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.
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.
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!
This is why I stick to open source software for anything truly important.
Gaming’s a mix of open source, physical retro games and the least abusive free to play games.
I’m down with buying games, but as soon as Microsoft decides I don’t get to own Baldurs Gate 3 imma be clicking that 🧲
One word: gog
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.
Phew, that makes a lot more sense. I thought it permanently locked them
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.
So revolutionary
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.
You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy
You mean buying isn’t owning?
Well then…Piracy isn’t st…I mean Piracy is wrong an immoral!
Piracy is always justified. I don’t do it because I’m afraid of consequences and my fear of fucking up is greater than my desire to watch TV, but if you’re confident in your abilities, do it. Fuck Netflix, they wouldn’t use your money to make shows you like anyway.
's alright sweetheart, you can say it, there’s no longer a megacorporation to shadow ban or lecture you
I don’t know what you could possibly be talking about! I would never pirate anything!
You should never use mullvad with quantum secure encryption or proton VPN with port forwarding off or qbitorrent to pirate anything! That would be horrible to steal from a corporate executive’s enormous income!
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.
Very shortsighted article calling repeatedly the GDPR a “crazy” law.
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.
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.
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 use Adblock dns
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
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
There are usually archives of versions for most apks for android. App updated to be shittier? Uninstall and install an older version of it from IA.
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)
“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?
Only that the contract was unilaterally changed after being perfectly valid for the longest time.
Because you signed (digitally) an agreement that lets them do that.
Pirate everything.
Also, don’t use Google. Wherever possible.
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.
And a large portion of the steam community will be super sad if Gaben retires or passes away. We can only hope it continues to be run as well as it has been over the past 15 years.
They’re not purchases, they’re leases.
Edit: it’s actually that you purchase access to their license of the media.
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
