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Enshittification spares no one.
“the play store is shit now!”
The play store was always shit.
Sure it does, but only those who have a zero-tolerance policy against using proprietary software. In the long run, Free Software is the only kind that can be relied upon not to betray you.
I agree, free software is the only thing that’s sure to not get worse over time. I took way too long to realize, now I have a shitload of stuff to migrate. I already ditched microsoft, but that google account is a real bitch to replace.
Happens when you don’t have competition. (Except to steam seemingly)
(Except to steam seemingly)
For now. I’m curious what’ll happen when Gabe eventually retires.
We also can’t ignore the fact that the Steam Marketplace is a hellhole and the origin of a lot of today’s microtransaction hell.
If you buy all your games on one platform then you’re thoroughly fucked if it turns heel.
We all know the answer to this. There will be a hundred threads with thousands of comments with people saying it’s not bad, the company promised x and y and we should be cautiously optimistic, but in the end it always ends the same way.
Exactly the same thing happens with IBM buying Red Hat. No shortage of articles talking about how this will be good for Red Hat and the entire open source community but of course last month they started the enshitification process that will now March on relentlessly. Even now there are defenders of red hat, talking about how it’s not that bad and there are workarounds, but in the end they fail to see this is just the first step.
Once started on this path, the rule is always enshitification, any exceptions are exceedingly rare. If steam ever gets bought/sold it will follow the same path and it’s defenders will stay by its side until it looks like the screen shot above.
I agree. As much as I like what Valve is doing and currently trust them, I prioritize buying games on GOG and keeping archives of the installers.
The point still stands though, you can easily filter out anything you don’t want to see.
But I doubt the same would apply if it was owned by shareholders.
A future change in leadership could very easily lead to it going public and then all the regular bullshit follows. Don’t just assume it’ll always be great; always be ready to jump ship.
I get worried with the amount of gamers who want Steam to be a monopoly. The existence of competition seems to upset some people and it’s really odd.
A future change in leadership could very easily lead to it going public and then all the regular bullshit follows. Don’t just assume it’ll always be great; always be ready to jump ship.
Ok, but what has that anything to do with what I said?
Only really the first part of my comment. I ended up on a rambling tangent for most of it.
The difference is that Valve is privately owned. They don’t have to please a board of shareholders who want to see the platform milked for the slightest increase in profit margins.
So you’re telling me that I can generate stable revenue if I work on my product and try to satisfy customers? Sounds kinda radical… who do we even screw over to get the money??
We need more companies like that, then.
For that you need passionate people who are wealthy and not primarily driven to acquire more wealth. That seems to be very rare in large scale businesses.
It isn’t wealth that breaks or makes it. The system, and in this case the shareholding system makes it or breaks it. Valve owner Gabe is insanely rich (in the billions I assume) yet, because the system he put up, it is consumer friendly.
The system is the one, not the people.
Yes, the problem is when shareholders only want profit at any cost. These are the wealthy people I was talking about.
I mean, the other thing that’s kind of stupid is - lets say a companies stock once issued goes to 0 and is delisted. So what? That’s not the company going bankrupt. The stock market valuation has no direct application to a company once the shares are issued and bought the first time. But ignoring shareholder demands that would destroy the company wouldn’t likely tank the stock of a otherwise good company - because there’s someone out there who just wants value to hold and preferably dividends vs infinite growth (that doesn’t exist). Now, you could buy enough stock to throw out the CEO and whatever, but that’s likely to be expensive and a PITA. So while there’s going to be some high profile examples, A) that gets close to taking a company private anyway, and doing a shitty job and B) generally limited numbers of companies will have people going to these lengths.
I think the bigger issue isn’t wanting companies to be profitable - that’s kind of the point of companies. The issue is shareholders trying to make capital gains on everything. This isn’t possible long term because infinite growth isn’t possible. I would argue what people and decent investors should want is the steady dividends and not worry about if the stock is up or down.
I’d have to think Newell has a lot more skin in the game or passion for his platform. He actually believes in the business and what they do, instead of just viewing it as a way to make money
This isn’t entirely accurate. If Valve were a public company, the enshittification factor would increase significantly. The reason they’re great now is because the current board is the original founders who are passionate about their business, and actually care.
Private or not, once Gabe and the other old farts die, Valve will enshittificate. That’s almost guaranteed.
Private or not, once Gabe and the other old farts die, Valve will enshittificate. That’s almost guaranteed.
