Therefore, we are starting a group today for Chrome Extension developers to work together in check with CWS. It's not a technical support channel, nor a platform to get attention when CWS is unresponsive. It's a place for Chrome Extension developers to rally together and discuss improving the foundation we stand on (it also won't be hosted nor managed by Google).
United, we can have a stronger, common voice to:
Pressure Google Chrome to allow for 3rd party extension stores. This would break down the walled garden of extensions, give extension developers a leveler playing field, and lower the risk of getting wiped out on CWS's whim.
2. Pressure CWS to be more fair and communicative with extension publishers.
Canned emails about rejections with only general policy information are “lose-lose” for publishers and CWS alike. Both parties waste time because of all the guesswork involved currently — especially when CWS makes a mistake.
And so the mice voted to bell the cat.
How would this be different than the Author's Guild negotiating ebook rates with libraries/Amazon? It seems like lots of industries have lobbying groups that represent multiple companies -- or is there an extra nuance here I'm missing?
Well, it seems easy enough. Just don't call yourself a union.. call yourself a "standards body" and organize the way ANSI and ISO do.
Presumably because to make the economics work, review and approval are done by poorly trained contractors who don't have time to do a proper job and need to meet quotas. And with anything security related, there's an inherent bias toward not giving information on the exact violations because this can be used to get around the "spirit" of the law while sticking to its "letter" (very true for spam, questionable for app stores).
Serious question: is there any better model though? In the non-virtual world, similar standards for the public good are achieved through things like FDA regulations, health inspections, building codes and permits, etc.
Since it doesn't seem like there's any kind of elegant free-market or crowd-sourced solution here, what should the standards be for regulating apps and extensions? What kind of "due process" ought there be, or appeal, or whatever? Is there going to come a point when app stores get regulated by a democratically legislated government agency?
Neither Apple nor Google are governments. When laws and constitutions were crafted, those framers did not comprehend a future where private companies had effective control (and even monopoly) on what might amount to critical infrastructure, and if not critical, then infrastructure nonetheless.
It doesn't matter that Apple and Google aren't governments. Either app store approval could be done by a new government agency (after all, aren't doctors and lawyers regulated?), or (far more likely) the legislature could pass laws determining how Apple and Google have to run their own or face stiff penalties that actually have teeth.
So that, at the end of the day, if Apple or Google make a wrong decision and refuse to correct it, you can ultimately sue them in court and win.
As Arch Linux user if I found a software I like and want to help with distribution I can create package and push it to AUR [1]. This works as recipe - list of make and run dependencies, configuration, installation. Package is not safe and should be reviewed on installation.
Popular package may be pulled to official repository [2], distributed in binary form. "community" repository maintained by Trusted Users [3], "core" and "extra" by Arch Linux Developers [4]. It is evergreen - rolling release. Some distributions provide Stable releases which should be even safer.
Distributions may remove package, block version, patch to its standards. I think if opt-out addons were distributed by Debian they would be patched to opt-in.
In other words - many 3rd party distributions, by users to users, pulled - not pushed, not required to accept all packages.
[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/
[2] https://www.archlinux.org/packages/
Then open source maintainers get spammed with angry users because of a poor user experience they can't control.
As soon as you give up the idea of preventing people from distributing malicious software, and they're not even doing a good job of it right now, you can let competition in a curation market solve the problem for you. I'd way rather have a system where I can get recommendations from someone that's an expert in an area. Ex: Like JonnyGURU is for power supply recommendations, but for software / extensions.
If you extend that concept to the mobile app stores, a system where someone from my city could run a store for local businesses would be significantly better for users and developers than what we have now. For developers it would be amazing to go to a local business, show some local ID, and get a signing certificate. For users it would be amazing to have a local store where established businesses with ties to the community all have a vested interest in it's quality / trustworthiness. That would be at the lowest end for tiny apps. For anything bigger, someone could build a brand / reputation around curation. For example, think of something like a specialized password manager extension store.
When it comes to Google I think there are two problems that prevent them from building a better system. First, they're arrogant and think users are too stupid to control their own devices. Second, their search has devolved to be an atrocious garbage pit of paid content that's optimized for SEO. It's a cyclic dependency where Google's failure makes it difficult for users to make good choices. Google interprets that as the users being dumb and makes the system even more complicated / less effective by adding more ML and automation.
