AmbitiousProcess

Sorry, but do you have a source for this at all?

As far as I can tell, they have added some Play Integrity checks (with root detection being part of that), but the reason was cited as spam prevention, and I can’t find anything claiming they had any sort of agreement with Apple to do so.

They kept pushing for Apple to implement it, but I don’t know of any cases of them making any promises about what they’d do on their own platform in order to convince Apple or anything like that.

In what way does this have anything to do with RCS or Apple lmao

The petition is only one part of the puzzle.

Keep Android Open also says to contact your regulators and fill out Google’s developer verification survey, both of which either directly affect Google by influencing internal processes, or put regulatory pressure on them to back off.

The Change.org petition is moreso just a way to count overall total supporters, and add one more lever of pressure that can be leveled against them. (e.g. instead of “we’ve had a lot of people contact regulators” it’s “218,000 people are actively taking the time to tell you they don’t like this”, can be cited by lawmakers, advocacy groups, etc)

That said though, I do agree that a change.org petition on its own is… generally ineffective most of the time.

Isn’t that no different than the millions of open source projects that have few authors, little interest and are abandoned for the next shiny thing?

The end result isn’t inherently different, but the basis is.

Someone who programs a FOSS project with their own programming skill is, by definition, more invested, and more willing to spend time making that project exist. Someone who is mostly just willing to tell the LLM to do it for them is, by definition, less invested in the project.

It is more likely that someone less invested in a project will abandon it.

At least in my mind with the current state of LLMs, if there is an open source project that you want to update for yourself, you should be able to do that pretty easily.

Sure, that’s possible, but the main concern is that most people either don’t have access to more capable models (which will otherwise require them spending money for their software to keep getting things like security patches, vs projects that have maintainers that are more invested in them that aren’t abandoned in the first place which are effectively free unless you choose to donate), and you get forks in development path. It might fit one user’s goals, but now you have, say, 100 people who all tried reviving abandonware with their own LLMs, all with different features, security, import/export mechanisms, etc.

That’s not to say it’s bad that people can use LLMs to “revive” abandonware, but I don’t think we should be encouraging people to create and publish software that’s highly likely to be abandoned in the first place.

This is the main reason why vibe coding, even if it produces good code, is still a major problem. It encourages people with the goal of making software, but without the actual will and motivation to keep supporting that software to pump out software and publish it.

It’s like all the faceless AI-automated YouTube channels we have now. It’s not that these people had no way of doing it before, it’s just that it’s easy and might make them some money, or make them feel like they accomplished something until they get bored and move on.

There’s something to be said for convenient and easy to use things, but they’re a double edged sword, because they also directly target people with the least emotional investment to use them, as a side effect of that convenience.

New one seems fine to me, haven’t had any issues with it, haven’t been privy to any malicious behavior or past actions that the developers might have done, so personally I find it pretty trustworthy.

it was never as simple as “pick file, send file”.

Not really what Syncthing’s for. Localsend is definitely much better suited for that. (though there is the option on the unofficial Syncthing Android app to use the Android share feature to “save to Syncthing”, then pick which folder you want Syncthing to save it to before syncing it to whatever devices that folder is synced with, though again, not really made for that as a core feature, Localsend is better for that)

Syncthing is more for if you just want a folder on one device to be replicated to another device. For example, my Camera folder on my phone syncs to my PC so I always have a second copy of all my photos by default.