Google Ejects Open-Source WireGuard From Android Play Store Over Donation Link In App

[Luke]

No shit Sherlock.

The issue is that I need to be able to communicate with people because of job and family, like I guess most other normal people.

I'm the one that has something to lose (i.e. job and money) if I can't use conventional means to communicate.

tl; dr I can't tell all people around me to fuck off and still eat food regularly. If you can, then you are special.

You are not telling people around you to fuck off, you are telling Google and Microsoft to fuck off, and telling those around you that you don't trust those companies and won't let them in your life. Anyone basing their communications on installing apps can of course get Signal from Google Play.

Family can be face to face, landline phone, or straight cellphone. So far (rumors planted by Facebook to the contrary) very few jobs outside being someone's social media presence require a Facebook account or access. A job requiring that really should also provide the device, if not exile that shit to a second device used for nothing else and never linked to what you use the secure phone for in any way e.g no websites or accounts ever accessed by both devices.

As for me, I am able to kick Facebook and Microsoft all the way out of my life with no negative repercussions. I would never write a program seeking to sell it if I knew in advance the transactions would have to go through Google Play for a 30% rakeoff, I would do something else instead and the software would never exist.

[pal666]

I work on MATE

which isn't android app. subj is android app

[starshipeleven]

You are not telling people around you to fuck off,

Correct, I'm actually telling them to "fuck me" because I'm the one that can be easily be replaced if they can't communicate with me easy enough, or has to deal with issues caused by family members that do things without talking to me at all.

As I said, I'm not as special enough for them to impose my rules.

[starshipeleven]

for kpederson he would still have a feature phone to handle SMS so that's a non-issue.

Kdepersen does not use those applications at all, so he does not need a small portable PC either.

I'm the one setting the standard of "a single portable communication device capable of video" here, so if I say it's relevant it is.

This is simply Incorrect. Telegram, Discord, and Slack which are the big 3

"Big 3" is a strong statement. Chat applications have a very fragmented userbase, it's also a XKCD comic, so you know it must be right

https://xkcd.com/1810/

I personally need Watsapp for say 60% of the people around me, plus Telegram, Hangout and WeChat for the other 40%. Discord I never used and I thought it was used only by gamers, I never heard of Slack entirely.

Skype does have a Linux desktop version.

As I said above, it's a webapp (a wrapper for the web interface) or it was last time I read news about it, I'm still not going to use that because it's been crap for so long on platforms that actually matter (Android for example).

WhatsApp has a web interface if you really must use it

It's not standalone, to initiate each session you must scan a QR with your phone's Watsapp application and then it is linked to that until you close the page. You can't use it if you don't have another device with Watsapp app installed on it you can scan the QR code with.

and should you really be using WeChat?

I don't mind sending my regards to Chinese Gov every now and then. #ChineseGovernmentDidNothingWrong

Asian-looking people (I don't usually ask nationality to clients) tend to use WeChat even if they are living in another country. I happen to have quite a few clients that do.

Apparently, Chinese are trying to conquer EU economically by sending their pawns over to buy out local business with hard cash on hand and take over.
But none cares, it's the poor black people from the North Africa that are the "real threat" for everybody as they "steal jobs" none else would ever have taken anyway, so nevermind this tangent, I'm just blabbering.

And before you go "buh buh ARM"

Architecture is not terribly relevant to me. The effort needed to get the average ARM device to actually work somewhat decently even on Windows is. I've had very bad experiences even with low end x86 devices with Baytrail and similar, still on Windows 10, where an update would break wifi or the modem or whatever and there is no "updated driver to support Windows 10 <current date here>".

you can install Linux on the GPD Win example too, and use all your x86 software to your delight,

Which I don't have that much of a use for, as said above.

And for 500+ euro game console-like device that is as unwieldy as a tablet but from out-of-EU (so I get a completely random but also completely bullshit customs fee on it, I've seen up to 60% import fee) that's a hard pass too.

It's one of the very few devices in its class that I would actually trust to deliver what it promises (as I did hear about its campaign and saw videos of it from Linus Tech Tips), mind me, it's just that I don't need that.

[Luke]

Correct, I'm actually telling them to "fuck me" because I'm the one that can be easily be replaced if they can't communicate with me easy enough, or has to deal with issues caused by family members that do things without talking to me at all.

As I said, I'm not as special enough for them to impose my rules.

You and all other people do in fact have the right to decide for yourself who you do and do not want to work with. If someone tries to tell me "you must be on Facebook to work with me" (or skype, etc), than that is a statement of contempt for my right to control my own devices. In my community such a person would be considered a security risk as well. We DO have the inverse case of folks who do not have smartphones at all because they are not confident they can secure them (a damned complex task), so when someone doesn't have Signal we work around that by a variety of secure methods. Nobody gets pressured to spend money or risk their privacy with a device they don't know how to lock down because they are not hackers. The converse is that nobody ever tells me "if you want to be at this event, open the page on Facebook" when asked for time and place.

