Petition to stop Google from restricting sideloading and FOSS apps

> What do I need to do to make a difference, and how much time will this take?

EU or US?

> what's the path? Legislation?

Send them a letter explaining why this is bad for you. Keep it strictly factual and ideally concise. Copy Google’s legal [1] and any relevant digital or markets regulators. (If in the US, don’t forget your state regulators.)

Wait two weeks and then call the elected. Make sure they’re aware, and talk through your options. Send a letter thanking them for the call, incorporating any new information and actions they said they would take, and copy all of the previous parties again.

More work: reach out to other top developers and organise an open letter. This will be hard because everyone wants to include their pet issue and everyone will fight over scope and language.

[1] https://support.google.com/faqs/answer/6151275?hl=en

EU (and the rest of Europe) are more concerned with controlling their own populations than keeping their data safe from the US. They are very much pro-big business dominance on the internet BECAUSE it makes it easier for them to regulate.

A lot of governments want to use American AI systems to run things to cut costs.

Honestly, I'll be surprised if this plan doesn't break the DMA/DSA already.

Someone will need to collect the necessary resources to bring the fight to the courts, though.

Yes. Not a rando online petition: “we have succesfully escalated complaints on this problem to consumer agencies in France, Germany, and Australia, and have brought forth petitions for new law on this problem to various countries.”

Petitions from verified voters are powerful. Triply so if done in person, because the infrastructure that can collect signatures in person can also e.g. back a primary challenge or plebiscite.

Has legislation been created as a result of that awareness?

And the vast majority of their awareness actually came from a failed counter-campaign by the opposition.

Did the US government not give endorsement?

[dead]

I've got no evidence that they have an estimation of the volume or scale of the feedback.

But I reckon we can all make an educated guess that they did anticipate negative feedback.

First, web environment integrity was about the web as a whole, not about something that is completely owned and under their control. Second, they will not stop trying. It was not their first approach and it won't be the last.

So, I believe that if they decided this is the path they want to take - they will find one way or another. It's not that resistance is futile (it's not!) but I believe that petitions are not a good tool for the case.

> delegitimize developer criticism before addressing its substance. This attacks the critics rather than engaging with their actual concerns

It’s a petition, not a debate. Who is speaking is absolutely relevant. Tens of thousands of tiny developers with a few million collective users aren’t relevant to Google.

> Appeal to Corporate Omniscience

This is not a logical fallacy. You may be thinking of appeal to improper authority. But in that case the criticism is that we don’t know Google anticipated this. Not what you wrote, which is technically ad hominem, since you conclude adversely based on Google being a corporation.

> ignores the possibility that feedback could be legitimate even if anticipated

No, it does not. It says such a petition brings no new information to the decision makers at Google. If Google (note: this is OP’s hypothesis, not a fact) anticipated small developers complaining. Small developers are complaining. That doesn’t make the complaints wrong. But it would make them practically irrelevant.

> The phrase "screeching voices of minority" is a

https://www.howtogeek.com/746588/apple-discusses-screeching-...

> Appeal to Corporate Omniscience - The argument assumes that because Google anticipated negative feedback, this somehow validates their decision or renders criticism invalid. A company expecting pushback doesn't automatically make their decision correct.

This argument is not present nor implied in my comment.

> Circular Reasoning - The logic is essentially: "Google knew people would complain, therefore the complaints don't matter because Google expected them." This doesn't address whether the complaints have merit.

My text did not comment or expressed any opinion whether the complaints have merit.

> False Dichotomy - It implies that developer feedback is either completely valid (and Google should have changed course) or completely invalid (because Google was "prepared" for it). This ignores the possibility that feedback could be legitimate even if anticipated.

My comment does not present this dichotomy as described by you.

The above post listing fallacies is entirely AI-generated and is likely a sleeper agent account that has been woken up from a pattern of posting non-content to disguise inactivity to start astroturfing for Google.

The cost/benefit of doing such on Hn is high.

It’s not purely social. A lot of web apps are legitimately poor, probably because the web has become the go-to platform for those looking to cut costs, who aren’t willing to pay for quality talent. This why there’s such a gulf between VS Code (not technically a web app, but built with web tech) and MS Teams for example: the former has had no expenses spared to woo devs and give MS legitimacy in software dev while the latter only needs to technically function since its audience is captive, so quality can be an afterthought.

So really, people need to start rejecting poor quality or poorly performing web apps. The collective bar for “good enough” is far too low, and so cheapskates will continue to churn out garbage.

Re DJI Fly: a combination of WebBluetooth, WebRTC, the normal location API, offline web pages (through managed caches), regular browser video features, and a bunch of other web technologies.

Re SyncThing: there's the File System Access API. You can ask the user for a folder and then operate on the files and directories inside it. Also from a locally cached offline copy, of course. Serviceworkers are there to run in the background, though I'm not 100% sure if the FS API and service workers can be combined to be honest.

It'll need as much effort or maybe even more to port it to the web as it has taken to develop the Android app, but it's almost definitely possible, at least on Chrome.

As part of Google's attempt to break free from the iOS app store, they accidentally invented an alternative to their own draconic measures.

Non-certified phones won't be sold in Western markets. This whole scheme has one goal only, and that's to snuff out DRM-unfriendly third party apps like alternative Youtube clients, videogame emulators and P2P file sharing apps.

I don't understand how side-loading would impact information marketplaces should provide. If it's side-loaded, that's no longer marketplace responsibility.

I am not an iOS user, so I wasn't aware of how it worked. In that case the DMA is completely worthless.

Isn't Apple already getting sued for having that process?

De-anonymization is being done for the same reason manifest v3 was - to help their youtube revenue.