Google's current phones always get the update the day it's released, because that is the definition of an Android release.

Far more noteworthy is that the Essential Phone gets it on day one (just like with Android 9) and the Redmi K20 Pro gets it on day one, and the OnePlus 7/7Pro get an Android10-based OxygenOS beta on day one. (Other phones may get it today too, these are just the ones currently with articles currently about it on XDA.)

Buying paid reviews is common. And it's blatantly obvious, e.g., when one of my apps gets a review with a comment, it tends to be a sentence or two in length; most of the competitive apps in my space have pages of three-word, five star reviews, clustered together. Google does not appear to care. Most tend to be from a single particular country.

It's also worth noting that using the Google Play Store is NOT ALLOWED in China. So when you're a developer there doing this kind of stuff, you're 100% guaranteed not to be committing fraud against your own country's citizens.

Many developers also use a "whack-of-mole" strategy, distributing basically the same app by multiple "companies". In the unlikely event one actually gets taken down, the effect is negligible.

So it's litigation proof. The reviews look great. The apps are pretty enough. Google doesn't care. Users never seem to wonder how the company is actually going to make money on something that appears "entirely free".

My genuine competitors and myself are being destroyed by this. The overall quality of the *average* user's smartphone experience is worse today than it ever has been as a result. I believe this problem is a key factor in why we're seeing the momentum of the smartphone market collapse.

....I'd be happy to offer my Android development services to remove the "Start Video Call" button from being placed directly in the ActionBar, which at least one user in any 50+ person chat will accidentally tap at least once per day. $10M may seem like a lot of money to simply add the text 'showAsAction="never"' to a menu XML file, but rest assured the resulting goodwill toward your company will be of significantly greater value.

If you're in the US, go look at new phones from your carrier (which is how everyone here buys phones).

With the advent of $1000+ iPhones and $900 Pixels and Samsung Galaxies, the finance term has moved from 24 months to 36 months, in order to keep the payment/bill increase in the $20-$30 range. Everyone here finances their phone with their bill (not an unreasonable choice, given lack of interest charge). The finance term directly sets the replacement interval.

What the heck were these companies thinking by increasing the price to $1000? It's as bad for the manufacturer as it is for the consumer. What's truly shocking is that with many phones we're still going be financing them past the point where they're guaranteed security updates.

F-Droid is not available on the Play Store. The Play Store policy prohibits distributing any kind of app store, even open source ones.

Do not ever download anything called "F-Droid" from the Play Store. If you see it there, it's likely someone's lame attempt at malware.

The real F-Droid is at https://f-droid.org/ (and is very much worth installing!)

....if they actually enforced their developer policies. Every day my competitors upload pages of 5* reviews for their apps, typically one to two words each (real positive reviews tend to be 1-3+ sentences). And the majority of my competition are copies of the same apps, differentiated only by various insane and obnoxious advertising strategies. Myself and my legitimate competitors have no recourse.

Several hours. Absolutely unacceptable. This version fragmentation has to stop!

Most of those complaints are due to developers being unwilling to write their own exceptions when they write code. If you tried to use checked exceptions without being willing to author your own, they would be an absolute nightmare.

Let's say you're writing a library that transfers data from an XML file to a database. If you have client-facing methods that throw SAXException, IOException, and SQLException, you're doing it wrong. When you design your interface, you also need to write your own exceptions, e.g., "TransferException" which describes the failure in a meaningful way.

I tend to have a high-level exception in my apps, call it "SystemException", which wraps the underlying failure (and contains a user-understandable error type, e.g., "network timed out", "access denied", "resource corrupt". )

Android app dev here. Learning Kotlin, I started off being thoroughly excited about it, especially the nullity checking and other general code safety features. Then I got to the bit about it not having checked exceptions and now have a very mixed opinion.

The arguments against checked exceptions seem to be that 1.) most languages don't have them, 2.) bad programmers will just throw and catch the base "Exception" class everywhere, and 3.) bad programmers will screw up interfaces and the like by putting implementation-specific exceptions in the contract rather than writing appropriate exception classes.

Bad programmers write bad code, and will continue to write bad code. I guess if we "fix" the problem by having good programmers write bad code too, it will technically make the bad programmers average.

Going to try using it on a new project (that won't have checked exceptions as a key component of its design, like my existing stuff) and hope for the best. I still can't get over this seeming like two steps forward, three steps back. I hope I'm wrong, as it otherwise appears to be a great improvement compared to Java.

This does nothing to solve the malware problem on Android, because the malware is being distributed by "legitimate" vendors directly on the Play Store.

I get complaints of full-screen video ads in my ad-free apps from users who have never side-loaded anything. Malicious apps are launching them from the background, which is against the TOS, but technically trivial to do. If they get caught, they either call it a bug or start another company/product-line.

As far I can tell, Google promotes the highest revenue generating apps...so the dirtier the tactics you use, the more you succeed.

The bad apps do take a beating on reviews from legitimate users, but this is worked around by the developers posting massive quantities of fake reviews. It's presently somewhat easy to spot, legit apps will have reviews that are generally 1-3 sentences long, while fraudulent ones will have pages of 1-3 word reviews (often clustered together). Google doesn't seem to care though, as even some of the most popular apps are doing this to counter backlash from ever more ridiculously aggressive in-app advertising.

And then of course there's the problem that the average app today is so invasive of privacy that it would have been deemed outright malware ten years ago.

Here you go:

https://play.google.com/store/...

Dozens and dozens of cloned apps that "clean" your device. Fake ratings and reviews.

They prey on the layman users' false "common sense" of how computers/devices should work. Each contains the same false information about optimizing Android performance, creating a completely inaccurate "common knowledge" amongst many Android users.

For example, there's no positive benefit in "cleaning apps" to save memory (RAM). The OS will just cache more, which uses even more resources (and thus more of those precious mAhs).

The apps practice heavy user engagement, recommending more crapware and spraying the user with advertising.

Google frequently recommends these apps, even though they are incongruent with the Android OS design.