Good point. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hydrogen.element.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hydrogen.element.io</a> works very well as a PWA, but doesn’t have push support yet.

This is the upside down crazy we are faced with when a tiny number of giant companies make decisions on whims of ever changing policy.We need to fight back with things like PWAs to bypass the app stores, web socket chats, distributed social platforms, and plain old web pages to publicly document these attacks on free speech. Call&#x2F;email Congress too. Get friends and neighbors to do the same. They are already alerted to this growing abuse by these monopolistic giants.

only if chrome is not censoring internet which google is happy to do

Banning Element because of channels created on a decentralised network makes as much sense as banning a web-browser because of websites created on a decentralised network (i.e., the Internet). Looking forward to Chrome&#x27;s imminent removal from the Play Store.

I have no idea whether this is correlated with the other recent de-platforming events, but the rapidly growing list of examples is now getting ridiculous. It’s crazy to imagine that the rug could get pulled out from beneath any of us, any time, under any pretext (or no pretext at all!). I don’t know whether a more apt metaphor alludes to serfs on feudal land, or The Trial by Kafka.If it turns out this is because of specific discussions&#x2F;channels then banning the Element app for that makes about as much sense as banning Facebook&#x2F;Twitter for what some people said, or Google because of what some website says.

Parler curated the content on their platform for months including shadowbanning new accounts until they had been approved by volunteer moderators. Accounts on Parler called for and planned violence against elected officials for months. Executives at the company spoke often and publicly supporting that content.If your going to argue with a straight face the this new situation is the same as Parler, your putting Element side by side with some very bad company.

Element and Parler are nothing alike.Element is a chat client. It&#x27;s an empty piece of software for use with your own choice of server. Element is to a chat server, as Thunderbird is to an email server. It&#x27;s basically a glorified IRC client. It contains no content of its own.Parler was basically a curated, centrally run, Facebook-message-board-replacement for neonazis, antisemites, qanon conspiracy theorists, and the lunatic fringe of the alt-right.

People will surely point out the obvious differences between the takedown of Parler and Element and I&#x27;d agree that it&#x27;s not exactly the same thing, since Parler is its own platform and Element is just a client.However, when looking on a bigger picture of the recent takedowns and trying to make sense of it, it does indeed seem to be connected. The only conclusion that seems rational to me is as follows:Everyone tries to push their burden of moderation on people below them, because no one can actually keep up with it. And if the moderation is not enforced, they risk being taken down by someone above them. That would explain why everyone is so trigger happy when it comes to censorship. When the WallStreetBets people were taken down by Facebook and Discord, they didn&#x27;t ban the individuals who were actually violating the policy, but the entire community.It&#x27;s also worth to note, that the takedowns can be enforced selectively, as we see here - Google obviously won&#x27;t take down their own browser or email client, that also allows to access abusive content - assuming that&#x27;s what Element was taken down for. It&#x27;s probably selectively enforced on the social media too, but I&#x27;m out of the loop on what actually goes on there, so to be fair, I cannot prove it.If this is actually what is happening, the only solution as far as I see it, is to extend the First Amendment to social media. Another solution could be to convince the people and the media to stop pressuring companies into deplatforming other people, but that&#x27;s in my opinion definitely not going to happen. So it&#x27;s either applying the protections of 1A to the internet or the censorship will get worse and worse.

I don&#x27;t agree with OP here but I&#x27;ve found a lot of people from the Parler&#x2F;Gab crowd have found Matrix lack of content moderation appealing and have been in channels on the Matrix directory that have all the same content as Parler&#x2F;Gab. I would recommend the Matrix team start taking content moderation more seriously as my experience is they do not take it seriously. They may want to disable room creation on matrix.org in the meantime.

You, like Parler, have been targeted by the powers that be. You may have nothing else in common other than that but, you&#x27;re in the same boat it seems.

Newsflash: there is a chat system so secure, Google doesn&#x27;t want you to know it exists.