That also probably plays a role in the reluctance to open up some of the current systems. The attempts at scaling with automation and ML are such failures (everywhere) the only way to make them look half reasonable is to ensure no one else can build a competing system.
That's the "middle ground" scenario that isn't true for either side. Apple does directly hire employees to do this, so their policies and rules are often the pain point. Google doesn't hire anyone - they have the team that runs the approval systems and will review certain extensions, but it's completely automated for 99% of all cases.
The only people that probably do use contractors are Amazon for their Alexa skills and Kindle apps.
None of the huge tech companies (Google/Apple/MS/Amazon/etc) have an easy (or in many cases any) way to contact human service representatives. This is intentional.
People have been complaining about this for more than a decade. Every week there are multiple writeups on the front page of HN about apps and extensions being killed off.
These corporations will never fix this. They have no incentive to do so. They don't care about individual users or small developers, and don't want to get involved in their "petty" issues.
Why? Because these have no impact on how much money they make.
The only way to fix this is through government regulation, but good luck with that.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/contact-us/ - I have never failed to talk to a human that way.
(For AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/contact-us/)
Oh the many times I have written to a company's "Support" forms and never got a response. And then I wrote to them on Twitter (message) and I got my answers in 2h or less... Unfortunately social media tend to be the escalation point..
With their (intentional) behavior you described, these companies often violate even basic legal principles and sometimes even specific laws (depending on country/jurisdiction). Moreover, these same companies (again, intentionally) also use their financial/legal weight to pretty much stifle/kill any individual attempts to bring them to task for those violations. In fact, that itself is illegal (antitrust) behavior in many places.
This isn't just about governments failing to regulate these companies, but probably even more so about their failure to even enforce existing rules and protect citizens against such abuses.
It's a pretty good demonstration of how bad the state of class (in)justice really is, including all the corrupt governments that keep it a reality.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219427
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229073
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186915
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21232438
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23285466
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12442048
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21990566
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23168874
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21233041
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20587440
I'm not suggesting Google doesn't care, but...
I've ignored them now and the extension is still up so let's see what happens.
It's pretty clear that the walled garden approach will eventually stifle innovation, and building businesses or even apps for fun inside the frameworks of giant corporations is just not a good long term strategy.
That it has its walled garden, but it is possible to install from arbitrary sources (with sufficient warnings to users of those dangers). In iOS, you can't sideload at all.
It can be found at https://getsnapfont.com/posts/avoiding-lengthy-review-times-...
Yes, I get some users don't always know what they're doing and it might be a big security risk, but just put up a big enough warning. People shouldn't be locked in to what software they're allowed to run on their own devices.
[1]: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/android-fragmentation/#packag...
If there were competition, then there's no way with Google not being able to answer urgent customer support tickets. Because they are a monopoly, they can get away with saving money on customer support. All their subentities like Chrome, Gmail, etc are funded by their search and ads monopoly.
The only way this gets better is by breaking up Google, and forcing them to actually compete. If Chrome had to earn money the same way all the other companies did without having the hundreds of billions that Google makes, it would be a totally different product. They would need to earn their money the same way Firefox does, and would need to earn a portion of their money from things like extensions, and then they would need to compete with better customer support. But because they are a monopoly, they don't have to. It's basically a form of raising prices with no recourse, except what they do is deny services to competitors by having no support.
The only solution is to break Google apart, and force the parts to earn money the way all their competitors have to.
So if you break up Google, chrome would have to cut its budget or stop existing. And either way, chrome extension Devs wouldn't be better supported than they are now would they?
This is always my question with "Break up X": then what?
It'd be a speed bump, and they wouldn't have the full resources of Google, but I think it could make it. (But I don't know if it should, the open-source Chromium base isn't committed to only by Google.)
-- Robert Heinlein, 1939
> It's very possible for a 3rd party extension store to do a better job than Google at blocking malicious extensions.
I don't know that that is the case. Google clearly does a _terrible_ job on this, but they are at least theoretically financially motivated to do the job correctly. It's hard for me to imagine a 3rd party extension store being financially viable with correctly aligned financial motivations.
Compare with
https://www.openhub.net/p/chrome
https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories
'separation of powers' is a useful concept in the law, it's coming to the private sector (except with shorter arbitration timelines)
They thought we weren't using the TTS permission, but we are.
