No definitely don’t sideload a YouTube client that doesn’t play ads!
If neither Google nor Apple took such a massive rake on the payments, fewer people would take issue with the main app distribution implementations. They have valid reasons for trying to keep you in their ecosystem, but those are severely undercut by taking such a huge percentage.
Basically everything outside fdroid is riddled with trackers and ads so no, thanks
Honestly been steadily becoming less happy with the way Google/Android has been going even since Pichai took over.
It’s a term coined by Cory Doctorow, Sci-Fi writer and ex-EFF, who has been writing about (tech) monopolies, and in particular monopsonies, and how those types of two sided markets originally grow by given users something they need, often for an artificial low price or even free, until they dominate that side of the market, after which they focus mostly on the other side of the market, in this case advertisers, and step by step, slowly dismantling the reason users originally liked their product… Enshittification.
Doctorow has lots to say, so here’s a link.
I’ve tried downloading some of the games that are on the Play Store for my kids, and by God those apps are cancerous. An ad every 30 seconds and the games are made purely with getting the players to become addicted in mind. Get off your fucking high horse Pichai.
There are some games that are genuinely aimed at being educational and fun, such as the Duck Duck Goose games. Or Starfall (from the website of the same name).
Oh yeah sure! The games from Baby Bus are alright, and there are some dino games which teach you programming. All very good, but as soon as an ad appears, 9 times out of 10 it’s one of those crappy, slapped together in a day, Unity games filled to the brim with ads itself. Showing characters from popular franchises (like Marvel, and most likely not paid for), and my kid goes “dad, I want that one”. Now I have Family Link installed so I have to allow everything he wants to download or pay for, but geez there’s so much junk on there.
I’d be sort of OK with the CEOs statement, if they did any sort of moderation on those predatory games aimed at kids. But alas.
Fun fact: You can sideload an adblocker that will legit block any ads in apps.
It’s called Blokada 5, and you have to download it from their website and sideload it because Google banned apps that use its functionality from the Play store.
So satisfying never seeing ads in apps.