I on the other hand hope that they won&#x27;t just say &quot;oops, our bad!&quot;, reinstate it and sweep the entire thing under the rug like nothing happened, without explaining anything.There are people here who work on mobile applications. If they depend on Google and Apple delivering their app to their clients, it&#x27;s still unacceptable that they can potentially put you out of business, just like that. I already saw a couple of people here that claimed it happened to them too. Without any reason, without the ability to appeal, nothing.

&gt; Google will explain what’s going on shortlyIt&#x27;s definitely not Google style.But I hope Matrix will get more promotion in result.

That really sucks. Here&#x27;s to hoping they don&#x27;t end up using this to pressure you into compromising your feature set somehow.Incidentally I was always kinda surprised that the upgrade nag links in Riot Android redirected to Play store instead of f-droid

My comment elsewhere got buried but it might be useful to you.Pattle also appears to have been removed. Ditto and FluffyChat at the moment appear to still be up on the store though. For those unaware, these are all Matrix clients.

So are you going to remove email clients from the play store if someone sends offensive emails?

sorry this is happening to you guys. i hope this situation gets sorted out.not saying i agree with the decision here, but hn is sometimes so quick to blame google.what surprised me though, is that you guys are aware of abusive content on the network and even put a &quot;moderation&quot; guide in place. so much good faith in people here...

Reach out how? You have no public contact information in your HN profile.

This comment alone should be reason enough for the company behind Element to sue Google.

There are debug version apks available here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;buildkite.com&#x2F;matrix-dot-org&#x2F;element-android&#x2F;builds&#x2F;latest?branch=develop&amp;state=passed" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;buildkite.com&#x2F;matrix-dot-org&#x2F;element-android&#x2F;builds&#x2F;...</a>Click on &quot;Assemble GPlay Debug version&quot; (or &quot;Assemble FDroid Debug version&quot; if you don&#x27;t have Google Play Services), then click on &quot;Artifacts&quot; and then choose your apk from there.

Can&#x27;t you just use a web app or any other matrix client if this happens?If Google were to &quot;ban&quot; slack from their store, their browsers, etc. then you would be quite in trouble.But with matrix, just pick a different client and move on.

Google may be able to control the Element app on the play store, but at least for the server side there&#x27;s no way to do that with synapse (the official matrix protocol server side implementation), which is fully open source and distributed directly from the developers.

That&#x27;s why XMPP has been adopted for military and industrial use.

Big players with clout can commission their own closed access app. The C levels just need to take a $0.5M hit among themselves.

How can you rely on the app&#x2F;play store for any app?  This suspension has nothing to do with element, it could have been any app.

There are alternative clients: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matrix.org&#x2F;clients&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matrix.org&#x2F;clients&#x2F;</a>FluffyChat would be the main contender.

I&#x27;m testing Element and Matrix at American Airlines.There are big players with clout that take issue to instability such as this. How can I rely on my company using Element when it gets pulled? Not cool Google...To the element team, reach out to me if you can&#x27;t get the support you are looking for.

The first sentence is about Element.The second sentence is about matrix.org

&gt; Element is a Matrix client just as Chrome is a Web browser, and just as it’s possible to view abusive material via Chrome, the same is true of Element.&gt; However, we abhor abuse, and on the default matrix.org server (...) we have a fairly strict terms of use (...) which we proactively enforce.These two sentences are contradictory. Either you are a road or a road restaurant. You can&#x27;t have it both ways.

Maybe someone can let Google know that Element is not a publisher.

I think it’s funny that they think Google cares at all about the implementation details of your service. The only thing that matters to app reviewers is what the user sees when they use it. If you make your app technically unmoderatable, impossible to remove illegal content, or impossible to 
respond to DMCA requests you don’t get to just throw your hands up.

Update posted on Twitter:&gt; Morning all. We&#x27;ve had contact from Google confirming that the suspension is due to abusive content somewhere on Matrix; we&#x27;re working with them to explain how Element works and get the situation resolved.

This is insane. This jeopardizes every email, xmpp, matrix, etc; basically any 3rd party application.