I think they will just live on as ghosts in steam itself. GabeAI here we come!
Bingo. Enshittification is mostly confined to companies that have gone public or whose sole aspiration is to do so quickly.
It shifts responsibility from satisfying customers/users to satisfying shareholders (who are never satisfied).
You can build the perfect product and ride a gravy train as a private company in relative perpetuity. As a corporation, you’re just going to strive for perpetually increasing profits on a quarterly basis with no real care or focus past that
Steam has some competition, its just that said competition never took off because Steam is so much better.
Yo dawg, I heard you liked ads …
Luckily I only have F-Droid on mine.
What, no love for the Ad Store?
“Thanks for the F-Droid”
- Dirty Mike and the Boys
This ad has features you may not like
F-Droid for the main stuff, Aurora Store when I’m feeling dirty.
A single row of ads would be ok, but having this many plus an ad showing up first, where the search results should be… Oof
I don’t think ads showing something related to what I’m looking for are bad in and if themselves. I want to find related content, the problem is that these are often not in any way related to what I’m looking for. It’s just a list of who paid to be listed there.
No it wouldn’t. Phones aren’t cheap.
They can be. I bought a Galaxy s22 with a broken screen for $150, and my carrier just gave me an $1100 credit for it on a new iphone. I don’t need an iPhone, and I will be selling it to get yet another cheap phone and pocketing the money, but it goes to show just how much phones do not cost to the people producing them
Dam that’s a hilarious life hack lol.
I’m on a 12 Pro with no intentions of upgrading but when I go to I’m gonna try and find a new broken flagship to turn in too lmao.
The Android licence is free and the Play Store infrastructure has to support tens of millions of devices.
I’m not saying this is an acceptable level, but Samsung ain’t putting a dollar toward Google running the store, in fact, they’d much prefer to run and maintain their own.
I guess hoovering up all your data ain’t enough.
I don’t even get why having the store on more devices is supposed to “cost” google anything.
It’s a store. They get a cut from every transaction. Why wouldn’t they want it to be on everything?
That’s not true. Phone manufacturers need to pay if they want to include Google Play in their devices, it’s not free. It can cost as much as $40 per device.
Thanks for the correction, I was unaware
They shouldn’t rely on ads to make money back on a phone IMHO.
Just be glad you’re on Android and have alternatives to this. Poor Apple users are stuck with whatever Apple decided to do with the app store.
Poor Apple users kinda don’t have to deal with this shit
Lol the ad is also the very same thing you’re searching for
Can confirm on my own device. Only ad in sight is for two dots itself at the top … I kept scrolling looking for one and didn’t see any.
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Yeah Apple doesn’t do this to the users whatsoever.
Whats the ad situation on app store, do they aggressively push stuff into your throats there as well?
Afaik it’s not nearly at all like this. Doesn’t change the fact that you have absolutely no alternatives, though. If apple did decide to do this, you couldn’t just sideload the apps yourself.
Not at all from my experience. The App Store generally looks cleaner and more organised.
I hope for your sake that they at least stick to that. The google approach seems to be that they are too big to fail and that they can keep doing what they want, and what they want, apparently is more space for ads!
I’d take the in-store ads if they enforced consistent behavior for in-app ads. It’s infuriating to have an ad that plays for 30sec or whatever, only to then force you to wait ANOTHER 5-15sec on the title card for the close button to appear. Or, worse yet, have an ad that automatically opens the Play Store unless you can hit the 2px close button.
Google is an advertising company.
They just recently (like in the past few weeks) added an ad slot in the ios app store that I actively hate, but it’s the first one that’s just there (and not in search). Just wait though. Soon the app store will look exactly like this shot of the play store.
Unfortunately that seems to be the case with Google products (see YouTube on mobile). Most users might not even care about the excessive ads and Google knows that.
Luckily, there seem to be many alternatives on Android. If Apple was to ad-ify the App Store, you wouldn’t have that many options (outside of jailbreaking and maybe the Altstore).
Google made 80% of its revenue from ads last year. No wonder they’re trying to force ads everywhere they can
That’s soon to change when regulations come in to force apple to allow sideloading.
Try out Aurora Store. Just started testing it. Looks and works similar to play store but without adds. You
can login withshould not use your main google account.https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.aurora.store/
/edit/
Pro tip - Avoid using your main account because it might get blocked permanently by Google.
Why?
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Do you know what part of the TOS that is violated? I looked through it and didn’t see anything that seemed to apply.
