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Comment by bilalq | Hacker News Reader

In practice, the Google Play Services dependencies and other walled-garden initiatives from Google will make this less useful than it could otherwise be. But still, this is really cool.

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MicroG of one of its wrappers takes care of it https://microg.cc/features/

I guess, in practice this can also be likely be made to run google services, the same as they can run on custom ROMs. And it already lists Aurora store as a solution.

So it's definitely something for more tinkerer people, but still quite cool.

Everything aside from apps with SafetyNet dependencies. Banking apps come to mind.

Also, a lot of games. This is actually why I stopped playing Pokemon Go, and never picked up a worse gacha game habit haha

Pokémon Go had a good reason - it turned out to be foreign intelligence gathering operation and couldn't risk being corrupted with false data.

What? Niantic (Google) admitted they were training spatial AI models. I have not seen evidence that the data was a "foreign intelligence-gathering operation" and I would welcome a source.

Which models for who?

Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data | https://nianticlabs.com/news/largegeospatialmodel | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42187494

430 points | 2 years ago | 338 comments

Whereas for my other line, Fate/GO, I'm pretty sure the reason was just sweet gacha money

Soo many more things than banking apps at this point. Things as normal as looking at train schedules, grocery store catalogues, ordering a taxi... sometimes have SafetyNet DRM.

When you publish apps on Google Play, the Play Developer Console even nags you to use harder obfuscation and implement Google's DRM to, allegedly, protect yourself and your users.

Can the EU finally make this shit illegal? Oh wait, they're pusing for mandatory DRM too... Fuck.

Banks want your money so try it anyway. Not all banks try to drive away their customers by preventing them from accessing their accounts.

Sure, but who would use a banking app when the web site is right there and has more features and generally works better?

These days many banks only allows app for "enhanced safety"

Fortunately, there are (at least for now) many, many banks to choose from, and you can tell the app-only ones to suck it. There's also almost no switching cost. The last time I changed banks, it was mostly done in an afternoon.

I've never heard of such a thing but that's definitely not a company I would do business with. If my current bank tried that shit I'd be gone.

time to RE play services

People are way ahead of you.

https://github.com/microg/GmsCore

hell ya, I love the internet

Optimist take: this will matter less over time as more developers start targeting Steam devices

...what steam devices? Steam Deck and Machine? I work in video games(at one of the largest publishers - worked at other two in the last few years) - and while we usually do some testing on the steam deck it's literally just to see if the windows version runs well. Full on Linux porting effort like Larian did for BG3 is very very rare and extremely hard to justify.

In your experience, is "Steam Deck Verified" attractive enough to fix any issues you might find when testing? I've been immensely curious about whether it's moved the needle at all

Sorry for the late reply, I just wanted to give it some thought.

I think it's hard to definitively answer. I'm an engine programmer and almost every engineer I have ever met wanted to see our games run on the steam deck well - if not for any reason than just because they have one themselves or because it represents a cool challenge.

I'm sure for some smaller companies the steam deck verified badge might be incredibly important - if your game gets featured in the "works well on deck" section it can be a big boost. But for some of the projects I worked on they were enormous(in the range of 20-30M copies sold) and I'd say 95%+ were sold on consoles. It was never said explicitly but there was an unsaid thing that the PC version is not worth the time and effort to make it and then support it. It was so far down the list that then worrying about whether it runs on the steam deck or not was not even on anyone's radar, except for some engineers who pushed for it themselves.

Sorry if that doesn't answer your question fully - I just don't know the answer from the point of view of product managers and marketing efforts.

> Full on Linux porting effort like Larian did for BG3 is very very rare and extremely hard to justify

Given the zeitgeist, how realistic are the calls to “just get AI to do it”? I’ve been rattled by just how good some one-shot (or otherwise low-human-effort) Claude ports of some games are (and I don’t mean “decomps”, but instead where an existing open-source and already-cross-platform codebase is ported over to new targets like WASM+Canvas, like C&C Generals: the AI-bros are in full-force posting demos of their new ports on a nearly daily basis - so if it’s as easy as these people say, why aren’t we seeing it from the major publishers?

> why aren’t we seeing it from the major publishers?

Models are just recently capable of reliably doing this type of deeper work, which is why you're only seeing it now. There hasn't really been enough time to see it. And still, why? Modern gaming on Linux is almost always on accident, with the devs targeting windows, with no thoughts of Linux at all. Seems like it would make more sense to point the AI at wine, to make linux run Windows better.

Most games run on Steam devices via Proton (Wine). You don't really need a native port in that case.

And I hate it with a passion. Publishers have no problem taking money from Linux users, only to ignore Linux-related bug reports and tell people “it’s not supported.”

I really hope Steam will use its position soon to either let users get refunds when devs break their games or force the gaming industry to support the Linux users they’re making money from.

That's really what the (Deck/Machine/SteamOS) Verified program is for. Valve tests games out on those platforms and reports results back for everyone on the store page. Publishers have the control to explicitly mark it as unsupported too.

And the Frame Verified program, which is most of where I was going with this.

Lepton may most directly target Quest games, but it's not like it wouldn't also enable flatscreen titles running on AOSP, and it's not like Proton is limited to the use cases Valve intended either.

While it's better than nothing I don't think the Frame Verified results will be as useful to gauge compatibility for other devices because the Frame is quite underpowered. It's weaker than the Deck, has two much higher resolution displays, and tracking surely takes a chunk out of it too.

Yeah, the system spec isn't really what I'm talking about so much as the compatibility layers.

...I mean, you're buying a windows version, then complaining that it's not running well on an unsupported operating system?

Steam is very upfront when you’re buying a windows game on mac. There’s a big banner saying it’s not for your OS and likely won’t work. There’s a compatibility icon for mac, and it’s filterable, for library and store, so you can get mac games. There’s an additional click-through screen on the store page with a checkbox. There’s a lot that’s filtered out!

The proton story pretends like you can run every windows game on steamos, verified or not. It’s quite different and tbh a little dishonest. I wonder how much of it is avoidance of alert fatigue (because many many unverified games do work) and how much if it is trying to sell users on steamos.

Well, just remember that Steam doesn't actually know where you intend to play the game. I buy most of my Steam games on my phone, and obviously there's no point in steam warning me that the game will not run on android.

Or matter more, as chromeOS is killed and Android comes to laptop form factor?

https://github.com/kksimp/Mac.apk/wiki/Google-Accounts-and-P...

It's also pretty easy just to spin up bluestacks if you really need android apps on a mac.

You can run it with microg

figuring out how to get PWA working would be a much better goal.

Can MicroG be ported?

Is this your experience or are you repeating something you heard somewhere?

I'm not the commenter but this is my experience in about 10% or so of cases. I've been running a network audit of baby tracking apps and the information they phone home with (results are pretty Orwellian so far) and a few of the apps have been virtually impossible to emulate without an active Google Play account that is verified against Google's servers.

I'm no expert on the matter, but I've developed and published multiple Android apps to the Play Store. Some of those apps have needed Google Play Services APIs. Google has also been actively making moves to lock down control and offering things like the Play Integrity API that some apps use.

By your phrasing, it sounds like you're implying my understanding is wrong somehow. If so, what am I missing?

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