Thread by @slightlylate

I take this blog post to mean that Play will provide WebAPKs to competing browsers and that I'll be able to install other stores on my Pixel.

Do I have that right?

https://twitter.com/lockheimer/status/1412984863070703619

My contention for something like a decade has been that if your tree is closed for half the year, you're "kept source", regardless of the license code eventually drops with:

https://twitter.com/backlon/status/1412928725088276480?s=20

One quick point and then a longer one.

Quickly, the distance between Play's mission and Google's mission has always been both obvious and disappointing.

So why does it persist? To grok that, we have to understand the origin stories.

https://twitter.com/backlon/status/1412932703180124161?s=20

Play exists to extend a patina of safety over Android's (dangerous, dead-code-walking) foundations:

infrequently.org/2020/09/the-pu…

Android exists to put a search box in everyone's hand w/o Apple's usual highway robbery.

To the extent that both of those things are, at a surface level, going well, nobody asks harder questions.

That Play is simply Apple App Store Lite, skating by on being *slightly* less terrible to developers (at some cost to users) is not seen as a problem to be solved.

Consider what Play ~is~: a search engine that doesn't actually get you answers, because the corpus it is designed to project into the world *is fundamentally unsearchable*.

Remember Now On Tap? Android App Indexing? "Deep Links" (or as we call them on the web, "links")?

The shift in use from web to native happened slowly, and always in the shadow of a competitive, more closed threat.

There's real value in living to fight another day, FWIW, and it wasn't always crazy to think being more open was enough.

Hiroshi's blog post (or rather, the Play PM's blog post that Hiroshi had to sign) rings hollow because it's the self-serving, unquestioned and unlititgated assertions that have been able to win an internal dialogue for something like a decade.

They work less well in public.

Not everyone is locked in a struggle with Apple for share. Some folks -- most folks, even -- just want safe computing they can have some agency in.

Android's core kernel distribution process is rotten, so Play has too much power in the name of safety.

There's a better way.

We *can* have meaningful choice in apps and runtimes without high app store tax rates.

How? We need safe-by-default runtimes and platforms.

Today, that's browsers. They're built to a more paranoid standard.

This is why browser choice and capabilities matter so much.

So, if Hiroshi et. al. want to raise the bar for safe, effective, open mobile computing, they have the power to do that. They can put in place Play policies that promote meaningful browser choice, and help ween Google and the rest of the ecosystem off of dark patterns.

Doesn't require new OSes (which Android can't make real in less than hardware-replacement timescales anyway), and doesn't need tenuous whataboutism to justify.

Just make Play web friendly and start to discourage the over-powered, insecure native side of things.

Would this mean dramatically shrinking the set of superpowered apps to several dozen browsers and a much smaller set of native apps held to a higher standard? Eventually.

But it would also mean safer, faster, less resource hungry, more open computing w/o higher taxes.

Hiroshi's post is Native Apologetics. It's an argument about why a bad world that's antithetical to Google's own best software values should persist.

It lands with a wet flop because the lived reality simply doesn't back it up.

An important PS:

The Android team is *rightly* afraid of sideloading and dodgy stores. They're bad, and do an even worse job of papering over Android's terrible security story than Play does.

Giving developers everything they want isn't a better world (see also: WinXP).