Hacker News

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.

Yeah, not for much longer though: https://keepandroidopen.org/

Google is making it increasingly difficult to freely install software from app stores that they don't control and tax. Quoting https://keepandroidopen.org :

> Starting in 2027*, a silent update, nonconsensually pushed by Google, will block every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with Google, signed their contract, paid up, and handed over government ID.

> Every app and every device, worldwide, with no opt-out.

No, you can't; not without jumping through hoops, not without clicking on fake warnings, not without a song and a dance about fake "saving you from scammers" scare tactics.

Please stop covering for Google. They're behaving badly, people are reacting, stop with the "Achucally..." which is pretty grating and cringe worthy.

> you lose all the users who don't want to leave the walled garden, even though they can.

I think it's moreso you lose all the users who don't realize anything outside the walled garden even exists.

But not for long. Sideloading is being frowned upon by the mighty G

It's honestly not that big of a problem. Probably some anti-trust legislation can/should be passed to make installing F-Droid and the like easier, but it's already pretty easy. If enough popular apps start requiring you to install them through F-Droid then that'll become normalized and Google will lose its soft monopoly in this space, which is an outcome I'm all for.

99.99% of the typical mobile phone users will not be able to implement your advice and the 0.01% that can already knows.

To me it's not really the concept of the app store that's dystopian, it's not that different from a deb or rpm repository. What is dystopian is the level of control the OS vendor maintains over the entire ecosystem.

Their emails are confusing, but they came after the alleged violation in private communication, not what you were going from at the time of the alleged violation. If you ignore them momentarily (surely you understand they probably aren't as well-scrutinized by lawyers, which would explain why they appear to mistakenly refer to the tax status of the recipient rather than that of the donation), is anything else actually confusing or inconsistent? Their policies, the relevant laws, and what common sense would have you expect - they seem pretty cut and dried. Are they inconsistent with anything other than their emails, which came after the fact?

From another angle: why/how do you feel the tax-exempt-mess of the recipient itself could sensibly be the determining factor here, rather than the taxability of the transaction itself? Is there any law or precedent or anything outside their emails that would suggests a payment processor should look at the tax status of the recipient rather than that of a transaction?

Google's policy wording is clear. It is just you don't like what is written.

The mere fact that they have to avoid dealing with sales tax here (unlike their typical transactions) is clearly extra complication for them. So you can understand that sales tax being 0% (thus "not taxable") can make things harder, not easier.

Having to deal with bookkeeping or paperwork for tax deductions could also make things harder.

In any case, whether you think these are easier or harder, and regardless of which cases should be supported from a business perspective, their policy page (at least the one that I'm reading) very clearly says you can't use their system for such donations.

I didn't say it's a question of sales tax collections. I said a payment processor deals with sales taxes.

In this case they clearly have to exempt this transaction from sales tax in order to support it, when other transactions through their system do get sale tax applied. So the mere fact that they have to deal with sales taxes in general is likely to introduce additional complications for them even here, in cases where sales tax turns out not to be applicable.

IANAL, but it seems like the wording in the public-facing version of the policy is a little muddy. As far as I'm aware, "tax exempt donation" not a thing that actually exists in US tax law. It seems to be a conflation of "tax deductible donation" and "tax exempt organization".

Knowing how big corporations do things, that document was likely written by someone who doesn't fully understand the jargon or even how pedantic you have to be about words when dealing with legal concepts, who didn't set the policy themself, and who is not responsible for enforcing the policy. So we should take its specific choice of words with a grain of salt.

I found that creating and adding to my own decks is the best way to learn. It's also a lot of fun creating the cards/notes structure, with some cards being created conditionally upon state of certain fields in the note, etc. It's a bit like creating a database schema.

Creating a card is a first step in learning that card. Worth it! And you don't have to do that on your phone - there's a desktop app available.

PWAs are not much more than webpages, basically just a separate launcher icon and less browser chrome making it look and feel more native. It's in the user's best interest to use these, since they get the good parts of using an app while avoiding full-featured-app junk like persistent background services that constantly monitor you.

Android and iOS keep each other in check

The irony is that just in communist China the corporations must submit to the Government.

You may argue that it is terrible. They don't have a democratic gov. But the alternative looks worse every day.

"Everything I don't like is communism"

The things mega corporations built could be even more valuable (for society) if they didn't intentionally restrict for their own and their shareholders' benefit what you can do with them.

