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So Google has no “app store” it’s a “rental lot” filled with a ton of malicious bullshit anyway.
Is there an easy and effective way out of their evil environment?
I bought a Pixel 8 Pro and installed GrapheneOS. No account signed in to the OS or Google play. You can run it completely Google free or run Google services in a sandbox mode with normal controllable permissions (alot of stuff uses Google services for push notifications and some other stuff.)
Use FOSS (Free Open Source Software) where possible, you can get a cheap domain name and cheap email hosting to move away from gmail.
You could go a step further, pick up a raspberry pi, and start self hosting some things to move away from Google apps.
It’s all pretty relatively simple these days, but you have to be open to learning at least a little bit (mostly the last part, gOS is basically one click install and some email hosts are about the same - but still.)
TLDR: Moving away from services you pay for with your data will require paying with your money or time, but it’s worth it.
This is the move, I’m still getting up to speed with Linux on my desktop before I get grapheneos on my cell. It’s damn intimidating.
Hell yeah. You’ll get there! Trust me, it’s WAYYYYYYY more user friendly than it used to be 😂
It’s the same as Steam, you sign the contract called “ User Agreement” that has a section on how you don’t own the games. It’s legal and nothing you can do about it. User Agreement also forbids you from suing Valve Corporation, so anyone who wants to own games from SteM legally cannot.
not all games on steam have steam drm, thats an option that devs decide to use or not. Valve gives it as an option, blame the dev if they choose to use it.
Valve’s games also include DRM, Valve will still be blamed. Valve doesn’t care about their games, TF2 community comes into mind when they sent Cease and Desist. No, do not defend them for it because you also would agree with Nintendo’s stance on this issue.
Valve will never be the good guys, only remember as the bad guys.
you didnt use valve as the sole dev however, changing your entire argument. you blamed steam as an entire platform when the actual answer is that its dev specific, hell theres a fucking wiki that tells you which games on steam dont have DRM. you blanketed an entire platform with a statement that isnt even fully true. im not even saying valve is the good guy, this shit isn’t black and white, im just here not trying to pedal actual lies
All Valves games are DRM, you can not download the games without Steam Client. No, using the alternative method because the User Agreement doesn’t allow it. Valve never allows games to be installed without permission by them.
That’s the very definition of DRM, a company saying they don’t allow you to install games without consent.
t’s the same as Steam, you sign the contract called “ User Agreement” that has a section on how you don’t own the games
this is what you said,
Steam is a platform, that host various games, some with DRM, some without DRM
Valve is a dev, their games have DRM. Just because Valves games have drm, doesnt make that all games on steam have DRM. You painted an entire platform as DRM when it isn’t. it’s one thing to say that Valve theirselves puts drm in their games, its a completely different statement to blanket all of steam to be drm, when thats a completely false statement.
For example, go get someones steam copy of witcher 3, youll quickly find out that it itself has no drm, despite coming from steam, and not the GOG version.
Again, the very definition of DRM is Valve approval of:
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Your account
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Your money
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The requirements laid out in the Steam User agreement
You do not own the game, you don’t own the Steam Client, you don’t own the account and buying doesn’t offer refunds for real money. THE WHOLE THING IS VALVE CORPORATE LEGAL TERF. You can never get Steam exclusive games outside of Steam.
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Whatever I sign doesn’t make it any less illegal to falsely advertise your services.
If I hire a pool cleaner and they shit in my pool it isn’t my fault that ‘I didn’t read the pool-shitting clause buried in fine print on the 138th page of the agreement’. Shitting in pools is the antithesis of a pool cleaning service.
Advertisers and marketers they know this, stop helping them.
I wouldn’t hire a pool cleaner that produced a hundred page contract, unless they were happy to start the cleaning a month or three before I signed
You decided to use as an example the only company known to not overstep in this regard. Steam has historically refunded in full the cost of games that have been withdrawn. It’s likely the agreements for these are part of the requirements of publishers rather than the platform itself, as well as the reasons to withdraw them.
