alt Hacker NewsApps need to exit the Play Store. I have a whole slew of apps which haven't been updated for a while now because Aurora Store isn't working because of whatever Google of doing. Meanwhile the ones installed via FDroid and other means are perfectly up to date. It's a crappy state of affairs as Google continues to close the boiling Android frog.
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90% of my apps (all except for banking, streaming and ev charging app) are installed without play store. Beyond FDroid with custom repos, I actually came to like Komi-Store in combination with obtainium. I really wonder what will happen when Google enforces their own registered developer signatures. I hope there is a crucial mass of apps outside of Play store until then to generate some heard protests.
I've started to see more B2C business apps not be on the Play Store, like Veed is online web
if i had a commercial app that i wanted to distribute off the play store, what are the options?
it certainly worked few days ago, I see last successful updates on August 26, tried just now and it doesn't work now
Crappy state of affairs is that the tax payer funded regulators twiddle their thumbs and do nothing about it.
Corporation like Google should have been fined to the edge of bankruptcy for such predatory behaviour.
This just should not be the top comment here. HN being HN, it's way, way too bent out of shape about the company name attached to the app store and not the minutiae of tax policy, which is what this is really about.
The app in question declares itself this way: AnkiDroid is a free, open-source flashcard app for Android with over 10 million installs, used worldwide for various purposes, primarily in medical education and language learning.
But it's registered as a 501(c)(6) non-profit, which is a designation for a "business league or industry association". This is what you use if you're a Chamber of Commerce, not a flash card app!
Obviously we're all reading this expecting that Anki is a 501(c)(3) charity, like most open source organizations, and it's just not. And the distinction is definitely impactful for tax purposes, something a payment processor is going to care about. Both organizations are exempt from tax themselves, but charitable donations are also deductable, and Anki isn't a charity. Likely Google isn't set up to record the distinction in an auditable way.
The bottom line is that Anki's lawyers messed up. Or plausibly are running some kind of scam (e.g. they take the "donations" and then hand them over to a for-profit "member" company). They need to fix their registration if they want to take money from people, this isn't how you do it and this is surely not the only problem they'll have. Seriously, my Fraud Meter is dinging at about 19.6% here...
I think there are more and more apps on f-droid.
On my end the experience was more pleasant on f-droid than on Google. On f-droid I had to manually push some things, in repositories. That I solved in a week or so.
On Google end I had to verify my account. Which was not easy feat.
- had to provide my ID several times, because it got rejected multiple times
- I uploaded driving license
- the verification process was stuck
- only after help ticket google employee pushed it forward
- I had to provide many more details, also had to use banking to pay substantial amount of money
- I currently trying to create app, but it requires 14 testers, and it can still be rejected, if their involvement was too poor
I am wondering what more things Google will invent to make my life worse.
By the way my app: https://github.com/rumca-js/OfflineWebSearch