alt Hacker NewsWhen 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.
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Imo if you compare what Google does to the one other mobile OS manufacturer with any users, claiming Google should be fined is something like the cop pulling you over for going 8 over the speed limit while Apple is doing triple digits and just ran two people over.
'Why not both' is an argument, but clear as day what Apple does is worse. There's no alternative.
> Reddit locking subreddits behind login wall - well there's always old.reddit
old.reddit is now locked behind login as well.
The amount of time I've spend to turn off news and ads in Windows is absurd. Just to be turned on in a new update.
And the menacing messages of installed something from F-Droid. My mother would never do it. Even my programmers colleagues usually don't do it.
The "convoluted" way is/was the default in the absence of a monopolist app store. Before centralised app stores, users downloaded or bought boxed software ad-hoc and installed it on their computers from installation archives, just like you can install apps from APK files on Android. If you banned Google from preloading their app store, isn't that what we would revert to?
Actually old reddit doesn’t work that way anymore lol you must login or use crappy reddit, which is exactly to your point though! They will just keep making it harder and harder until you simply can’t, but by then so a few people will be “opting in/out” that they’ll argue nobody wants the ability to toggle that anyway.
https://srinagar.nic.in/notice/immediate-suspension-of-virtu...
They banned "VPN"
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/after-vpn-ban-in-k...
Then came arrests.
https://www.medianama.com/2026/01/223-jammu-kashmir-vpn-ban-...
Street level checks. Police literally stop you roadside and check your phone for VPN.
This is happening in 2026. RIGHT NOW.
I talked to some officials and "oh you know what happened in Delhi blasts? They were using signal. If we had only caught them before".
While I agree with your point, conflating the effort to install apps outside of the Google Play Store with the effort to immigrate to a different country is wildly incomparable.
old.reddit now requires a login :/
macOS slowly ramping up the friction to run unsigned/unapproved apps over the years
old.reddit is also locked behind a login wall too, now!
sometimes people share a problem and want solutions or workarounds
other times people share a problem and just want to feel validated ("yeah that sucks dude")
it sounds like you wanted the 2nd but got the 1st
The frog is boiling slowly.
Google is breaking fdroid in less than a month left for sideloading: https://f-droid.org/en/2025/09/29/google-developer-registrat...