Re: Peasants..
blondie101,
It was only last month that there were a million downloads from Google's official Play store of a fake Whatsapp app - which had only been up for a short while. This slipped through automated checking in a way that it would probably have never got through ten seconds of human scrutiny from Apple's appstore.
But Google are obsessed with automation - if not also being greedy.
There's obviously a much bigger problem with the unofficial app stores, which I think mostly affects Chinese users. You could argue that isn't Google's fault, though the shit app permissions model that they created, most definitely is.
Shoving more and more functionality into their own Play Services (which they can update) is one way of fixing some of these problems. Though it's also a way of allowing them to claim Android is Open Source, but it not actually really being so - because you need Google's Play Services for the full experience. So that looks as much like a response to people like Amazon forking Android than it does a way of solving the vendors breaking the update model.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