Could this be related to all the WSB shenanigans going on? Banning their chat groups makes them move to another, repeat?

We&#x27;ve just published an official blog post updating on the situation at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;element.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;element-on-google-play-store&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;element.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;element-on-google-play-store&#x2F;</a> which we&#x27;ll keep updated as things progress.

Wonder if we can get Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp off the Play store like this as well. &quot;Side effects include: sexual content and coups.&quot;

This is probably not a coincidence or an oversight, but rather a &quot;what can we get away with&quot; attempt, similar to previous efforts to remove UBlock Origin.But why? Matrix is tiny and no threat to Google services.I&#x27;d personally expect three letter agencies to be involved here. The US government has been aggressively going after encrypted communication for years, with extreme tactics like personal intimidation and secret courts. Read this story about a secure email provider if you doubt it. [1]This doesn&#x27;t work so well with EU based companies, even though they have been pushing EU governments to do the same. (There recently was a leak that the encryption ban currently discussed in the EU parliament has some roots in Five Eyes efforts and that governments were pressured by the US to support it. Published by FAZ or Sueddeutsche, I&#x27;m trying to find the article...)I also doubt that iMessage and What&#x27;s App gaining &quot;backdoors&quot; to their encryption is purely motivated by user experience.At a time where a lot of people want to switch communication platforms, nipping any such efforts early might well be viewed as important.&quot;Abusive content&quot; is a convenient excuse that can be arbitrarily applied.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;annals-of-technology&#x2F;how-the-government-killed-a-secure-e-mail-company" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;annals-of-technology&#x2F;how-the-...</a>

We received a generic update at 05:31 UTC confirming that the app had been suspended due to abusive content (Sexual Content and Profanity: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;googleplay&#x2F;android-developer&#x2F;answer&#x2F;9878810" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;googleplay&#x2F;android-developer&#x2F;answ...</a> ); we&#x27;re following up to explain how Matrix and Element works and get this resolved.

F-Droid publish their own builds; part of their mission is to independently build and package the upstream from source to avoid risk of the upstream doing anything unpleasant.

Lack of resources, plain and simple. The f-droid folks are operating on a shoestring budget last time I checked, which is shocking for a project of such significance.

Good luck! I hope you get this resolved soon.In the meantime, what is the explanation for the F-Droid version lagging behind?

How do we get Google Chrome pulled for abusive content?

please keep F-Droid repo up to date.
please don&#x27;t create your own repo.

Legitimate app yes, but was it actually popular? The cached copy of the Element store page says 100k installs, &lt;2k reviews. Compare to e.g. Signal at 50M installs and 1.2M reviews. Or WhatsApp with 5B installs and 130M reviews.

If you accept that (1) there is a substantial amount of mal-content that Google should censor, and (2) a key use case for federated messaging platforms is to evade censorship, and that (3) client applications can be functionally part of a federated messaging platform while legally separate from it, then those client applications are fair game to be censored when they deliver mal-content.Now I may disagree with parts those precepts in stronger or weaker forms, but it is disingenuous to claim that the client application is exactly as legitimate as a web browser just because the client application is legally but not functionally separate from the federated network.

&gt; There needs to be regulatory oversight of the Google&#x2F;Apple app storesThe regularity oversight needs to address a different aspect: google is world-wide de-facto monopoly for people not owning an iPhone. At least for the most part of the freer world, China is different story.Until Google is broken up or fair competition is not achieved, content regulation does not help. As a European I want to care about US regulation as much as about US tax laws: not at all. The US is not the world-regulator. We elect governments in Europe that have no power to do anything in this sector. I don&#x27;t say Google should be forbidden in Europe, we are not China. But competition and more choice for users needs to be guaranteed by effective legislation, in practice that against Google and Apple.

