Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free

wccrawford

15% is a lot. I'm not trying to say it isn't. And they're annoying and often screw up the review process. Google is always going to make money off any work they do. That's just business. They're not going to put more money towards better reviews without taking more money. And without the reviews, even as crappy as they are, a lot of really crappy software would be on the store. And a lot more would be actively malicious And you were making like 7x as much as they were taking. Without them, you would even get noticed and you'd have made nothing. We know this because almost nobody installs FDroid, and the other stores like Samsung make basically nothing for developers, even though they're preinstalled on so many devices.

4chandaily

Customer support has gotten so terrible. Now that all big companies have terrible support, none of them are punished for it. You can still occasionally find people who give a shit in small business, but that is it. Google is probably one of the worst offenders of all. I don't know what the solution is, it seems like the only way to get any satisfaction on an issue at a big corp anymore is a social medial call-out like this one. If you are here, thank you for Conversations, Daniel, it has been my go-to for years for communicating with friends and family.

chii

Receiving 1000 euros without having any real work or accountability is the epitome of free profit. No wonder these platform gatekeepers are fighting so hard to maintain it (at the cost of you, the consumer). And yet people (in general) just dont care, because they don't truly feel the pain until it's too late - issues like privacy and such are like that.

skybrian

It makes sense to leave, but it also seems like the overall sentiment would be more positive given the “it paid my rent for many years” part.

jan_m_savage

"Fortunately, I’m no longer economically dependent on Google Play Store revenue. Google doesn’t deserve me and my money anymore. I’m done. Fuck the gatekeepers." +1.

happosai

Yeah that "there is no way to talk to a human at Google" is one of the reasons I never recommend a Google solution at current workplace... Or to family.

faangguyindia

Our app has 17,000+ users and has never paid a cent to Google :) With a little out of box thinking, you can avoid Google tax.

N_Lens

I recommend the book “sacred economics” regarding this play. Free to read online - https://charleseisenstein.org/books/sacred-economics/

pi-victor

I think it bothers OP less that they take a 15% tax than the fact that google provides terrible support for their own play store. If they would take that tax and provide good feedback and speedy version reviews, nobody would ever complain - it is expected to pay something since the play store doesn't run on good thoughts and prayers. But because they're a monopoly (or a duopoly if you count apple, which is a different platform altogether) they can afford to act this way.

thenthenthen

Conversations is pretty nice for self hosted xmpp. Wish there was an iOS client!

pelagicAustral

I know this is a stupid question even before I ask it, but is there any chance at this point of seeing something out of the scope of Apple and Google for mobile?? Will the bank apps ever allow people out of these two players

vachina

> This effectively means I’m paying Google more than 1000 Euro per year for their services. 1000 Euro per year is 1.5x what I’m paying for my internet access. It’s roughly what I’m paying for my notebook per year if you assume I use it for three to four years. When my internet breaks, someone drives to my house and fixes it. When my notebook breaks, someone drives to my house and fixes it. Couldn’t have said better. We all allowed it to come to this.

asim

Unfortunately google is now a massive juggernaut that has 20+ layers before you can ship anything, and thats bled out to the users of their services. I wish we had better alternatives. In fact, I now just focus on shipping a PWA. Btw thanks to the author. I got Conversations to work with Micro ( https://micro.mu ), the personal assistant I'm building. Its a nice XMPP client. Now just need to figure out how to do encryption for queries going into the model itself.

mrbluecoat

> I was in a toxic relationship with Google[/Apple/Amazon/X/Instagram/Facebook/TikTok], and the only reason I stayed was economic dependency. That just about sums up Big Tech