"Regulating" also doesn't mean "taking control".

you're not making a good argument for privatization lol

Oh I see. I mistook it then. Sorry, my bad.

From a user perspective I think F-Droid is really good too, mainly because it only allows FOSS apps by default, which cuts out a lot of the BS you see in Play Store apps.

You can go download a random, no-name app from F-Droid and be very confident it does what it says on the tin and won't be riddled with ads or spam you with notifications.

On the user side my experience with F-Droid is auto updates dont work and I constantly get a "repository not reachable" f-droid error every now and then popping up on my phone (that little small middle-of-screen toast) when im doing something else completely unrelated. Might be a regional thing.

There are downsides to F-Droid too: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/android/obtaining-apps/?h=f...

F-Droid is a nerd solution and will be used by 0.00001% of the total market. There are more people that will use Linux on desktop than will use F-Droid.

We need governments to mandate both Apple and Google to allow web installs of apps. No requirement for Apple/Google pay, Apple/Google login, or Apple/Google services.

Total freedom for users, for developers, and for competitors.

This duopoly has fucked over America and the EU by training us to think only these two companies have the right to decide what gets to be on your phone that you pay for.

They've created a moat so strong that it's impossible to compete with Android/iPhone, so the market cannot even have healthy competition.

F-Droid is not the answer. Regulation is.

And I'll have none of this fangirl/fanboy "but my grandma will fall for scams" nonsense.

Google and Amazon and all the platforms have scammy ads on their platforms. Nobody's doing anything about that.

Technology can be sandboxed, permissioned, signed, fingerprinted, attested, scanned, and blacklisted. It's easy to make this safe in the year of our lord 2026. Don't pretend we don't have a million ways to make this safe for your meemaw. She's more likely to fall down the stairs or get a scam call.

Regulate Google. Regulate Apple. Make our phones free.

If you think average person buying an Android smartphone will use something like Komi-Store, obtanium or anything like that, you are in for a treat.

But users won't exit while they can find apps they want there. It's the apps doing the primary pulling.

Not everyone publishes apps to make money or get the highest number of users though.

Put an APK file download on your website, but it won't help discoverability.

Build it on the web. Almost no software needs to be in an app.

>Corporation like Google should have been fined to the edge of bankruptcy for such predatory behaviour.

Google has an alternative at least (can download other app stores, apks, and have been able to for 15 years), I have no idea how Apple has been allowed to get away with what they do.

We Americans collectively voted for this for decades. Virtually everyone who has cast a ballot for a national race has voted for this state of affairs.

Especially in the software community, overwhelmingly self-described libertarian, all voted for this.

It takes a big government to stop this from happening. (It also takes a big government to stop structural racism, etc., which means higher taxes, which means there's no such thing as a fiscal conservative who is also socially liberal. But I digress.)

Google is not the payment processor. This is about the app including a link to a donation page on opencollective.com.

Other 501(c)(6) organizations you might have heard of include the Linux Foundation and the Rust Foundation.

The 501(c)(6) in question is Open Source Collective, which is a “business league or industry association” dedicated to providing financial and administrative assistance to Open Source projects. Anki does not have lawyers, Open Source Collective does.

https://oscollective.org

This is an interesting rabbit hole if you bother to go down it, I encourage you to do some more research.

> The bottom line is that Anki's lawyers messed up.

Anki and Ankidroid are not the same entity and they have different owners, if you want to call it that.

Anki is owned by Nicholas Flint, a physician who sells med school-related decks online under the name AnKing, which controls Ankihub, which now controls Anki after the original founder (Damien Elmes) gave them control about six months ago.

Ankidroid is a non-profit project that arose when there was only an iPhone mobile version of Anki. Completely unrelated to Anki except that it was blessed by the original creator of Anki.

It's also just some nerd programmers who ported Anki to run on Android. It's not some org with a revenue stream and attorneys.

> Obviously we're all reading this expecting that Anki is a 501(c)(3) charity

No, no one is reading it thinking that Anki is a charity.

Anyway, when you are going to harp on about HN not caring about the minutiae of tax policy, you should make sure you understand that you're talking about two unrelated entities run by different people as if they were the same entity.

A majority of the people that have contributed to Android did not contribute with the understanding that Google would monopolize payments in all apps on the app store.

They must have updated their terms.