> No human knows

source?

1) Don't like Apple? Don't buy their products

2) You still have full disk access if you want

You know, surprisingly enough, some of us here on this forum are software developers.

And so it ends up mattering to us what the rest of society gets in terms of software too.

If you can't get 12 people to test your app, how do you expect to get actual users? I believe this is a good change by Google to prevent slop on the store

> If you can't get 12 people to test your app, how do you expect to get actual users?

Just like Google did with its Clock and Messages apps. They have billions of people to test their app. If it compiles, ship it.

No, this invites slop rather than stopping it. 12 testers is trivial to buy online or swap for on Reddit and Discord, so only hobbyists get blocked. Note that this requirement also affects PWAs which is quite funny to be honest. To this the fact that some people register businesses and provide paid "publishing services" to 3rd party devs over their accounts. Is this really the best Google can do? Laughable.

Look, not everyone is chasing subscriptions, ads and thousands of users, and with Google constantly squeezing side-loading, the Play store is becoming the only distribution channel left on mainline Android.

But yeah, I guess it's not a big loss, most people install 0 apps per month anyway.

If that is true, why does no one agree with you?

Protest RIGHT NOW, not by complaining here but by getting rid of Cloudflare

This is unacceptable

or... hear me out, do BOTH

Multiple things can be true at the same time. While we do have shorter attention spans, some (lots of?) developers absolutely suck at writing articles

I fancy myself as a decent writer, but I suck at writing documentation. People describe reading my notes frustrating and incomprehensible. I find it much better to use AI to untangle my, admittedly, convoluted reasoning

And some intentionally write clickbait headlines even though the have the skills to do better.

You can’t build your own engine outside of the EU, but you can still build on top of the existing Safari engine. What you’re describing is technically possible.

However, why would a company build something just for a handful of people?

I guess if you are Epic games, and you do not want to be blocked or controlled by App Stores, or pay 30% paycut. maybe you would build and support independent (from google/apple monopoly) interenet stack.

or if you are EU/China and do not want google DNS and networkign layer owning entire EU/China

in all cases they would still want centralized control by each state/company.

how to align incentives of someone who can actually pull this off and still keep it decentralized is a big question.

so the only way to make this happen is independent SWEs build their own browser. AND significant portion of users will start use it exclusively AND it survives and crashes competition from OS controlled browsers (Chrome/Safari) AND OS does not block/remove them from OS controlled app stores (which they can and regularly do, just look at "Hey" or "Brave").

you got to go full own hardware stack. now only China can reallistically pull this off.

China has own hardward stack. (actually entirety of all hardware stacks. it is all build there). China has own playstores or higly regulated versions of Apple/Google play stores.

China has mini-apps ecosystem which is more resilient to App Store whims.

and pretty much China is only place that can reallistically negotiate and push back to Google/Apple.

nobody else can stand a chance.

so free web is only possible in China pretty much. and future of free web is there.

if it was up to corporate monopolies (MSFT, Google, Apple) they would shut down whole web and remove other browsers from OS they control, and be gatekeepers of entire internet unless govenrment threaten them break them up or block them.. oh wait.

exactly.