&gt; But the details of how Google screwed up hereThey didn&#x27;t &quot;screw up&quot;. Or rather, that&#x27;s not the main problem. The problem is that Google has the power to block the main channel of distribution of a piece of software.Now, it&#x27;s true that you can &quot;just&quot; get Element elsewhere, but the effective user lock-in into a single-corporation-controlled download hub (&quot;app store&quot;) - that&#x27;s the problem. And Google has gotten that quite right... for itself.

I&#x27;m really upset that this happened to you folks, and it&#x27;s scary, because incident could just as easily have happened to us at Zulip (or any other OSS app that connects to self-hosted servers!).I expect we&#x27;ll never get a useful explanation from Google for why this incident happened -- abuse teams, like fraud teams, are worried about the bad guys using the explanations to tune their tactics and so tend to never explain anything.But the details of how Google screwed up here also don&#x27;t matter. A sudden Friday night suspension of a popular, legitimate app is insane! That possibility shouldn&#x27;t be in the flowchart.I get that for malware&#x2F;spam&#x2F;etc., it&#x27;s important to immediately suspend, but I don&#x27;t understand why Google doesn&#x27;t take more seriously the very negative harm caused by doing that to a legitimate app. Some notice and appeal opportunity should be required before suspending a popular app by a legitimate publisher.I&#x27;m upset, and a bit scared, but I can&#x27;t say I&#x27;m surprised. This sort of random&#x2F;erroneous&#x2F;arbitrary punishment without explanation happens all the time with Google and other major tech companies. And every app developer I&#x27;ve met has experienced _significant_ disruption to their app publishing efforts due arbitrary&#x2F;random rejections by an Apple app store reviewer, and this has been the case for years, so we can pretty confident that the vendors won&#x27;t improve unless they are forced to do so.There needs to be regulatory oversight of the Google&#x2F;Apple app stores and the negative consequences for everyone else of their error-prone and ruthless enforcement processes.

What is your policy surrounding your push notifications for your apps in the stores, when those notifications are originating from end servers on which people are saying things that you don&#x27;t like?

Yeah, we better make sure every corner of the internet is moderated. &#x2F;s

There are a LOT of channels unmoderated in the matrix directory that could have been reported, so this isn&#x27;t surprising. I have abuse complaints emailed to your abuse address that have gone unanswered, so I don&#x27;t believe that you&#x27;re taking your terms of use seriously.You can find my complaints in your inbox. It&#x27;s good to know Google is taking action - will send the same complaints to them in the future since that seems to get more of a response from the devs.

That&#x27;s good. I switched away from IRC to Discord back around 2016 because it was tedious to use with mobile networks. Discord has served the community I moderate pretty well, but I am always concerned that the company will go under some day. I&#x27;ve been eyeing Matrix for a while as an alternative and it&#x27;d be a blow to have one of its largest clients removed. Here&#x27;s hoping it gets back soon.

Very happy for you guys. But do take this as a shot across the bow, if and when it serves Google&#x27;s agenda to shut you down they will. You have a great service, don&#x27;t let Google control you and be beholden to them.

But I can visit sites and do things in chrome that will get me locked up for life as well yet it&#x27;s still on my phone.

Sounds like CP ... cp is a real issue when it comes to crypto.

Thank you for all your efforts. The way you appear to have handled google&#x27;s unjustifiable action is really impressive. Clearly that&#x27;s one of the main reasons to be optimistic that matrix has a bright future - if I was in charge it certainly wouldn&#x27;t. Due to incidents like this I simply ditched google completely. (OK, to be honest I sometimes watch videos on yt but without having an account.)

Did your abuse team email the site that you removed from your home page, explaining your policies and telling them exactly why it was removed?Did the VP offer any explanation as to why you had not received any communcation from Google?

this is still a joke you have to post on hn and hope to get high enough up to nastygram someone over &#x27;my app connectsto the internet like yours&#x27; level of shit

&gt; extremely abusive contentThis phrasing suggests it was probably not even illegal to publish.What if this content had been something that Google finds politically or commercially disfavorable to its interests, rather than something we would all think is intolerable? What if it _is_ like that?

Why the lack of transparency about exactly what content triggered this response?

