You definitely need approval to publish on the Play Store. It’s just more basic

Not every change is going to completely overhaul the app. More than likely, the changes are a fix to some obscure bug not caught in testing that only affects a small percentage of devices. Just because you don’t encounter it with your workflow and device doesn’t mean it isn’t a critical bug preventing someone from using the app. It could also be a new feature targeting a different use case to yours. It could even be as simple as bringing the app into compliance with new platform requirements or government regulations (which can happen a couple times a year, for example Android often bumps the minimum SDK target such that apps are forced to comply with new privacy improvements).

Just buy a cheap Casio if that’s your budget. It’ll keep better time and is less likely to end up in a landfill

From a quick Google, it seems like Mullenweg is a complete jackass

I contribute and run some open source projects. Some projects receive sponsorships and contributions, some are backed by companies, a lot are just someone doing it on their own time, very few can actually meaningfully support the people working on them. Personally, I receive no money for mine.

After a certain point, learning to code (in the context of application development) becomes less about the lines of code themselves and more about structure and design. In my experience, LLMs can spit out well formatted and reasonably functional short code snippets, with the caveate that it sometimes misunderstands you or if you’re writing ui code, makes very strange decisions (since it has no special/visual reasoning).

Anyone a year or two of practice can write mostly clean code like an LLM. But most codebases are longer than 100 lines long, and your job is to structure that program and introduce patterns to make it maintainable. LLMs can’t do that, and only you can (and you can’t skip learning to code to just get on to architecture and patterns)

Mozilla’s next largest source of revenue is subscriptions and advertising (source 2021 financial report), by a wide margin. That “useless shit” is their other revenue, and they’re investing in it because they know they need to diversify revenue to fund Firefox. You’re suggesting they kill it because it’s not their core (unprofitable) business?

Thank you Emma, genuinely 🩷

Not a man. My pronouns are in my username. Even you can connect the dots here.

How much computing power do you think it takes to approximately recognise a predefined word or phrase? They do that locally, on device, and then stream whatever audio follows to more powerful computers in AWS (the cloud). To get ahead of whatever conspiratorial crap you’re about to say next, Alexa devices are not powerful enough to transcribe arbitrary speech.

Again, to repeat, people smarter than you and me have analysed the network traffic from Alexa devices and independently verified that it is not streaming audio (or transcripts) unless it has heard something close (i.e close enough such that the fairly primative audio processing (which is primitive because it’s cheap, not for conspiracy reasons) recognises it) to the wake word. I have also observed this, albeit with less rigorous methodology. You can check this yourself, why don’t you do that and verify for yourself whether this conspiracy holds up?

Read the next paragraph, I already addressed you armchair conspiracy theoriests. We can independent verify their claims by analysing the device’s network traffic, I’ve literally done it myself and seen with my own eyes that it doesn’t happen. If you don’t believe me, you can also check for yourself.

As I said, I don’t care if you “intended” to be condescending, I’m saying you were. Judging by your comment history you often are, so maybe get used to people responding with a bit of attitude.

You used polite words, but you were condescending. I’m not interested in whether that was intentional or not, but that is the vibe you gave.

Yeah well, apologies for being a little sassy, but I’m not exactly a big fan of your tone either.

Can you explain to me exactly how moving where profit is recorded from one division to another in the same organization reduces their tax burden? Because, excuse me, I know I only did a year or two of accounting courses before dropping the degree, but that’s not how I understand taxes to work.

Also to be turning a profit by “doing well collecting data”, the open market value of the data Alexa alone annually generates would need to be around 8% of the entire global data market. If you can justify how millions of instances of “Alexa set a timer for 10 minutes”, “Alexa what is the weather”, or “Alexa play despacito” generates that much value, maybe you have a point.

It’s a good thing their reason is explained very clearly in the article linked in this post. They believed Alexa would have a high “downstream impact”, i.e.generate sales or subscriptions elsewhere in the company. Which it has so far failed to do.

having an always on listening device in someone’s home

They very explicitly do not collect audio when you haven’t used a wake word or activated it some other way. They will not “know what is discussed within the house for data on ad penetration/reach” (which is pretty much the only valuable data you’ve mentioned here), nor will they “have a backchannel to television viewing and music listening patterns” unless you actively discuss it with your device.

I’m not going to put words in your mouth, but if whoever reads this is thinking of replying “are you going to trust that” etc, yes I am. We can track which data an Alexa transmits in real time and directly verify this “always listening” isn’t happening. Even if we couldn’t independently verify that his is the case, and lets say they contradict their privacy policy and public statements and do it anyway, that’s a crazy liability nightmare. Amazon has more than enough lawyers to know that unconsentually recording someone and using that data is very illegal in most places, and would open them up to so many lawsuits if they accidentally leaked or mishandled the data. Take the conspiracy hat off and put your thinking cap on.

Send it to cheap overseas transcribers, use it to train and improve voice recognition and automatic transcription.

Bad for privacy, but also not a $25 billion dollar source of revenue.

Alexa, Google Home, and Siri devices are not good sources of data. If they were, why would Google, king of kings when it comes to data collection, be cutting their Assistant teams so much?

I’m very skeptical that the data Alexa collects is anywhere near as valuable as people seem to believe it is.

Making a breaking change to the mobile API also breaks old outdated installations of the app. Websites and their APIs are usually synced, apps not so.

If they were really motivated to stop your method, they could just obfuscate the frontend with webpack and break your scraper every time they make an update.

I suspect that any of the methods proposed here would be prone to a C&D, but IMO the safest legally would probably be the RSS method (not a lawyer though). Reddit’s RSS feeds are public, documented, and available without the need for private APIs, authentication, or an API key, so I don’t see how they could claim that a wrapper is unauthorised/illegal. Documenting their private API however seems like a gray area. Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. found that APIs are copyrightable, but this use may constitute fair use.