Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Google has freedom of association. If they don't want to work with you based on your employees, that's their prerogative. That's not controlling who you can hire.

Really, it's a monopoly problem. You shouldn't be affected by whether google wants to work with you or not




I'm not buying this line of reasoning entirely.

The problem isn't that you don't have options with regard to hosting, email, etc (with the notable exception of google play store), the problem is that once you've picked your option it's hard to migrate out, and as a customer you have a right IMO, whether in the terms or not, to a good faith effort on the part of the service vendor to sort our any problems you encounter with the service. If a robot just shuts you down no notice and there's nobody to reach to sort it out that's a negligent business practice and I believe any vendor of any service that operates this way is liable.

If they want to offer migration tooling, notice and access to your data I can see it being alright. A pain in the ass, but at least not the end of your business one morning while making coffee.

As far as google play goes, I think there's the monopoly aspect to work on and hopefully legislation brings a resolution to this problem, like offering independent repositories as a default option or something like that, til that time though, do not rely on it entirely. If you have to open source it and put it on f-droid, maintain an aptoide repo, apk download on your site and market that heavier than your google play account, whatever you have to do, just do not rely primarily on the play store because you're basically giving google the keys to your kingdom.


Pick a provider with that option. Building a business on top of a business that can shut you without recourse is risky.


So no one should make an Android app, since the persistence of Android (with or without the play market) relies on Google not trying to lock it down into something similar to what Apple has.




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: