Issue is that it is no secure.
Explain. I'm tired of hearing this boogeyman, tell me exactly how Lineage is "not secure" but Graphene is?
Then maybe give me some examples of cases where that difference has actually been a problem.
Because it feels like a lot of these "unsecure" things people hand-wring over are really just user freedoms they may use to hurt themselves, not actual vulnerabilities that can't be avoided with common sense.
I mean, you can be as snotty about this as you like, but it doesn't change the fact this "choice" is basically between participate in the same digital world as most people do with the most popular, most supported, and highest value apps, vs only what you can use in F Droid or something?
You're calling them slaves but can you give them anything more appealing outside the walled garden than "privacy"? It's not like everything on the play store has an F-Droid corollary. You're basically telling them to dramatically reduce their own use case. Does that make them a slave?
Their reasons mean nothing. It's my device. I shouldn't have to worry about an application installed on my device being policed because the developer got a hair up their ass about people downgrading.
The phrase "more secure" is becoming meaningless as it keeps being used as a blanket excuse for literally every user hostile change.
Are they? Other comments in different PRs seem to indicate they have no intention of trying to subvert play integrity. Is there something more recent than this that indicates they're trying?
For every single app where the developer tries this?
Yeah right. That's unsustainable.
They'll also just increase ways for the integrity to verify it hasn't been patched. This announcement already says they're checking the app's binary for tampering.
There aren't any good search engines anymore, because there isn't a good internet anymore. SOE has buried the internet's wealth of information and centralization starved out all the spaces where information used to be. Hell half the forums that used to appear in search results aren't even online anymore, and live only in the way back machine (which doesn't come up in results).
There's so little to find anymore compared to the halcyon days of search engines we remember.
They were supposed to destroy these when they closed the locations, to prevent exactly this.
Which is a tall order for minimum wage restaurant workers. The fuck they gonna do? Take it down to the local steel mill and T2 it?
It's mostly that it's just an older site and the voting/review system goes back by over a decade. Much of the information you're gonna get on there is just dated, pure and simple, and that reflects in the rankings.
And as you said, the categories aren't curated well enough. Too many unrelated suggestions.
Only issue with alternativeto is the comments and reviews are all dated, some by over 10 years, and often don't reflect the current state of the software.
A lot of the information on the site just feels very stale in general.
Having third party clients is not good for security.
If the first party provider told you this, you should always second guess them.
Moreover, providing an option that informed users can choose doesn't hurt security. This idea the user can't be trusted to use the appropriate type of messaging if provided options needs to die.
You have absolutely zero guarantees, with or without their policy on third party apps. You can not send sensitive information to someone else's phone and tell yourself it couldn't possibly have been intercepted, or that someone couldn't get ahold of that phone, or that the person you're sending it to won't take a screenshot and save it to their cloud.
A lot of software nowadays is doing a real disservice to their users by continuing to lie to them like this by selling them the notion that they can control their information after it has been sent. It's really making people forget basic information hygiene. No app can guarantee that message won't be intercepted or mishandled. They can only give you tools to hopefully prevent that, but there are no guarantees.
Moreover, this policy does not exclude them from including third-party functionality and warning the user when they are communicating with somebody that isn't using encryption.
Too many of these apps and services are getting away with the "security" excuse for what is effectively just creating a walled garden to lock users in. Ask yourself how you can get your own data out of these services when you decide to quit them, and it becomes more apparent what they're doing.
Yes they will. This tool would force users to always use the Play Store which would increase the download count on their app, which would help its ranking in the Play Store. Every last single developer is incentivized to use this.