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Comment by deogeo | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps it is time to treat Google as the enemy, because that is how it is treating us.

Google puts 1 restriction, they are the enemy.

Apple has created priopritary connectors, closed off systems, paid barriers to entry, and banning apps from their store.

Where is Apple and Microsoft on the scale from Friend to Enemy?

Hi. Nobody said they are the friends here.

Just that Google is not.

In this case I guess there are no friends, only enemies?

Rank the enemies since op avoided that.

Since things are not black and white, it should be reasonable to differentiate between Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

The corporation will put its best interests before anyone else's. Doing something like this where 99% of the world won't know or even care is likely in their best interests no matter how unethical its actions are. There tend to be very few true 'friends' because of it. People are normalized to this corporate dance and keep expecting less and less for more.

On HN, the overwhelmingly common paradigm is that conflict in the tech industry is to be understood as part of a existential conflict between Apple and Google. A comment that starts "Google is evil" is all but guaranteed to come from someone with a iOS device in her pocket.

And in this case I think the point is valid: this policy is bad, both because battery management and notification policy really needs to be part of the core OS in AOSP and not a proprietary add-on and because of the licensing glitch reported here where the client library isn't GPL-compatible.

But that's just one policy. Across the fence of the war mentioned above, it's a GPL-incompatible wasteland where absolutely nothing is possible at all. If you care about free software in the abstract and want to view your war along those lines: Google is behaving badly and needs to be admonished. Apple is clearly The Enemy.

What proprietary connectors? There was one significant one. Singular. Lightning. That's it, in the recent history of Apple. And thank God they created it: micro-USB sucks. There was a legitimate engineering need for it.

The other things you mention have all been a great service to users, in protecting their security and privacy.

All the chargers, cables, iPhone sockets?

Um, there has been ONE new iPhone port design. One. Lightning. Which I already mentioned. As for MagSafe, that's a strength, and there have been a grand total of TWO versions of that. Compare to the 900 trillion different PC charging sockets during that time.

Apple lobbies against right to repair, and Microsoft lobbies for software patents, among other of their user-hostile actions, so they both deservedly fall under 'enemy'.

And do not pretend this '1 restriction' is the full extent of Google's user hostility - it is merely the latest straw.

Edit: You may find calling someone an 'enemy' rather extremist - after all, Google is just doing what's best for its bottom line, same as other companies, right? But when they increase their profit not just by providing a good product/service, but also by altering the market/ecosystem/legal system to leave you worse off, what else would you call them? Perhaps sociopath - but "sociopath that's trying to get you for all you're worth" isn't meaningfully distinct from "enemy".

Absolutely correct. HN somehow is fixated on google because google was maybe very good once and now maybe they aren't so good. The entirety of the App store is GPL hostile, so much so that the vlc devs had to rewrite a lot of vlc code to relicense just to make sure it could be distributed on the app store. Was the iOS notification lib ever open source, I don't know but I guess not.

The same with Microsoft. People keep bringing up dragonfly, while conveniently forgetting that bing already works and censors in China.

^ this is commonly known as 'whataboutism'.

No I asked a question

Google still lets you use your own push notification service. It will just be correctly reported as using more battery. The evil thing is not providing a GPL-compatible library for connecting to that service, but I'd be surprised if that isn't remedied.

Not quite. Apps have always been held to accounting for the amount of battery and clockcycles they use. The only change here is that a notification is now required for an app to deploy a persistent service. If you request the absolute lowest priority for your notification, your app winds up in the list of apps which are "running" in the background (mainly because the stuff way down at the bottom is too easily missed). If you don't request the lowest priority notification, then your notification text says whatever you'd like it to say and your app doesn't feature in the default notification.

...and there are plenty of good reasons to explicitly register as a foreground service.

I agree with you that someone's bound to crank out a GPL-compatible lib for interfacing with FCM sooner or later.

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