Indian app that deleted Chinese apps from Androids deleted from Play Store Google has removed an app called "Remove China Apps" from its Android Play Store. The app, published by Indian developer OneTouch AppLabs, advised Android users of the nation of origin for all apps installed on their smartphone and offered to delete them. The company says the app was downloaded a million times in ten days, a …
I've seen a number of posts about this app decrying Google for banning it but from what I can tell looking at screenshots it violates several Play store policies. If I can tell that from screenshots imagine what else it must be violating. The surprising thing is that it was published in the first place.
The more recent article spells it out:
'...the digital bazaar’s policies do not allow “Apps that encourage or incentivize users into removing or disabling third-party apps or modifying device settings or features unless it is part of a verifiable security service.” '
In other words, the core purpose of the app is against the policy, which is why it was removed.
Sadly theres something weird about 'land' - nations get obsessed and will quite happily spend gadzillions of pounds defending or attacking their neighbours over 'soverignty '. Sometimes you can see a glimmer of rationality when the land is populated or has mineral resources, but far too often the fights are over barren hilltops or slips in a Victorian draftsman's pencil.
What other examples can you think of a country being prepared to sacrifice its economy on the altar of 'winning' a dispute?
Chairman Xi is going to the time-honoured practice of stirring up an external enemy when your internal support is suffering. What with the HK protestors continuing to stick it to the mainland, and the massive disaster that was COVID-19 which has damaged China's reputation not to mention killed untold thousands of its people, he needs a foreign adventure to wipe it all away.
I think you need to do a bit of history reading.
This disputed area has been around for quite some time, once again down to us Brits deciding arbitrarily deciding what be of land belongs to who. The Chinese weren't even asked.
And as for his rating being low? That's a very developed western centric view. Many parts of Africa for example, are extremely happy with the Chinese. Wether that will last, is still be seen.
I'll say it again - Android is garbage.
How can one user app delete another app?
What sort of exotic root permissions are being given to the app to do this?
And if they can delete the app, then what else can they do possibly without the user knowing?
Maybe it just "legally" launches the app store and gives the user the option to delete the nominated other apps.
Or, yes, maybe it uses an illegal hack of Android.
I don't know and neither do you, and probably neither of us ever will.
How is that different to any other OS? The user has permission to delete any user data. An app is just user data that the user chose to install. If the user choose to install a "clean up" app, then that app can do anything a user can do. There are plenty of apps out there that will tell you about unused or iffy apps and suggest that you delete then if you don't need them and will then do so when you authorise it by clicking OK. As mentioned further up, this apps seems to have a number of faults which take it outside the Playstore T&Cs, but the ability to delete apps is not one of them.
I have installed and used this app. It does not delete anything. The app only lists apps it calls China apps. It gives me the option to delete the listed apps. If I don't exercise that option, the apps remain on my phone. It's just like many other storage management apps like CCleaner.
The same applies to all those systems and registry cleaners for Windows. I'm failing to see the difference. You run it and it either just goes off and deletes stuff or it might give some general idea of what it's about to do and ask to OK it's actions, or may have an "advanced" mode where it's list loads of stuff for you to select.
This article by Raymond Chen on why you cannot have a super-duper must-always-be-on-top window is slightly appropriate here.
I read his article, but I don't really understand his point, unless he was talking exclusively about applications that wish to be "top dog" as it were, in which case I can see what he means. I guess the system modal dialog is probably the closest that can be achieved by preventing other windows from doing anything substantial.
As a matter of choice, my MATE desktop manager allow me to specify which windows are "Always on top". At first it appears contradictory to have more than one, but what I think really happens is that it creates a tier of priority windows that behave between themselves in the same way that other windows normally do. It's pretty handy at times although I am left feeling that some kind of improved window paradigm would be a better solution.
"I read his article, but I don't really understand his point, unless he was talking exclusively about applications that wish to be "top dog" as it were, in which case I can see what he means."
You cannot have an option that says 'always do this thing, and ignore what other applications say'. Or anything from a whole class of objects of that form. One of them would be why can you not have an application that always has highest priority among applications to decide which can delete others.
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