- cross-posted to:
- android@lemdro.id
- cross-posted to:
- android@lemdro.id
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They’re not purchases, they’re leases.
Edit: it’s actually that you purchase access to their license of the media.
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Edit: Sorry, meant to reply to the comment above you!
They’re not really leases either. Leases last for a defined period of time, like “one year,” or they renew at regular intervals, like “monthly.” “Pay up front and we’ll let you keep this license for either forever or until we decide to revoke it without notifying you” isn’t the same thing.
Apple uses the word “Get” for free things and simply displays the price on the button of paid apps. No mention of the nature of the transaction. That’s in the Germa of agreement you “read” and agreed to.
Same thing that Sony did with movies on the PS. “You’re buying a revocable licence”
Pretty much all the big tech firms have done this. The problem is we only blame the middlemen. We blame Sony or Amazon, or Google or whoever. But the companies providing the licenses for them to “sell” are a big part of the problem. And nobody ever wants to listen when I say this but they should be on the hook too. Like, I appreciate that it’s messed up to have your purchased media shadow ganked. But at the same time it’s fucked up to have the licensing agreements be what they are to start with and that’s absolutely on companies that own the rights to digital media. Who continue to lobby to maintain the status quo.
And this is why you don’t see apps selling for a price but rather being used to syphon users into subscriptions.
Well, they’re “purchases” of a license that can be revoked at any time for any reason.
Are they really? Didn’t you press a button that said “Buy”? Just because they want things to be something else, doesn’t mean that the meaning of the words changed.
They can argue that you “bought” the lease.
No they fucking can’t argue that! Words have meanings and Google is not entitled to change them.
It’s pretty clear that you’re leasing a car when you do it. Make it like that.
It’s in the terms you agreed to. Didn’t you read them?
I wish the terms and conditions had reading times at the top of them, and I also wish there was a law saying something to the effect of “buying a movie shouldn’t require you to read 35 minutes of ALL CAPS TERMS AND CONDITIONS while holding a dictionary and a thesaurus after gaining a legal degree”
Agreed there should be a max word count for this kind of things.
If it’s in the term and you sign it, then, for better or for worse, then that is true.
There are usually loads of unenforceable terms and definitions in the ToS you sign. Just because you sign it doesn’t make it true or enforceable, and many won’t hold up in court even if you’ve signed the document. But that requires you to spend the energy and money to fight these fuckers.
If a car dealership put a sticker on the front window of a car saying “Buy this car for $250 a month for 4 years” and then took the car from you after 4 years because their terms had some fine print, the dealership would likely be sued.
If they weren’t sued they’d at least lose business. Unfortunately for everyone, that’s not going to happen with Amazon or Sony or any other big company doing this shit because we’re just letting them get away with shady business practices.
I’m not saying the terms are wrong or that what the companies are doing is illegal right now, but I do think it should be looked at closely by someone who can dish out some massive fines, or ideally change the situation.
Maybe that’s true in a legal sense, depending on the jurisdiction, but in a moral sense, it’s only true if you read and understood what you were agreeing to. You can’t consent to something you were tricked into.
I’ve just had a look on the Play Store, and they notably don’t use the word “buy” anywhere that I can see. The button to “buy” the app is just a button with the price on it, and clicking through that it uses the language of “install”.
Can’t help but think that that’s deliberate.
It does say “Buy” and refers to a “purchase”, but everyone’s arguing semantics; the Terms of Service say that you are buying a limited license to download and use the software. You may have a “one-click purchase”-type option enabled?
On some storefronts the relevant button is labelled “Get”
It’s also a private company and they can do whatever they want on their platform and their property.
It’s like renting space in an apartment … don’t be surprised if the landlord decides to change the agreements and do things you don’t like. You’re renting things, you don’t own anything.
why would you defend this
I’m not defending or condoning it … I was just pointing out something for what it is. I keep my purchases, rentals and anything paid for to a minimum with services like Google, Amazon or any other cloud or electronic service. They are not purchases of ownership, they are marketed as things that we buy and own indefinitely but in legal terms, they are more or less indeterminate rentals or leases from the company with terms that can be set by the company that controls them.