jonathanstrange

Sorry this is a bit of a long rant. To many people here this will be a very old hut but I've only recently realized that Apple and Google are basically extortion rackets and have made the online world way worse and enshittified than it should be. Why? They deliberately make it as hard as possible to sell true cross-platform apps. "Buy one license, install our software on all of your devices." That should sound reasonable, yet it's impossible as a business model. If you put an app on the Apple Store or on Google Play, you cannot have it unlocked by a license code. So you have to sell it on their platform. That means that if you want to sell one license for all platforms, you'd have to force your users to buy the license in one of those stores, then generate desktop license from that store purchase. That's not just nonsense, it still wouldn't work because the user can still not switch from iOS to Android and vice versa. Okay, so sell mobile platforms separately but make desktop platforms with one license. That would still be nice and comparatively hassle-free for your customers. Not so fast, though! Desktop app stores also prohibit free apps with unlock mechanism. So you have to put unlockable versions on your website. However, app stores explicitly prohibit even just mentioning that the user doesn't have to buy an app if they have already bought it elsewhere. They strictly prohibit pointing the user elsewhere to check whether they could use it for free. Consequently, unless your users are extremely well educated about those platform quirks, many of them will erroneously buy your app twice. But wait! There is an exception in Apple Store and Google Play Store. You're strictly prohibited from putting an app on there that needs to be unlocked by a license key, but you are allowed to ask the user to create an account or log into an existing account with a user name and email address. As long as users can also purchase the app on the respective store, that's allowed. So you can tie the app to an account and unlock it if the user already bought it for another platform. For some reason, unlocking an app with a code is strictly prohibited but unlocking it by providing your email and a password and then contacting a server is totally fine. That's why so many apps have those shitty login requirements. I wasn't really aware of that. In a nutshell, apart from "freemium models" there are two major ways to sell cross-platform software that really is cross-platform. First, make the user pay individually for each platform, make them buy your app again and again with all the hassle that brings. Second, force them to login with an email and a user name with some direct contact to some centralized hub server. IMHO, all of these options are strictly worse than just allowing your users to buy the app anywhere they like and unlock it for all other platforms.

shevy-java

All these stores, Apple Store, Google etc... must be opened up. They constitute an illegal monopoly. Why does the US government protect monopolies? This is against the core tent of capitalism, aka more competition in a free, open market, to have prices be as low as reasonable possible for the customer. The USA shifted towards de-facto monopolistic mafias. Financial kickbacks to the US government must logically exist here - otherwise one can not explain why the US government works for the interest of mega-corporations only now. Open ALL stores.

wg0

At least in Europe - these rouge corporations need to be reined in or just leave the market. Google Play's app registration is so much more complicated now that Good Luck getting to production ever. And even then the same thing on every update. If you're a small business and your livelihood depends on that then it's a nightmare to deal with. And no, kicking them out won't be a problem. No sky is going to fall. Vacuum would be filled in very quickly.

metalman

To the author. Go buy yourself some socks.Maybe a wallet, and go to the resturaunt that never fails you, or more generaly put in a concerted shameless effort to catch up, relax, fit the worst little personal bugs and recuring inconvieniences, essentialy put the same attention that you put into maintaining your product, into your self, remember to say fuck you google as you put the new " toothbrush * " you got by the sink, that you have reminded yourself but failed to get for the last six months, because thats what we give up, when we are blamming ourselves for the rejections we get from nameless faceless functionaries, that doom loop of 'engagement' is the point behind the delays and mindless activity, and reversing it is almost magical. * 'toothbrush', anything that is a constant tiny irritant going away can be absurdly triumphant

mawise

I get excited every time I learn about another E2EE messaging app where the server can be self-hosted. But as I understand it, the server that triggers push notifications for any android app must be hard-coded into the app's binary. Are there any good architectural workarounds for this? I've read a little bit about VAPID[1] but I don't know if it is actually a viable approach and I don't think I've ever seen it promoted in an E2EE messaging app with a self-hosted server. [1] (Disclosure: the AI gave me this link) https://unifiedpush.org/news/20250131_push_for_decentralized...

0xbadcafebee

It's called "Rent-seeking" when a powerful entity extracts wealth without providing any commensurate value. Google wants you to believe the only way to get an app is through them. They have programmed society to believe this - despite the fact that you have never needed Google to download and run apps on your laptop. Apple also wants you to believe this, which is why they keep making it more impossible to run Mac apps without the Apple Store. They too want to extract your wealth and control you. FOSS was created because people didn't have a way to cooperate and share the source code for their programs, to let users fix their own problems. Like the "right to repair" but for software. But Apple and Google wouldn't exist in the forms they do today without our FOSS. Our own software is being used to manipulate us, take our money, and take away our freedoms. Ironic. Maybe it's time for a new software license that does discriminate against the rent seekers. Not because we deserve money when someone uses our free software. But because our freedoms are being trampled by the companies who use our software. I think we should define that new license, abandon the old projects using the old licenses, and start using new ones. We already did this for Rust tools, I think we can do it for new licenses too.