Steam didn’t refund any of the cost of the games their DRM rendered inoperable on my Windows 7 PC. They happily took my money 1 week before dropping support.
That’s on you. They extended support to that legacy os far beyond it being end of life.
It’s on them. I don’t want “support” I wanted them to disable their DRM before they abandoned Windows 7.
If you’re hanging onto windows 7 because your computer isn’t suitable for later versions, I suggest you move to Linux so as to be on a modern reasonably secure operating system. Windows 7 machines are becoming too likely to be part of a bot farm
You can run steam on Linux
I actually have an alternate boot that runs Linux. I have Windows 7 PC precisely to be able to run most amount of games, including older games.
That’s absolutely correct, they’re also excellent when it comes to lending games to other people. OTOH Valve is fighting its way through the whole European appeal chain to prevent having to allow customers to resell their games. They’re going to lose, it’s just a matter of time.
Fdroid, free and open source alternative to the play store. I’ve been using it for months, and while it’s barebones and probably too minimal for most people, I rather like it myself.
Apple probably does the same thing. You pay 20 bucks for an app that gets taken down from the store: does the next phone get it still?
IIRC there were iPhones being sold at exorbitant prices because they were in Airplane Mode and Apple hadn’t removed Flappy Bird from them after the developer removed it from the App Store.
imagine selling a kidney to buy a phone and not even having a say what apps can go on it
Yeah, I’d hate to drop $1800 on a Samsung.
Yeah - I have lots of apps that I paid for that have been delisted or aren’t compatible with my current model iPhone. I had a couple that were installed but got “offloaded” so I still have the icon but the app is gone forever :)
Technically won’t be able to download from the app store but using applications like imazing to download it and as long as you previously owned it, Apple will restore your purchases.
I’ve been using a manga reader that got taken off the store around 2017, still use it and transfer it to each new device (works for both phone and iPad). The ad-free in-app purchase restores just fine too.
Digital purchases are not you buying the product. It’s you buying limited and reversible access to the license to download the file. When you agree to the TOS, you agree to this arrangement.
If you want to actually own something, you should be buying a physical copy of it.
Let me know where I can buy my android apps on disk I guess?
Hey the thought of a USB-C flash drive as physical media you can buy for an app sounds cool as actually
You can download APKs from repositories on the web
Or (in software) get open source software, so anyone can make a fork of it if the original goes off the rails
You are stating the facts of the current situation. However, that is the exact situation that needs to change.
If you actually want something, pirate it.
its the only way to actually own anything.
Which is such an absurd and ridiculous thing to say, and its even more absurd and ridiculous we are at this point.
You can also use open source products when available.
Or make it.
Because they have more money than you and, according to the US legal system, that’s all that matters.
Because it’s in the EULA?
There are things that you cannot simply waive in an agreement like that. This should be one of them. That’s the point.
Collective agreements like this shouldn’t even be valid without representation of the other party. The customers get no say in it and it’s treated as if it’s law? Ridiculous.
Good to see more people are understanding how anti-consumer our digital distribution laws are. Sucks they had to find out this way, but people have been warning of this for years.
This is rage inducing.
Imagine if your car dealer was allowed to confiscate your car on a dubious claim such as “it doesn’t meet the latest emissions standards,” but not even telling you that.
Google needs to be fined twice the value of the apps that it stole from it’s paying customers.
One of the most important parts of purchasing a car is the title being signed over and that transfer being registered with the state. You never own the title to an app.
“Tesla has a new feature that will disable your seat controls if you keep messing with them”
https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/31/22911072/tesla-seat-controls-disable-lock-out-brose
This is so stupid. Why would a company put this much effort to lock down the seat controls, as if they didn’t already exist without limits on every other car? Not even with a toggle? These companies are really trying to destroy the “cars = freedom” association.
They get disabled for 5 minutes, probably to give the motors time to cool down.
