, but the visible version was correct so I didn’t notice.
The correct address is: https://apps.aslanrefuge.org
It doesn’t help when the overhead is dictated by a massive corporation that isn’t your friend…
You’re talking about a different situation though. I have old apps that are no longer supported so I can’t install them on newer devices. However, I can still install them on old devices with a supported OS version (or trick the Play Store into installing on a new OS and deal with bugs).
What about this: Can we stop pushing for big OS updates every year? This just makes it harder on developers, and the apps are the reason people use the OS in the first place.
For Google, hosting an app is just a matter of keeping an entry in a database and its data in storage. It’s not about the difficulty.
Furthermore, that app COST MONEY to the user. Here Google is not only removing the app from the store, they’re also UNINSTALLING it from the user’s device, without warning them, and without compensating them financially for this.
To make things even worse, their malware detection algorithm is prone to false positives. There’s not even a degree of certainty, like “there’s a 20% chance we could be making a mistake.” A binary without tolerance means they are removing things only on the SUSPICION they could be malware.
I had a very useful open source app - that I installed WITHOUT Google play store - removed from my phone. It was never submitted to Google and neither the author nor I EVER agreed to their app store remove third party software from my phone.
Google have become control freaks over our phones. The only solution I see is to install a third party OS, like Lineage or Graphene. I might even have to buy a new phone for this, but I don’t care. I don’t want Google to assume the role of Nanny and take away control of MY devices that I bought with my own fucking money.