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When I’m installing F-Droid I get a security alert about it being developed for a previous android version and that it doesn’t include latest privacy updates. How legit is that? I’m downloading the apk throught their official website https://f-droid.org/
It’s so the app still runs on ancient android versions. Use the Droid-ify client instead if you don’t want that
Does it have security vulnerabilities?
Not exactly. It’s possible to make an app run on older versions (select lower
minSdk) and yet take advantage of newer features (select highertargetSdk). This one can be easily be fixed by the F-Droid developers like almost all other developers have already.Droidify is amazing, I’d totally recommend that over the official F-Droid client any time. 👍
Thanks for that, looks pretty nice. Though I’m concerned now trading Google might block your account for using it.
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it got worse and worse over the last 1-2 years. this days you can’t even open an app description page on desktop anymore. you search for the name…and you can’t click on the app listing. it just gives you the option to install on your phone but not to read the store page. you only get to it by searching on Google for it. and the mobile app is like you said shit too. often you can’t even find an app and get random ads for other shitty apps.
It sounds like you’re browsing the web signed in to your Google account. Sign out and clear cookies, or go Incognito.
what has this to do with signed in our not? google does the same if you’re not logged in
Works well here. I just checked on desktop to be sure they have not broken it now - nope, I can browse apps normally.
maybe it depends on the region then. I’m in germany.
what has this to do with signed in our not? google does the same if you’re not logged in
One word: F-Droid! I’m literally only searching there for Apps first, often I find it. Send them some love, if you can afford it! Wouldn’t know how to watch YouTube anymore without New Pipe and stuff, listening to music via ViMusic, all ad-free. https://f-droid.org/en/
Saved this comment, thank you!
I discovered ViMusic a while ago but Youtube music keeps cencoring the songs I like so I will probably seitch back to mp3’s soon, cool app tho!
If you do, check out plexamp.
You can self host a small Plex server on a raspberry pi and store all the music there. Play via plexamp and Plex does all the metadata for you
That sounds awesome!
Use jellyfin instead, its FOSS and amazing.
The eternal debate, Jellyfin vs. Plex 😀
I tried both, i prefer Plex (also because my TV doesn’t have a Jellyfin App and i don’t want to have another mini-PC just to play Jellyfin on my TV)
To each their own of course, I just want other people to be aware of an alternative to Plex if they haven’t heard about it.
I hear great things about Jellyfin, but I’m in the Plex camp too. The availability of the Plex app is a big factor. I’m a bit biased in that I bought a lifetime membership years ago so I get all the premium features as well. I believe they still offer deals on plex lifetime membership from time to time. It is really worth it!
Yup, got the 20% off of lifetime a couple months ago.
Didn’t regret it.
I run /e/OS with a custom app store, App Lounge. It combines F-Droid and the Play Store via Aurora. It even embeds Exodus Privacy Ratings and is simply awesome. You can even log in with your Google account and download paid apps that way. Pretty neat.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !e_os@lemmy.world
Hmm, seems your regex isn’t perfect mister bot. That’s ok
I’m probably not seeing the error…? Can you point it out to me so I can fix it?
Is there an easy way to see which of my installed apps are available through f-droid? Or do I need to search for each one manually.
I’d also like to know that.
yes; I use Foxy Droid to access f-droid and it detects Play Store-installed apps and displays them under Installed as long as the package name matches. This also works vice-versa
i just discover ViMusic thanks to your comment, i love it!! thank you for mentioning it!!!
I am really lately hating my android phone and the targeted ads disguised as “Article I might be interested in” in the google now section of my phone.
I’m tempted to switch to an iphone but I realize the same problems exist over there too. We need a new mobileOS…with blackjack
Firefox with ublock and duckduckgo seems to help my android experience. This is my first non apple smart phone.
@Mrmcmisterson i have had iPhones for forever now. The only place i see ads (that Apple has control over) are the one bar in the App Store now, which didn’t happen until what 2 weeks ago. Every other ad is within an app itself or online.
Even Apple News doesn’t have ads. Nor do any of their exercise or music apps (at least not that I’ve seen)
Apple News has ads but only in the articles
@mashi right, but those aren’t apple’s ads, they are the news sources’, since it’s redirecting to their page (afaik).
Wait, what? A shitty Google product? Plagued by ads and spyware? No way!
As others have pointed out here, use Aurora Store or F-Droid.
Welcome to being a product!