If the motors need to cool down, they need to rethink their motors.
Rethink a motor designed to be used for 5 mins initially then occasionally in future? It’s fine for the design purpose. It’s even fine for the mode where it operates every time you get in the car (where it waits in fully back position, and moves forward when you operate a control)
Why should they think it to let it be used as a fidget toy?
Motors get hot and it’s quite reasonable to not include tons of cooling just so that you can adjust your seat for hours on end.
That said the implementation is still stupid as time isn’t the right measure to judge motor temperature, motor temperature is. Thermocouples cost fractions of a cent, the motors probably already include one or two as they already have smarts (being hooked up to the CAN bus and not straight voltage). Which would also take care of differing environmental temperatures as obviously the motors are worse at shedding heat when it’s scorching hot in the car.
You don’t add cooling, you size the motors to have enough thermal mass and mount them to metal chassis.
Potatoe Potatoh. Point is you size the overall system for quick adjustments, not continuous use. If you can get by with less weight and cost then you do as continuous use does not even begin to appear in the requirements sheet.
Phew, that makes a lot more sense. I thought it permanently locked them
So revolutionary
Usually distribution rights or breach of contract
Is it just me, or does something not add up here? I find it incredibly hard to believe that hundreds of titles, some of which required payment, were so easily removed without notifying users. Google may somehow have the right to withhold purchased content from users, but that doesn’t change the fact the company is taking our purchases from our accounts without even telling us. On the aforementioned Reddit post, we can get some insight from one of the affected developers via a comment from NoodlecakeStudios that states: “Google Play has been on a rampage lately. They’ve removed a lot of our games too. Unfortunately for some of those games, they use really old engines or tech that can’t be easily updated to 64bit (which is a new requirement), so they won’t be coming back.” So much for apps staying accessible in our libraries. Even if the reasoning is less malicious, such as new (albeit unrealistic) tech requirements for older apps, or crazy laws like GDPR seeing removals in countries it does not apply, the real sting is that Google is not notifying its users (or even its devs) when an app is pulled and no longer available. Although Google has undoubtedly covered itself with conditions that we agree to when we use the Play Store, every user deserves to know when apps are pulled from their account.
So breach of contract (64 bit requirement)
Only that the contract was unilaterally changed after being perfectly valid for the longest time.
“Breach of contract” is a bit of a stretch as they could simply claim any excuse is a “breach of contract” by adding in new things at any point.
Yes, that’s how it works
Imagine if Microsoft said you can’t run 32bit software on your 64bit Windows anymore.
Like Apple did?
It’s purchasing ≠ owning, then piracy ≠ stealing
Ok but this isn’t purchasing outright it is basically leasing. It says so in the tos. The issue here is ppl don’t read tos or they don’t care and pay anyway. Ppl like that have zero right to complain.
Lol everyone of you idiots are proving my point and making tons of idiotic assumptions like I’m anti piracy. Y’all need some logic lessons.
Yeah, okay, except the iTunes and Facebook TOSes are longer than King Lear. Eventually a judge nullified a TOS on the basis that no-one ever reads those anyway.
Thanks to odious TOSes, the average American commits three felonies a day, violations of the CFAA for which some whistle-blowers and journalists are serving sentences similar to [assassin] Scott Roeder (for the murder of Dr. George Tiller). The rest of us are not serving such sentences but for one officer or official who wants us to disappear.
In the meantime journalists continue to get charged with such violations, usually when their investigating something embarrassing to current administrations. The EFF has repeatedly raised a stink about this, but hasn’t yet been able to change the law.
If your kid is under 13 and has social media accounts on specifically kid-friendly platforms (that, themselves teem with predators, salesfolk and law enforcement) then your kid is committing major federal crimes. On the light side, they totally have haxxor cred.