Challenges - like this google fiasco - really test the merit of a person and org...and you @Arathorn and the rest of the Element team as well as the Matrix org&#x2F;Foundation team have shown to be really great stewards and leaders for Matrix, as well as great actors for open source and internet-at-large software.  Kudos to you and the teams for the great job at managing this challenge (that never should have been created by Google in the first place)!!  I&#x27;ve been a fanboy of matrix since the beginning (both the protocol and the teams building it), and it is behavior like yours and the related teams (incljuding all contributors!) that keep me as a fanboy for both the protocol stack and the software.  Keep on truckin&#x27;!!! :-)

&gt; We don&#x27;t want to go into specificsThis kind of language is very wishy-washy and leaves everything to the imagination. 9&#x2F;10 times the issue is terrorism or CP. So which of the two was it? And why aren&#x27;t you comfortable enough to share that reason with your prospective users?

UPDATE: I just got a call from a VP at Google who apologised for the bad communication around this and explained the situation, which related to some extremely abusive content which was accessible on the default matrix.org homeserver. We don&#x27;t want to go into specifics, but suffice it to say that it&#x27;s not related to WallStreet Bets or anything like that, but instead is the sort of thing that causes you to get locked up for life.We spent today doing an audit by revisiting recent issues reported to abuse@matrix.org, which had already identified and acted on the content in question. We also took the opportunity to explain how Element and Matrix fit together, what decentralisation is, and the steps we take to mitigate abuse on the servers we run.As a result, it looks like the app has just been reinstated while I was typing this message: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=im.vector.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=im.vector.app</a>.Thanks everyone for your patience and support while we sorted this out (and huge thanks to the overall Element team who spent their Saturdays on the audit).

I wonder if this is some sort of an organised thing. I think there are services that sell a take down service so that they upload questionable content on the competitors apps or websites and then report it.

So we got notified by the developer console at 21:45 UTC that the app had been suspended, but still haven’t had an email to explain why - it’s 02:24 now.Our assumption that this is due to someone reporting abusive content in Matrix to Google, and Element catching the blame — although this is currently speculation.To be clear: Element is a Matrix client just as Chrome is a Web browser, and just as it’s possible to view abusive material via Chrome, the same is true of Element.However, we abhor abuse, and on the default matrix.org server (and other Matrix servers the core team maintains) we have a fairly strict terms of use at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matrix.org&#x2F;legal&#x2F;terms-and-conditions#6-play-nice-clauses" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matrix.org&#x2F;legal&#x2F;terms-and-conditions#6-play-nice-cl...</a> which we proactively enforce. Meanwhile we have a comprehensive toolset at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matrix.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;guides&#x2F;moderation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matrix.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;guides&#x2F;moderation</a> to help folks moderate, and are making good process with decentralised reputation to empower users and admins to filter out stuff they don’t want to see, as per <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matrix.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;10&#x2F;19&#x2F;combating-abuse-in-matrix-without-backdoors" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matrix.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;10&#x2F;19&#x2F;combating-abuse-in-matrix...</a>.So, it’s very unfortunate and frustrating that we’re in this position - hopefully Google will explain what’s going on shortly.

I don&#x27;t understand what google want to do...Evil.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;element.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;element.io&#x2F;</a>

I totally agree. Last time this happened with an app I use and trust, I rooted my phone and switched to lineageos to allow F-droid auto-updates. Google is not making me want to keep using their services.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;f-droid.org&#x2F;packages&#x2F;im.vector.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;f-droid.org&#x2F;packages&#x2F;im.vector.app</a>

I was able to easily hide my persistent notification, and still get the actual notifications for messages.I understand it should use more battery, but my phones still last multiple days even with F-Droid versions of Element and Telegram running 24&#x2F;7.One real annoyance is that after upgrading the apps, I need to start them again manually. Otherwise I won&#x27;t receive any notifications until I do. IIRC with the Google Play versions, the push notifications will arrive and cause the app to start.