What? … what’s that? … wait … let me buy the ‘listening app’ for $3.99 monthly subscription first … oh yeah, now I hear you … yeah, feels shitty being a product … oh wait … now I have to buy the $5.99 one time payment app ‘thoughts and feelings’ … there, now I feel I can feel it … yeah … feels shitty
i’m still just pissed that they renamed it to “play store”
Psst listen up losers. There’s this godly app that you could download off the web called Blockada. It can block add inside of games and apps. If you’re not a masochist, you should get it.
But always use blokada 5, because blokada 6 sends all your traffic to a cloud service to be filtered there instead of filtering locally like 5 does.
Or just set your DNS to nextdns.io or similar. No need for any app.
That’s also true, but I find the ability to decide what gets blocked and what doesn’t to be useful sometimes
I mean, it’s Google. What did you expect? Android is free because having it on a ton of cheap phones helps Google collect data and sell ads.
Side-rant:
Apple’s got plenty of problems and anti-consumer behavior, too, don’t get me wrong… but it’s incredible how far they’re able to enforce privacy, down to the hardware level, while still giving devs almost the same level of control over OS features as Android.
Like, look at how ARKit does point cloud sharing vs ARCore. iOS limits sharing scanned AR environments to peer-to-peer local connections, and it’s a totally opaque object. Android meanwhile uploads your scanned room to a Google server, and the privacy terms for that data are the same as the ones for Youtube, search, maps, etc.
It drives me crazy how many FOSS nerds will rail against Facebook’s data collection and chokepoint capitalism, but then go on to praise Android for standing up to that no-good Apple. They hear “I can sideload apps” and they drop all of their recent cynicism about why they’re getting nifty stuff at a hefty discount.
Apple makes money by selling expensive devices.
Google makes money by selling ads.
You can figure out the rest of the equation.
I can’t scrobble my music to last.fm on iOS without some janky workaround. The “almost same level of control” part of what you said relies on an assumption that only the set of use cases explicitly determined by Apple as ones that “matter” are worth supporting. That it’s more important to prevent the user from explicitly allowing a scrobbling app permission to read the music player app’s now playing notification than for the device to be able to perform this simple function.
This point of difference doesnt have any meaningful impact on collection of my data. It just stops the device from being able to do the function I want. So that what, I can sleep easier knowing that Apple designed a slick interface to point out data vectors which were already implied to be collected? It used to feel like a smartphone with training wheels, now they’ve just locked up the handlebars so that it’s easier to go straight.
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Google has much better software and they charge for it in data/ads instead of money, but there’s a much better reason to choose android over IOS: It’s open-source, so people have created free software variants of it that retain compatibility with existing apps while respecting your privacy and freedom.
In case you care about that, give grapheneOS or calyxOS a shot on your pixel.
If you install a custom build, doesn’t that break OS verification (or whatever the name of it was)? Meaning things like Google wallet, but more importantly some banking apps, will fail to work?
Apple does objectively suck for many reasons though.
Also, important to note that what you’re describing as their privacy focus is a deliberate rebranding exercise after a huge ,global failure with icloud and things like police access to their systems/data and public backlash.
They are only here now, in this brief moment, because of necessity and like any of this, it’s typically a pendulum. As soon as they don’t have to do this (which probably sounds a lot like users like you defending their security bonafides publicly on their behalf), they will start to creep away and de-prioritize privacy and security.
but it’s incredible how far they’re able to enforce privacy, down to the hardware level, while still giving devs almost the same level of control over OS features as Android.
I don’t give a shit about devs. I want that control for users. Until they allow users to do what they want, they can get fucked.
Privacy through the use of user restrictions is not acceptable either. It’s my god damn phone, don’t you dare tell me what I can’t do on it “for my protection”.
It’s like saying a security firm is the best in the world at keeping clients safe, because they lock those clients in a vault and don’t let them leave.
Privacy for freedom is not a good trade for those enthusiasts your frustrated with. They will accept Google’s shit because the alternative is getting in a fucking cage.
I mean, FOSS nerds run android de-googled (or more specifically never install google services on a custom ROM).
I’m with you on this, I used to avoid using apple products at all costs due to the way they are so anti consumer and lock you in heavily to their ecosystem.
But in terms of security and privacy they aren’t even playing on the same level. Android will never be as privacy or security focused as apple due to the way google runs its business so long term a Linux mobile operating system would be the dream.
Until then I stick with what I can use which is the apple products for now.