I agree, in terms of comparing to an apartment rental, there are more laws because the thing that is involved severely affects a person’s life because we’re talking about a roof over a person’s head.
But in terms of electronic or digital items or services that only exist online, it’s a lot easier to remove / change / delete them because these actions won’t put you out on the street, make you starve or physically hurt you in any way. We lose the convenience and we lose out on something.
I’m not belittling any of it, I wouldn’t want to lose anything I paid for either but at the same time, we have to understand that when we sign up to pay for something with a multi billion dollar corporation, we hardly have any rights to anything, agreed to or implied … and if we argue that in court, the one with the most money wins.
Your argument is cargo-cult libertarian bullshit. There are lots of things private entities can’t do on “their property!” Murdering visitors, for example. Fraudulently claiming a sale isn’t really a sale is right up there with that in terms of how clear-cut the rule is.
What we have here is squarely a failure of the FTC to do its goddamn job. Nothing more, nothing less.
I think everyone took there comment in the wrong light. They’re not defending Google, but rather pointing out that this behavior should be expected from a for profit company, and thus people should have avoided the situation in the first place. Not that it should be that way, but we live under capitalism unfortunately, and people need to be way more skeptical of these companies.
Rather than blaming inaction of the FTC, why not just stop using play store all together and encourage people to use Fdroid instead? Companies will never stop abusing ‘e-goods’ , it’s just not going to happen. People should just get beyond ownership and embrace the advantages of free software.
Rather than blaming inaction of the FTC, why not just stop using play store all together and encourage people to use Fdroid instead?
Because boycotts don’t fucking work and are not a replacement for meaningful consumer protection law!
I do use F-Droid myself, thankyouverymuch, but I’m not so naive as to think it’s an actual solution instead of a workaround. Even if it’s technically possible to continuously defend yourself from the avalanche of corporate abuse, it’s fucking exhausting. The masses not only aren’t capable of it, but shouldn’t have to be in the first place because abuse should be prevented, not worked around. That’s what government is for!
This shit about boycotting abusive companies instead of actually regulating them is just as brain-dead as arguing that we shouldn’t have police because we can just hire a personal security detail to follow us around instead.
Companies will never stop abusing ‘e-goods’ , it’s just not going to happen.
Not with that attitude. Companies could certainly be forced by the government to stop doing that, but apologists like you are letting government off the hook.
Well I personally think the FTC should do more, but until money out of politics, it will never happen. And pending some mass upheaval; that is probably in all reality unlikely as long as people are fed, money will almost certainly never be out of politics.
So all the more necessity to encourage people to just abandon these profiteering companies.
Does that single landlord control every apartment in the country? That is Google’s level of monopoly.
Because you signed (digitally) an agreement that lets them do that.
Pirate everything.
Also, don’t use Google. Wherever possible.
If you have an Android, they are increasingly making it impossible to not use them. They continue to punish users that choose to unlock the bootloader or root, and Google Play Services are an inescapable prerequisite to many apps, regardless of side loading ability.
“the boot loader is only safe if it is signed by Google”
How ever did I get out of the '80s with computers with dangerous unsigned boot loaders
I’ve used F-Droid without unlocking the bootloader or rooting or Google Play services integration. Developers are free to use F-Droid, most just choose not to. Hopefully it becomes even more popular as gplay has more issues.
Don’t buy games on Steam or Valve Corporation, they make you sign the User Agreement that legally waves your rights and ownership of games.
Actually, Steam is usually one of the best places when it comes to refunds. The process is simple, and they’re willing to make exceptions to the rules. And the company is run by one of the few CEOs in the gaming industry who seem to actually understand gaming.
AU lawsuit against Valve proves Valve didn’t want to refund their customers. Valve is guilty of this violation of Australia law. Many people who used Steam before 2010 tell people they were never given refunds oran option for refunds.