Until you find out that the app isn&#x27;t able to use the google notification service so it puts a persistent notification in your bar and uses more battery.

Let people decides what is wrong and what is correct. Not big tech, not platform creator.

I don&#x27;t think this is the case. But in my opinion, the fact that we have no way of knowing and have to rely on Google not to do that is the real issue.

Very well put. Sympathetic. Yet still culpable even if they can&#x27;t scale Google scale right?

&gt; The policies back them into being a monopolistic heavy whether they mean to or notThat only happens because they deliberately put themselves in a position of market power. If they didn&#x27;t have such crazy amounts of power nobody would care about their &quot;policies&quot; misfiring. None of this is accidental in the big picture, we&#x27;re well past any window of plausible deniability with Google. They can&#x27;t perpetually claim incompetence.

I think the situation is probably more interesting than deliberate anticompetitive evil. I bet that there was indeed some policy violation, and some minor bureaucrat is reasonably applying the policy, but in a way that misses the big-picture impact of doing so, for example threads of outrage high on Hacker News. The policies back them into being a monopolistic heavy whether they mean to or not, because they&#x27;re so big that they basically have to rule the world and there&#x27;s no mechanism for outsiders to have a say.The real problem is that the policies are not adapting to rapidly changing conditions (i.e. yet another takedown, howls of outrage, calls for regulation), and the big tech companies have become too sclerotic to cope with that. Worse (for them), they&#x27;re vulnerable to being gamed. Once people figure out that saying &quot;Jehovah&quot; triggers the policy, some will keep saying &quot;Jehovah Jehovah Jehovah&quot; just to fuck with them and grow the popular outrage.

And then you occasionally see more subtle stuff like this:&quot;Since Android 8.0 Oreo, Google doesn&#x27;t allow apps to run in the background anymore, requiring all apps which were previously keeping background connection to exclusively use its Firebase push messaging service.&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Telegram-FOSS-Team&#x2F;Telegram-FOSS&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;Notifications.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Telegram-FOSS-Team&#x2F;Telegram-FOSS&#x2F;blob&#x2F;mas...</a>

&gt;Is this google starting to test the waters when it comes to arbitrarily kicking out software they personally don&#x27;t like? (open source, decentralized, privacy oriented etc.) Absolutely. They&#x27;ve done similar things with similar apps. You just have to pay some attention to see the pattern.Let&#x27;s take video for example. They Kicked LBRY client off Play store not so long ago. (It eventually got reinstated.) They permanently banned BitChute app. Not app-related, but currently Rumble is suing Google for manipulating video search results in favor of YouTube. Look up the details, they are quite interesting.Meanwhile, Google has an agreement with all Android hardware providers that forces them to pre-install YouTube and make it non-removable.

They kicked out Paytm in India because they were offering &quot;lottery&quot; prizes in the same way that their Google-competitor Gpay was.

&quot;Don&#x27;t Be Evil&quot; - Looks like the roots of Google are far behind them now.

Seems like the first step to kicking out competing web browsers, if the browsers don&#x27;t moderate what you browse.

This is a critical growth period for smaller platforms.

&gt; Even if these removals are temporary, they can still hurt growth.I don&#x27;t think so. A lot of people were not aware of Matrix even, it&#x27;s geek tech.Now, just watch how this Streisand effect unfolds over the weekend.

Yes, I&#x27;m convinced the YouTube algos did this to my channel during summer 2020. Their algos wait in silence until triggered.Big tech platform who participate in anti-competitive practices (Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook) know the optimal time to pull the plug to flatten the curve and prevent competition from going exponential.

Say you demonstrate it in a fullproof way, what are you seeking damages for? A store kicking your product out according to the agreement?I.e. the thing you need to show in court isnt that Google stopped selling your app in its store because it didn&#x27;t like it rather that it&#x27;s a monopolistic marketplace or the terms are somehow invalid or so on. These are much higher bars, especially with 3rd party stores and side loading being available and used on the platform. It&#x27;s considered a battle to prove these things in the Apple ecosystem I can&#x27;t imagine trying to prove them in Play first.