Real friends don't try to force each other into tools or platforms that they don't trust

[Luke]

which isn't android app. subj is android app

That is true, but the subject is also development and motivations for it, which in turn affects viable responses to rules on the Google Play store. Also programming is programming to a great extent.

OK, MATE is written in C, Android apps are written in Java but these are just two different programming languages. For Android, the huge fragmentation in ARM almost forced the original devs to rely on Java for apps, as this way each phone with its particular ARM version need only offer a consistant java runtime environment. Also in Java you have automatic memory management and garbage collection, so less risk of the Google Play store or F-Droid filling up with apps that are full of memory leaks and buffer overflows. Disadvantage is this is heavier on already low resource ARM procs, and garbage collectors can slow things down drastically under memory pressure. A dramatic example of that is trying to run Twitter's JS of a few years ago on a first generation Intel Atom netbook: the browser almost comes to a stop.

I had to learn to program in C from total scratch to do what I did for MATE. I see from some online research that a new Android app from scratch can take anywhere from 300 to 3,000 man-hours, no doubt this assumes a decent pre-existing background in Java and with Android development, and this is for all the way to release. I probably have between 500 and 1,000 man-hours in the aggregage six months it took me in MATE to deal with some of the major bugs. The bugs grated on me, had the potential to kill the project entirely, and I wasn't willing to give up the interface I wanted. Had I had the pre-existing experience equivalent to most of those who develop a major new app from scratch I would have saved a hell of a lot of that time.

[Luke_Wolf]

Kdepersen does not use those applications at all, so he does not need a small portable PC either.

I'm the one setting the standard of "a single portable communication device capable of video" here, so if I say it's relevant it is.

Or in other words... You're moving the goalposts, as the scenario you challenged him on came with two devices. A feature phone, and a handheld computer, and since you already say you're using Hangouts later on... You already have your SMS solution through Google Voice, and if not them 100 other companies that do SMS through a web portal, and no objecting that you have to pay because we're getting rid of the phone from the equation which you had to pay for.

"Big 3" is a strong statement. Chat applications have a very fragmented userbase, it's also a XKCD comic, so you know it must be right

https://xkcd.com/1810/

Don't give me that crap. Chat apps are fragmented sure but there have always been dominant 800 lb gorillas, it's why Skype was such a problem in the past. But as long as you can account for at least one of the 800lb gorillas you're compatible with most people because most people are going to have all or most of them installed.

I personally need Watsapp for say 60% of the people around me, plus Telegram, Hangout and WeChat for the other 40%. Discord I never used and I thought it was used only by gamers, I never heard of Slack entirely.

Not even close. Discord is basically the new IRC for everyone under 30. Only a few of the Discord Servers I'm on has anything to do with gaming, and some of those are development not playing. Slack is basically the same kind of thing as Discord but primarily used by businesses.

As I said above, it's a webapp (a wrapper for the web interface) or it was last time I read news about it, I'm still not going to use that because it's been crap for so long on platforms that actually matter (Android for example).

Well... It is an electron app but calling it "just a wrapper for a web interface" isn't quite right. Ironically the Linux version works better than the Windows version for me because at least it doesn't crash in the background all the time. Regardless it's available.

It's not standalone, to initiate each session you must scan a QR with your phone's Watsapp application and then it is linked to that until you close the page. You can't use it if you don't have another device with Watsapp app installed on it you can scan the QR code with.

Looks like you may be right, I didn't read closely enough. I refuse to use Facebook or Facebook owned platforms personally.

I don't mind sending my regards to Chinese Gov every now and then. #ChineseGovernmentDidNothingWrong

Asian-looking people (I don't usually ask nationality to clients) tend to use WeChat even if they are living in another country. I happen to have quite a few clients that do.

Apparently, Chinese are trying to conquer EU economically by sending their pawns over to buy out local business with hard cash on hand and take over.
But none cares, it's the poor black people from the North Africa that are the "real threat" for everybody as they "steal jobs" none else would ever have taken anyway, so nevermind this tangent, I'm just blabbering.

Well you certainly don't have to bow down before the Chinese Government and install an openly malicious app if you want to be a socially functional adult in The West.

Architecture is not terribly relevant to me. The effort needed to get the average ARM device to actually work somewhat decently even on Windows is. I've had very bad experiences even with low end x86 devices with Baytrail and similar, still on Windows 10, where an update would break wifi or the modem or whatever and there is no "updated driver to support Windows 10 <current date here>".

Which I don't have that much of a use for, as said above.

And for 500+ euro game console-like device that is as unwieldy as a tablet but from out-of-EU (so I get a completely random but also completely bullshit customs fee on it, I've seen up to 60% import fee) that's a hard pass too.

It's one of the very few devices in its class that I would actually trust to deliver what it promises (as I did hear about its campaign and saw videos of it from Linus Tech Tips), mind me, it's just that I don't need that.

The comment was in response to you going on about software availability on Linux which I assumed was due to the fact that most of what you listed is obviously available for the Linux x86 desktop, that you were commenting on the fact that the Pandora and Pyra are ARM. However the only unresolved application here is WhatsApp which does certainly seem to be tied hard to smartphone availability.