You 👏 should ,👏 expect 👏 this 👏 it 👏isn’t👏the👏first👏time
Nice try, Google
How dare the average person not have the time or attention span to read a 28 page document in legalese that explains what exactly they’re doing
It’s not like purposefully dense and overlong TOS is a known strategy to hide bullshit that later gets thrown out in court or anything
That person probably also think people who get shot are stupid for not moving out of the bullet’s path. “It is not so hard, it moves in a straight line you idiots”.
“Daniel Shaver should have just listened to philip brailsford’s commands”
Obviously, Brailsford was found not guilty by an infallible jury after all.
So you don’t have time for that? Spend two hours reading stipulations for a service that you might use for a decade or longer? That you might spend thousands of your currency on? What happened to the world. So fast. So furious.
OK but piracy isn’t stealing it is basically a harmless free copy. The issue here is corporations want to have their cake and eat it too, but to prohibit us all from either having or eating any cake ever. Corpos like that have zero right to my consideration or care.
TOS documents are designed not to be read.
The button to install a paid app literally says BUY. If that doesn’t mean purchase I don’t what else it could mean.
It’s literally just a convention, a design choice. It doesn’t really mean anything.
From Wiktionary:
buy (third-person singular simple present “buys,” present participle “buying,” simple past “bought,” past participle “bought” or (archaic, rare, dialectal) “boughten”)
(transitive, ditransitive) To obtain (something) in exchange for money or goods.
“I’m going to buy my father something nice for his birthday.”
When I search the Play Store for Geometry Dash, and click the lil button that says “$1.99,” I get this page. It sure as shit looks like what I’m about to buy is Geometry Dash, the video game. When I click “Buy,” I’m not at all expecting to “buy” a temporary, permanently revokable license to play the game for now. I’m expecting to own the 1s and 0s that are downloaded to my device. Hiding legalese in the T&C that nobody clicks saying “actually buy means lease” is legal, and it should not be legal, because it’s misleading as hell. They should not be allowed to redefine widely understood words in T&C in a way that misleads consumers into paying for something they didn’t expect to be paying for.
I can buy a vacation doesn’t mean I own the place I’m going.
Amazing how you can talk so coherently with that corporate dick taking up so much space in your mouth.
Some people don’t get how you can separate understanding the logic of something and not supporting it at the same time.
Don’t worry, that is normal. Im getting laughed at left and right for having my own root-server with all my services running on it, all FOSS.
Most of them were born with google already existing, it is part of nature. They haven’t seen a giant go down yet.
Hey look it’s the libertarian I was talking about in my other comment
I recall a while back someone did a study that there are not enough hours in the day for an average person to actually read all the TOS documents they’re expected to agree to. The idea that people can or should be responsible for knowing what’s in a TOS is a legal fiction.
I never said or implied what you assume I’m implying.
Get some literacy.
Maybe we should get a GPT started to make short and understandable TOS.
Partially agree, because if purchasing == owning (which it should), then piracy is still != stealing
I don’t believe piracy is treated as stealing from a legal sense, already.
That’s true. If I steal 20 copies of some avengers movie from Walmart and give them away on the street, I’ll pay a couple thousand dollars in fines, tops. If I’m caught seeding an avengers movie to one person downloading from me in Serbia, I’ll be fined more money than most people make in their entire lives
Piracy is never stealing, since you are not removing anything from anyone. This does not include actual piracy, the one with ships and rum.
Get a custom OS on Android and install free standing apks. Actually, many apks are hacked anyway. So find and just install them. No need to change OS. But rooting+custom OS might offer ways to make it way easier.
f-droid and mabye aurora store
Because you trusted them.
Because when your legislators write laws (read, have them handed to them by the party with a direct interest) they do it for campaign donations because everything is money. Capitalism’s end stage is corporatocracy and oligarchy. Surprise, we’re there! Legislation in a healthy democracy/republic is written for the benefit of the citizens, but we stopped being a democratic republic long ago. In capitalism, legislation is written to maximize profit at all expense, including the health, welfare, and best interests of the citizens.