Would there be a way to demonstrate that this hurt your growth and could you seek damages for this, despite the terms of service?And if this is actually a pattern with the Google Play Store, couldn’t someone design an elaborate set of traps to demonstrate this in Court?

&gt;Is this google starting to test the waters<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Trial_balloon" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Trial_balloon</a>

Is this google starting to test the waters when it comes to arbitrarily kicking out software they personally don&#x27;t like? (open source, decentralized, privacy oriented etc.) I might of course be exaggerating a bit here, keep that in mind.- Element and Matrix are growing but still not equipped to fight back at large against this, so it is unlikely to create too much negative press- If Google starts to catch too much critique for this decision they can put it back and always blame $errorI believe Element will be back soon, the problem I see here is that it will be framed as an &quot;honest mistake&quot; and then become forgotten until they pull another stunt like this.Even if these removals are temporary, they can still hurt growth. Let&#x27;s assume a bit more malice: Couldn&#x27;t Google just monitor and analyze metrics of an undesirable app (downloads, usage, hype), pick a critical point in its growth then &quot;accidentaly&quot; remove it for a few days, causing damage that isn&#x27;t immediately apparent, but nonetheless long lasting?

As a practical matter, though, only a very small number of people will ever do that. Being kicked out of the play store is almost always going to be a death sentence for the app.Apple has earned plenty of criticism themselves, but I do appreciate that they curate the app store with humans.

On Android, it&#x27;s still much easier to install apps from outside Google&#x27;s app store (just change the &quot;install unknown apps&quot; setting, download the .apk file, and open it) than it is on iOS.

Lots of google fans on this website.Like legit it’s like the inverse of wading through the comments section on macrumors.

The difference is, good luck getting Element installed on iOS if Apple removes it from the app store.On Android you just grab an APK or use F-Droid and it&#x27;s a couple taps.

Side loading is clunky.If Android were really as free and open as everyone says it is, then there would be a method built into the os to download and install apps directly through the web browser, without hunting through settings and enabling it.As it is, this is barely better than iOS, and I’m kind of disgusted that everyone thinks it’s fine and normal as a solution.

It&#x27;s trivial to sideload apps on most Android devices. You can&#x27;t sideload on iOS unless you jailbreak or spend some time and money on a developer account, and even then you&#x27;re rather limited on what you can do.

It’s not that iOS is safe from this, it’s that in all practicality, Google is not really that different as what my friends popularly suggest. Android is not a free, open OS. Well, it is to a point, but realistically that point is not much further than ios for most users.As for an alternative mobile OS, I would love to get my hands on Sailfish, but it’s not available for the US.

If you think this isn&#x27;t coming to iOS next you&#x27;ve got another thing coming.If you actually do care about privacy and free speech and aren&#x27;t using an iPhone because they&#x27;re fashionable in your country then you should check out purism and pine64. They&#x27;re the only phones I know of that are designed not to run &quot;mobile OSes&quot;.

SMH playing games on a cell phone os LMAOROTFLLOLLLLLLLL

How are you liking the new Fortnite update ;) ?

Bookmarking this one for when my friends chide me for “still” using iOS.

It&#x27;s a shame nobody saw this coming fourty years ago and devoted his life to the cause.

The Digital Citizen has rights. And its time to draft them.

It&#x27;s a mistake to enshrine these companies though. Break out their app store and android division and make them a utility, but don&#x27;t make google a permanent part of our lives by making them a necessity. I don&#x27;t want to live in a world where these centralized platforms have a government mandate.What I want is true competition and laws that make that happen.

They can build their own water and electricity!

Hear, hear!For the people who see no issues with any of this, shall we shut off their water and electricity too while we&#x27;re at it?

