How the fuck are open source apps a “legally grey area”!?
Yeah I am pretty pissed off that this article is conflating issues by even suggesting this.
The legal grey area they are alluding to is ad blocking. I don’t think it’s grey but that has to be what they are saying.
But the article is about third party apps and Google being a fuckwit.
This waters down the discussion, and is a unnecessary diversion.
Ad blocking isn’t even a legal grey area, it’s legal (as it should be, ads are a major attack vector for malware and scams).
I agree with you, yet I am sure there are lawyers who will argue that it would be against their terms of service.
I am with the old school crowd: you put stuff on the internet however you like, and I will render it however I like.
Their TOS can get fucked and it’s certainly not law: They’re free to deny service or ban users if they like, but I’m sure that’d go over like a lead balloon.
Crackdown? Cracking down on installing applications? These articles perpetuate Google’s bullshit framing.
Your fault for assuming crackdowns are good or well-intentioned.
side loading is a dumb word.
Fuck Sundar Pichai.
Tbh, I don’t like the coverage they’re giving to this issue. It feels like the new restrictions to sideloading are being done in a vacuum (and as though Google had always offered the “advanced workflow” mentioned, which was not the case. It came after popular outcry, IIRC), and not as a new chapter in a history of encroaching on users’s freedoms done by a profit-driven company. It feels like the concerned users are overblowing the situation and that “reasonable” users need not preoccupy themselves.