Valve is not good guys, they fought the Australia government to the very top to not pay or offer refunds. They are greedy.
They literally had to be sued by multiple jurisdictions to even offer refunds. The cult of Valve needs to die.
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But we never owned a copy of any software or movie ever. We always had a license to watch or use the copy we purchased.
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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.
“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.
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.
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?
Phew, that makes a lot more sense. I thought it permanently locked them
So revolutionary
Because they have more money than you and, according to the US legal system, that’s all that matters.
It’s purchasing ≠ owning, then piracy ≠ stealing
Piracy is never stealing, since you are not removing anything from anyone. This does not include actual piracy, the one with ships and rum.
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
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.
Amazing how you can talk so coherently with that corporate dick taking up so much space in your mouth.
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.
The button to install a paid app literally says BUY. If that doesn’t mean purchase I don’t what else it could mean.
I can buy a vacation doesn’t mean I own the place I’m going.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe we should get a GPT started to make short and understandable TOS.
TOS documents are designed not to be read.
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.
Nice try, Google
Hey look it’s the libertarian I was talking about in my other comment
!= is better
Outside of programming circles I’ve been surprised how little people know what != means.
Despite claims, math and logic are not important skills according to many.
Are you implying that my math professors do not think math and logic are important just because they used
≠instead of!=?
I paid for the whole Unicode, so I’m gonna use the whole ꙮ𐐘彁 Unicode
Partially agree, because if purchasing == owning (which it should), then piracy is still != stealing
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 probably removed certain libraries that are used by 32 bit programs
They removed the 32-bit libraries from the system so they don’t have to be loaded, to save RAM.
Yep, I never bought a game again after my CAVE shmups all stopped working when I switched phones, there’s also no way to try and make it work on your phone unlike any other operating system on PC since it’s so locked down, completely dependent on devs to care.
At least we have forums archiving the games themselves.
Not only that. If you buy an app, you are at the mercy of its creator. If they decide they want to fill it with ads and tracking, or switch to a subscription model, there’s nothing you can do. You can’t rollback updates, you can’t install an older version from the play store. If they decide to remove it from the store, you won’t be able to install it any more.
I had one of the flight tracker apps, used it to identify planes passing my work lunch room’s window, and paid $5 for it to get it ad free. Then it went to subscription and made it’s free tier time limited instead of ad supported, so now I don’t use it. I can’t use an old version as it doesn’t work on newer versions of Android
Edit to add: It’s worth learning how to side load apps. While on a driving holiday in Sicily I was told that it was vital to have the ZTL app so I could know what areas were closed to cars (zero traffic limit), but it was only available on the Italian play store, so I had to download the APK and install it that way
Zona a Traffico Limitato - buy I like the way you made the acronym work in english :)
Edit: Limited traffic area, typically only residents, emergency services, deliveries etc.
That’s it. I was allowed to drive into one as I was booked into a hotel in the zone, I think that’s the slowest I ever drove for more than three metres
Story of pretty much every good app ever.
On that note, I bought a GIF viewer app’s full version via in-app purchase and about a year later, they updated the app to have ads again regardless and my “full version no ads” app got ads again and now i had to buy a subscription per month to be “ad free” needless to say I uninstalled
Well you can always use https://blokada.org (version 5, which runs on your phone). It stops most ads.
I set up a VPN tunnel to my home network and use pihole to block ads which worked on this app too, so that wasn’t a problem but the audacity to remove my paid-for full access was astoundingly awful
i use Adblock dns
Did you let them know why you uninstalled?
mercy of its* creator
I got into technology because I loved it. Now, ever bit of news I get I hate it a little bit more. What happened with improving things, sharing information and making the world better?
