Comment by devsda
5 days ago
When do we stop this instinctive response of "well you can still do it in an only slightly convoluted way" everytime a corporate does something bad.
Windows added ads - well you can disable them, if you don't like it.
Chrome brought up mv3 - well you can still use mv2, it is only optional.
Reddit locking subreddits behind login wall - well there's always old.reddit
Android moving everything to playstore - there's always FDroid.
How many of these are still true and for how long?
If someone's country is a dictatorship, it doesn't help to tell them that there are 100 other democratic countries, just move. Not everyone can emigrate or want to emigrate for any number of reasons.
Imo if you compare what Google does to the one other mobile OS manufacturer with any users, claiming Google should be fined is something like the cop pulling you over for going 8 over the speed limit while Apple is doing triple digits and just ran two people over.
'Why not both' is an argument, but clear as day what Apple does is worse. There's no alternative.
Your reasoning shows why it's so much harder to fix a duopoly than to fix a monopoly. If there was no Apple then Google would get its comeuppance. If there was no Google then Apple would get its comeuppance. But because we have both Google and Apple, we can't punish either.
The mathematician in me wants to solve the problem of the duopoly by first reducing it to a monopoly, which we have known solutions for.
oligopolies are just as bad.
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We both agree that there is a speed limit and it needs to be adhered to, regardless of who it is.
The problem with Google is that it may have started at 8 over the limit, but it advertised itself as sticking to the limit but always hovered slightly above it pushing the boundaries. This has skewed our perception into believing that Google's was acceptable and we have been gradually raising our threshold itself to a dangerous level.
Now Google is not too far behind Apple that it can't catch up.
Give it up. Stop defending your position when it's been pointed out that you are holding the two companies to two different standards. It's all right to admit you were wrong and learn something, even on the internet.
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> 'Why not both' is an argument, but clear as day what Apple does is worse. There's no alternative.
'Just start somewhere, anywhere, please' is another argument.
So let's start with the worse one.
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Ironically, Apple allows alternate app stores in the EU now, while Google is moving to disallow them everywhere.
I don't think Google is moving to disallow them, it's more that the EU said that it's fine for Apple to still own app notarization / developer verification even outside of Apple's app store. Google saw this and said, cool, we'll add that to Android too so we can also get our (undeserved) cut outside of the Play Store. I can install F-Droid or anything else, but if they dont submit papers to Google, I get a big scary warning when I install it (I get the same scary warning if a developer distributes apps through F-Droid, but doesn't verify with Google, which is ridiculous too). On iOS if I don't submit to Apple I cant do anything.
It all sucks, and I'm not saying this is a good thing. But Google and Apple are both trying to position themselves as not having monopolies on store fronts, while still forcing notarization and verification to run through them independent of the store being used. And the EU seems fine with this for some insane reason. Google isn't trying to be worse than Apple, they're trying to match Apple.
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The frog is boiling slowly.
Google is breaking fdroid in less than a month left for sideloading: https://f-droid.org/en/2025/09/29/google-developer-registrat...
Honestly still one of the main reasons why I am actualy considering switching to iPhone. Atleast with Apple I know what to expect. And as a bonus I get amazing vertical integration and probably the best aftermarket there is.
That's like moving to a gulag to get away from Guantanamo.
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https://srinagar.nic.in/notice/immediate-suspension-of-virtu...
They banned "VPN"
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/after-vpn-ban-in-k...
Then came arrests.
https://www.medianama.com/2026/01/223-jammu-kashmir-vpn-ban-...
Street level checks. Police literally stop you roadside and check your phone for VPN.
This is happening in 2026. RIGHT NOW.
I talked to some officials and "oh you know what happened in Delhi blasts? They were using signal. If we had only caught them before".
Actually old reddit doesn’t work that way anymore lol you must login or use crappy reddit, which is exactly to your point though! They will just keep making it harder and harder until you simply can’t, but by then so a few people will be “opting in/out” that they’ll argue nobody wants the ability to toggle that anyway.