This isn’t new, study the history of the East India Trading Company. The difference is lack a monarch to dissolve the company (and it’s not just one company anymore). The founders remembered the lesson of East India Trading Company and corporate charters in the US used to be temporary, and you had to show a benefit to the citizens. It’s one reason conservatives, republicans, and capitalists don’t want strong education and history lessons. Corporations in the past were NOT people, and they better benefit society or they could swiftly have their charter revoked and dissolved.
This is a repeat, but even more successful than in the past. But when your populous has no education it seems brand new!
EDIT: Low effort/research further reading
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/cbo-american-wealth-inequality/
Nothing is more challenging to power than a person that remembers the past.
They have to promote piracy somehow
They want us to search for torrents!
They all do this. I’ve had games or dlc vanish off my PlayStation account. When I called to complain, since they lost the records of my purchases, they won’t return them. I lost the receipts so long ago. I still have save files that require the DLCs
Nintendo just turned off whole stores instead.
I normally don’t advocate for piracy if you can afford games, but if company doesn’t even allow you to buy them, then what other option is there? It’s like they want people to pirate their games.
I normally advocate for piracy. In cases like these, where some corpo comes in and STEALS from their customers (because let’s stop pretending this is anything else) I advocate for the other type of piracy, with sabers, cannons, rape, theft, pillaging and making some of these assholes walk a plank.
Honestly, as somebody who really loved the early era of Android gaming, I’m really disappointed how ephemeral it all was between the Play Store delistings and the absolutely atrocious approach to backwards compatibility in the Android OS.
Yep I found out myself pretty quickly. With a simple App which was maybe 10K lines of code I started targeting Android 10 and so far every new major version caused some issue with the code as Google constantly messes around with files, permissions, …
I can’t imagine what a task it is to maintain a game.
I just wish Google would release some kind of 32-bit Android 4.4 sandboxed compatibility layer for old games. Android 4.4 was the standard Android version for a super long time for a zillion devices, and I’d bet 99% of the dead .APK games out there would run on that version.
Give me a tool with a crapload of slow, clumsy emulation wrappers covered in tedious config options and a launcher any time I want to run an app through this compatibility layer and let me play Amazing Alex again.
edit: it occurs to me I basically want an Android emulator for Android. Or like, a psuedo-emulator that’s not really an emulator like WINE/Proton.
and let me play Amazing Alex again.
Why not just buy a top notch 4.4 phone off eBay? Looks like you can get a Galaxy Note 4 for about 40$
Ahh, you know, it’s about the convenience of not having to juggle another device. I still have an old Galaxy Tab kicking around the house that plays all that stuff pretty well, but it’s not the same as being able to pull it out of my pocket on the bus.
Ya know, I actually had the idea a while back to run an android emulator on one of my servers and then setup remote access to it with some software that hopefully had an android client app.
The idea being I would use the android remote client on my actual phone to use a “phone in the cloud”, ofc my original intentions for it wouldn’t have been affected too terribly by things like latency, but for games it may or may not work all that well (I never really got past the sketch out phase lol)
Why not try emulating it locally on your phone instead of a remote server, to eliminate the latency? Was it not possible at the time you got the idea?
I thought about it, but the pros didn’t outweigh the cons for me. The biggest con being limited resources on a phone and a remote server would have relatively endless resources, and my use case could handle a little latency so the biggest pro wasn’t so big
There exists stuff like this.
Virtualxposed. Sandvxposed.
The most popular one I heard about vmos, https://www.vmos.com/
But that one was android 8 (I think?) closed source, and probably spyware inside and outside the thing.
Also, new changes by google may break these emulator type apps:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SamsungDex/comments/16r1tg8/phantom_process_killer_solution_in_android_14/
Seriously, I can’t run a 32 bit game on a 64 bit processor? How is that even a problem on newer phones?
They removed the 32-bit libraries from the system so they don’t have to be loaded, to save RAM.
They probably removed certain libraries that are used by 32 bit programs
At least we have forums archiving the games themselves.