The “best” thing is when someone makes legitimately the best application for its purpose (arguably the only good application for it), so you convince your friends to use it because it’s so useful, and then they cram it full of ads and bloat and make it borderline unusable, but your friends won’t switch to a different app (or even leave the app altogether) because it’s the only way they know how to do the thing
I’m talking about the 5e Companion app on Android. Anyone know any good alternatives? It used to be so good, but then they started adding Unearthed Arcana garbage to it, which almost entirely sucks ass, and when UA gets officially added, they have to add the official version separately because some people have already used the UA version to make characters. I want so badly to switch away from it, but I can’t find any good free alternatives that have all of the content from 5e.
I wish 5e.tools had a character sheet builder
Actually there’s websites with archives of old apk files for apps.
Kinda hard to just trust those sites not to hide malicious shit in there.
That’s why Android apps must be signed. Tools can show an app’s certificate hash and if two app versions’ hashes match, they’re equally trustworthy / from the same source. I think APKMirror does this and it’s actually quite trusthworthy.
Google them and see which one is safe.
Yup, looking at you, Vocabulary.com
Because our government representatives are idiots and don’t care about us.
Very shortsighted article calling repeatedly the GDPR a “crazy” law.
A “purchase” or “buy” option, especially when you get an invoice, should ALWAYS mean ownership of the product.
A “borrow” or “rent” option is one that you expect to have to return the product.
Google can’t have it both ways. They either sold people software or they rented it out. Since it was never advertised or marketed as the Google Play Rental Library, they should be forced to give people the products they paid for.
Yup, I’ve said it a million times, it needs to be made flatly illegal to use language that implies ownership if the company has any method of revoking your ownership of that product in the future. These threads always get the same libertarians that show up in discussions about non-functional slack fill saying “it’s not illegal, so what’s the problem?” The problem is that it isn’t illegal. Imagine if Toyota could come grab your car from your driveway, because even though you paid it off, subclause 74 of section G(2) says that the company retains the right to repossess property made by them at any time for any reason. You didn’t read a 200 page contract at the dealership when you bought the car, you just trusted that they wouldn’t fuck you. Toyota would get their ass reamed in court if they tried that, so why are Google and Microsoft and Sony and Steam allowed to do it?
Between this (which happened to me on both Google play and Amazon) and audible audio books not being “mine” unless of course I log in to Amazon etc to get my DRM key, I am starting to reconsider how I obtain my stuff.
This whole techno serfdom thing ain’t for me.
I am starting to reconsider how I obtain my stuff.
This is a good thing. I don’t know why modern business models for these companies seem to be intentionally anti-consumer, but people will find other ways to get what they are looking for. And if that means spending money with a more ethical company, or simply pirating, they’ll find the path of least resistance.
I used to spend hundreds on the Google Play Store, buying apps and music all the time. Then they started playing stupid games, and I haven’t spent a dollar on the Play Store in years. My money goes to someone else.
At this point I’ve spent $12/mo for 4 years on Amazon music. That’s $576 dollars I could have spent on buying songs or CDs and that’s probably 576+ songs.
I regret that I’ve streamed all of these years. And let’s be honestly, I rarely branch out to far afield from my favorite songs and artists. Who have probably received less money from me than if I just bought their cd and ripped it like we did 15 years ago. I also have way more storage on my phone than I ever did 15 years ago. I could keep quite a bit of my music synced and enjoy it whenever I want without worrying about data limits or if I’m on WiFi.
Same goes with half the video streaming services. I watch a handful of shows and movies. I could have bought the ones I watch and never have to worry about “oh man, did they take x off of Netflix? What service is it on now? Ew Hulu, I have to watch ads with that even though I pay”.
The 0% interest is drying up so these companies are trying to claw as much revenue and profit out of their services as they can and I wonder how many people it’s just going to drive away from it completely?
I’ll stop watching prime video when they add ads.
I don’t mind paying for services. I mind feeling like I’m getting shafted and duped every time I turn around. Raising the prices, making the experience worse, removing content, removing features, and then having the nerve to increase the prices by 50% in some cases. Get bent!
I lucked out last year and ended up scoring something like 1000 DVDs for cheeeeaap. Like $100 or something. I ripped them all (minus any duplicates I already owned) and put them on my NAS. No more worrying about ads, data mining, or even internet/service outages ruining my evening.