I think the old reddit redirect extension gets around this somehow, that has worked for me lately (occasionally with some toggling of the extension). Although maybe it's best to just use less reddit tbh
Not anymore :-(
But it's a good thing, actually because: - when reddit is good it's way to addictive - reddit has become nearly as bad as most other social media sites
So if they force me to use an account, I'll finally be able to kick the habit ;-)
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You don't always need an extension to use old.reddit.com, it's an actual setting if you're logged in.
The real problem is that old.reddit.com and its ecosystem are all becoming worse and worse. Just off the top of my head, things like image galleries, message notifications, RemindMe bot, RES, /r/random, etc all have various problems and breakage.
I resigned as a mod after the API shitshow and am so glad I did. It’s a terrible site. I wind up there every month or two from friends or looking something up, it’s hard to see how much of a cesspool it is when you’re so invested in it and up close.
I use redlib https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib and librediret instead.
> Reddit locking subreddits behind login wall - well there's always old.reddit
old.reddit is now locked behind login as well.
There's a workaround if you want it enough.
I noticed that reddit was setting a use_redesign (I might have the name slightly wrong) cookie when I explicitly visited the old.reddit domain, and this caused old reddit to persist. Since I do occasionally want to use the new site for image posts and the like, I set up a bookmarklet to set/unset that cookie on command.
I've since found that setting this cookie bypasses the old.reddit login page, allowing me to view the old site while not logged in. No idea how long that will last though.
There is a workaround for now. Boil little froggy, boil.
To what value do I need to set the cookie?
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The simple workaround to most of these walls is to create an account with your email address and phone number.
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When did this start? I didn't even realize at first because I use Redlib.
few weeks ago
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https://old.lemmy.world has no login wall!
The amount of time I've spend to turn off news and ads in Windows is absurd. Just to be turned on in a new update.
And the menacing messages of installed something from F-Droid. My mother would never do it. Even my programmers colleagues usually don't do it.
I actually think the menacing messages are on point but should apply to play store apps as well. Most of the people I know are incredibly cavalier about running mystery software from unfamiliar developers on by far the most sensitive device that they own.
The "convoluted" way is/was the default in the absence of a monopolist app store. Before centralised app stores, users downloaded or bought boxed software ad-hoc and installed it on their computers from installation archives, just like you can install apps from APK files on Android. If you banned Google from preloading their app store, isn't that what we would revert to?
The goal is not to prevent a Google monopoly. The goal is to have competition to prevent Google abusing its monopoly to lock down users.
There is Samsung Galaxy store.There is Xiaomi store.There was Amazon app store which failed to gain traction as it was not pre-installed but had decent number of apps. This is even before we get to open stores like F-droid.
Now their viability is a question in the long term, if Google has complete discretion over what is allowed.
> There was Amazon app store which failed to gain traction
I also heard that dev's couldn't remove apps they, for whatever reason, no longer supported. Even if the developers abandoned Amazon's app store entirely, the old bitrotted apps would still be there. The 1-star reviews would pile up, biasing users against them on other platforms.
Google doesn't have complete discretion. On Samsung phones, Samsung's discretion overrides Google's. On Xiaomi phones, Xiaomi's discretion overrides Google's.
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On my Nokia (featurephone) you don't need to install apps, you just run them.
old.reddit is also locked behind a login wall too, now!
While I agree with your point, conflating the effort to install apps outside of the Google Play Store with the effort to immigrate to a different country is wildly incomparable.
old.reddit now requires a login :/
macOS slowly ramping up the friction to run unsigned/unapproved apps over the years
sometimes people share a problem and want solutions or workarounds
other times people share a problem and just want to feel validated ("yeah that sucks dude")
it sounds like you wanted the 2nd but got the 1st
There are solutions and then there are workarounds. what we see are workarounds, not solutions.
Even in software, you can only patch so many workarounds without fixing the issue. Eventually fatigue sets in or we run out of workarounds and just publish the bug as "expected behavior" don't we?
I don't want the workarounds to distract from the need for a proper fix.