I did the same for all my CDs, and while we still do purchase CDs, they are way overpriced.
But purchasing digital music and movies has become harder since Google Play Music went away. It’s almost too much effort to try to buy digital content these days, and it makes no sense. I want to pay for content, but making it impossible just doesn’t work for anyone.
Amazon played their first ad for us on Prime Movies today… during a kid show no less. Just disgusting where things have ended up.
My father in law has thousands of CDs he’s collected over the years that he’d probably let me have.
And I just found out my local library sells old DVDs and Blu-rays for $.50 each. I should go drop $50 and buy em out. There were some great movies in there and a few that I’ve always wanted to watch.
This thread just made me realize that I’ve hit my limit of bs with these services. Over lunch, I wrote a script to download yt videos and put them in my Plex library.
And I just found out my local library sells old DVDs and Blu-rays for $.50 each.
Holy crap, I need to see if our local library offers something like that. I used to go to their book sales, but never considered that they would be selling movies.
As far as im concerned, the equivalent here, should be a raw downloadable file. Much like how music purchases work.
Anything other than that simply isn’t “buying”
I recall purchasing Photoshop for Android, before it became Lightroom for Android.
It was as close to the desktop Photoshop as you could get, and it wasn’t cheap.
Google (or adobe) took it out of the play store, effectively cutting customers off and preventing them from installing it on new devices.
Fortunately, I was rooted at the time and backed up the APK, which allowed me to use it for years longer and on newer devices. But the experience really had be second guessing whether I should keep “buying” apps on the play store.
There are quite a few other instances where games and apps I purchased simply disappeared. Such an unethical business model.
You don’t need root to extract apks.
True, but as I recall it was more than just the APK that I needed to backup/restore to get it to work.
It was so many years ago, so I really don’t remember the details, but the point was without a backup, I’d have lost access to the app I paid for.
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.
They have to promote piracy somehow
They want us to search for torrents!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is important information they left out, but it could have happened while 7 was still supported by MS.
True
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.
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
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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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.
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 😂
And these companies think piracy is unjustified. No, it’s just holding out an umbrella in the rain.
Piracy is ALWAYS justified! These companies are dead set on robbing me blind. Well guess what: if I never spent a nickel, there’s nothing to rob me of! To the high seas!
It’s their accounts, you just have access to them. They can close the whole thing tomorrow.
I don’t even want to know what will happen when the valve guy retires. A publicly owned (edit: meant to write privately owned) company that could just shut down tomorrow. Many gaming publishers are aware, having their own launchers. Are you?
I’m telling you, root server, self-hosted everything and FOSS. If you can’t do your things with that, it ain’t worth doing anyway.
It’s a private company. You can’t invest in them.
The Valve guy doesn’t run a publicly owned company. But go on, keep spewing.
How does that make a difference? Anyhow, I meant to write privately owned. My mistake.
The difference is that a hostile takeover can’t happen.
Unless the founder still owns a majority of the shares, you can take control of a public company without needing the consent of the board (and CEO, founder, etc)
deleted by creator
I know it can happen, but that still makes a difference between public and private companies. That’s one risk less.
Especially for Valve which is a very desirable company for their position as de facto PC games online store.
Yeah, it doesn’t make much difference, I just commented on the low-hanging fruit of what was clearly incorrect.
My bigger problem is with your fear-mongering and the gibberish that assumes that self-hosted FOSS solutions are somehow a viable alternative for the majority of users. I’ll pick privacy-compromised convenient products 9 times out of 10 and actually spend my time doing things I want to do, and I’m pretty bored reading all the privacy nutjobs trying to tell me how to do things.
What fearmongering. Being cautious and talking about it is fearmongering now?
And why shouldn’t privately run FOSS solutions be viable for the majority of users? Millions and millions are doing it.
That’s like saying that cooking isn’t viable for home-use and that all people should just order their food, trusting that the service holds up their deal regarding quality. If they even follow a standard.
It is just a matter of lifestyle and how much one values their own authority over things. You seem to be biased in this area, yet I’m sure, in other areas you are doing exactly what you are calling me a nut job for.
You are throwing opinions out without any reasoning attached.
Your claim: “root server, self-hosted everything and FOSS. If you can’t do your things with that, it ain’t worth doing anyway.”
Do you really think I need to “reason” why this is utter nonsense? Fine, here you go. My elderly technically barely-literate father and mother are supposed to self-host their email servers so as not to just use Gmail? Old people who don’t speak English and use Netflix or HBO or whatever to stream movies and TV series are supposed to self host Jellyfin and torrent their stuff? They’re supposed to use OpenStreetMap to find directions around the city instead of Google Maps, because “privacy”?
Maybe my grandparents should run GrapheneOS.
Or perhaps you’re suggesting that, since they can’t root server and self-host FOSS stuff instead of using off-the-shelf products, they should just not watch anything other than cable TV, and write letters by hand and post them. And if they need to go somewhere that they don’t know the way to, they should just ask for directions on the street (and hope the person they’re asking doesn’t just pull up Google Maps, since then they’d be using it by proxy!), oldschool style.
This is not viable, feasible, or possible. “Millions and millions are doing it” tells me you have little understanding of the scale at which modern technology is used. There are an estimated 7 billion smartphones in the world. Almost 2 billion gmail accounts. So the fact that “millions” are using self-hosted FOSS alternatives means… basically nothing.
Home cooking has been a staple human activity for millennia. It is widespread, it’s a skill passed on from one generation to the next, slowly ingrained in people. And even then, the majority of people are absolutely trash at cooking, can barely cobble together one or two recipes, buy ready-made meals, have others cook for them, order out or go to restaurants. Your “root server, self-hosted everything and FOSS. If you can’t do your things with that, it ain’t worth doing anyway.” could be “buy your own ingredients and home-cook every meal you eat. If you can’t do your things with that, eating ain’t worth it for you” and it would still have been utterly ridiculous despite billions more people in the world having the ability to do it.
You need to accept that self hosting and FOSS is for a fringe part of the population and suggesting it as the solution to the issues that currently exist with services like Steam or Google or Netflix is counter-productive. Maybe many generations from now it will be possible to have a sizeable amount of people using technology that way, but now ain’t it.
And by the way, I’ve been on the Internet since like 1998, I went through Napsters and DC++ and I torrented tons and tons of things for years and years. But even for me, the idea of doing what you suggest is absolutely exhausting and not something I really want to find the time to engage in. “It is just a matter of lifestyle and how much one values their own authority over things.”, you say, and you’re right. That’s a much more reasonable stance than your original comment. The truth is I don’t care too much about the authority I have over “my media” or “my data”.
Fine. Be that guy.
Setting up that complicated FOSS stuff took me six hours, ten years ago. With another hour every six months to maintain, if at all, as most things update themselves. And you know what? My parents can use them too, as they are all set up to be multi-user by default.
You just don’t care. Why argue about it then, trying to make others not care, spreading your ignorance. Even calling me a fearmonger. You being afraid is not on me. It’s your own ignorance.
Perhaps, just perhaps, you should have taken a minute to learn about the tech you are using. Torrented for years, eh? And now you are the literal jock putting down nerds, because they did learn? And we nerds spent two decades at making it all easy. Installing your own cloud on a root server takes five clicks and ten minutes for heaven’s sake. Installing the root server itself is done in a matter of two hours. They even come hardened out of the box.
I can’t argue with ignorance. I’ve never talked about replacing each and every technology with FOSS. Just the sensible ones, the ones with money attached. With privacy attached.
And that is both cheap, and easy to do. And your parents could just hire someone. You know, like hiring a carpenter, doctor, gardener. Have you heard of businesses? You don’t have to spend ten minutes on it.
FOSS is being used by a fringe part of the population. Why change that, you don’t care. Why should anyone think differently?
You are strawmanning, adding new topics at will too. I can’t write a book here.
Feel free to take it as a win. I wonder though, why are you here, and not on reddit? Oh. Right. I would guess: because of your freedom and privacy, right? Did you get banned there? Your comments deleted? So you do care. Just not enough? Just a tiny portion of people use lemmy, after all.
Where to draw the line? Damn double standards, eh? .
You accuse me of being afraid. Of what exactly? You’re the one afraid Gaben is going to pull the plug on Steam and other stuff like this. I’m not. You’re the one saying everything needs to be self-hosted FOSS. I don’t care if it’s not.
I don’t want to take anything as a win, but I realize now that you are so divorced from the reality in which we live that there’s no point continuing to debate. 80-year olds who can barely afford food should… hire businesses to root their phones and install self-hosted mail servers for them? That may work in some highly privileged places in the world, but do you have any idea what conditions the vast majority of humans on this planet live in? What their priorities are?
You say you “never talked about replacing each and every technology with FOSS.” but that’s exactly what you said in your first post and that’s what irritates me and what I take issue with. If your stance would have been “I like to self-host stuff for myself and family and use FOSS. You should look into it, it’s cool and not that hard”, I’d have upvoted you and not batted an eye. But you came in here with the sweeping generalisation that if you can’t root, self-hosted FOSS something “it ain’t worth doing”.
I never called anyone a nerd and I’m not sure why you feel like that’s the case.
And not that it should matter, but I’m not on reddit anymore since they killed RIF and I a) didn’t like their stance with regards to third party apps and b) can’t stand the official mobile app. Not really because of my privacy, and no I didn’t get banned.
Anyway, I accidentally came across another one of your posts on a different topic on here, and now I understand. I’m sorry for having engaged you at all and please accept my sympathies.
To start with, you’re right. Digital distribution in general is volatile for consumers. While I will say that Steam, at present, is leagues better in that you must download the game purchase in order to play it (meaning, you have a direct copy of the game on your hard drive, which will remain there even if the game is removed from the Steam store), it is not outside the realm of possibility that this could change in the future.
That said, publishers having their own launchers, I’m sorry to say, has absolutely nothing to do with their fears over “the valve guy” retiring (his name is Gabe Newell, by the way), and significantly more to do with making more money. These publishers figure if they can get you, the consumer, to buy their games directly from them, they can make 100%+ of the money, instead of having to pay Steam a percentage for any transaction. Due to the limited scope of these Publisher-run launchers, purchasing a game from them is even more volatile than purchasing from Steam (at least in the current climate), in such that if the Publisher suddenly finds their launcher is not bringing in customers (which, on average, compared to the draw of Steam at present, they generally don’t) publishers could simply drop their launchers and the catalog of games you, the customer, may have purchased from that launcher would go with them… again, yes, this could happen if Steam went down, but presently, pound for pound, the publisher’s launchers are far more likely to fall than Steam will.
Also… for any of these services (Steam or publisher launchers), you have to download the game locally in order to run them. The games are not streaming as most movie and music content is. As such, once you install a game, you could crack them to remove any DRM attached to them (barring any game that’s strictly online), then, yeah, you can self-host/store these games yourself all you want. If you buy games from GOG they make this even easier for you.
Thank you for taking the time.
Those launchers will be installed even if you use steam. You are mixing up store and launcher. The launcher often exists to have a viable game without steam running.
Saying it has absolutely nothing to do with it is a bit weird. I have bought most of my games on Steam since 2014, yet I have all the launchers.
Gog is the way to go for non-online games. And all the classics. And yeah, of course, the games often require online components. Not much to be done there. Sometimes, things just die.
Sometimes, they don’t. I still run a Trackmania server. Glorious.
So if steam went down, my games with launchers would still work. All others would be a crap shoot, at least until valve releases some offline-steam as a farewell for their customers.
Or they’ll have to resort to cracks, which could be illegal, or even criminal in some areas of the world.