It&#x27;s becoming more and more clear that there&#x27;s a problem with these corporately-controlled &quot;free markets&quot; that are neither free nor are they markets. It&#x27;s time for Congress to do more than just write strongly-worded letters to large tech conglomerates hoping that these kinds of anti-consumer practices stop. It&#x27;s funny (or sad) that the meme du jour is &quot;build your own app store, bro.&quot; We need: (1) transparency and (2) accountability.First of all, we can&#x27;t have stuff getting arbitrarily censored or kicked off stores, because even though it may start with alt-right QAnon nonsense, it will lead to things like Hey, Epic, Fortnite, Robinhood ratings being scrubbed, WSB being banned, or now Element. The slippery slope is not hypothetical. It&#x27;s here.Secondly, we can&#x27;t just have AAPL, GOOG, FB, etc. merely say &quot;oops, our bad&quot; when the shit hits the fan. People get mad, they say &quot;oops&quot; -- even though the app may have lost thousands of customers and reputation -- and everyone forgets the snafu ever happened. This is not okay, and as consumers we should not be okay with it. I promise you Google will release a statement saying &quot;certain groups&quot; on Element &quot;used some poopoo language&quot; and the apologists will, yet again, be totally cool with it.(I don&#x27;t feel my comment is particularly controversial, yet I&#x27;m being mass downvoted with no counter-arguments.. weird.)

FYI your comment was dead, and I vouched for it. You might be shadowbanned? Not sure, but regardless you might look into it.

How could this be - I was told our corporate overlords are able to do whatever they&#x27;d regarding kicking people off their platforms?Whatever shall we do?The funny thing about the whole &quot;do bad things and get kicked off&quot; strategy is that every platform has abusers. Since Big Tech can arbitrarily decide the thresholds and circumstances that lead to being kicked off, this effectively means they can kick anyone off for any reason.Even on here, on Hacker News, if you dig deep enough I guarantee you can find questionable content (albeit probably downvoted) to justify deplatforming if you were tasked with deplatforming this site anyways.

Looking for a reason?From <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;element.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;element.io&#x2F;</a>&quot;Keeps conversations in your control, safe from data-mining and ads&quot;

I worked around this by removing YouTube from my life.
I&#x27;ve been making much more progress on my personal projects since.

I simply accepted it loads slower. It&#x27;s long bad if I don&#x27;t have 5s to wait.

If I need youtube, I go to an invidious instance first.

I worked around this problem in Firefox by changing the browser useragent for the YouTube site to an older version # though the fix won&#x27;t last forever.I have become accustomed to using multiple browsers and OSes simply because of all the issues surrounding video playback.

If there&#x27;s a backlash, it will just be explained as an &quot;oops,&quot; like when Firefox devs catch them doing stuff like this:&gt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.neowin.net&#x2F;news&#x2F;mozilla-executive-claims-that-google-has-made-youtube-slower-on-edge-and-firefox&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.neowin.net&#x2F;news&#x2F;mozilla-executive-claims-that-go...</a>&gt;In a thread on Twitter, Mozilla&#x27;s Technical Program Manager has stated that YouTube&#x27;s Polymer redesign relies heavily on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API, which is only available in Chrome. This in turn makes the site around five times slower on competing browsers such as Microsoft Edge and Mozila Firefox. He went on to say that:&gt;&gt;YouTube serves a Shadow DOM polyfill to Firefox and Edge that is, unsurprisingly, slower than Chrome&#x27;s native implementation. On my laptop, initial page load takes 5 seconds with the polyfill vs 1 without. Subsequent page navigation perf is comparable.

I don&#x27;t think it lowers quality of life. YMMV of course.Petition the government if you like. It doesn&#x27;t matter. You don&#x27;t have millions to donate to the next campaign or their personal enrichment. You&#x27;re not who they care about.

It&#x27;s sad that your quality of life depends on Google or Facebook services.I quit Facebook along with most Google services, I feel much happier and more well adjusted than when I was using them. Meeting with family and friends is also much more interesting because I don&#x27;t have a constant stream detailing their life.Good luck petitioning the government to act on it... this goes double for US businesses and people who live outside the US.

I quit Reddit, Amazon, Twitter, Google, Instagram and Facebook. My life has never been better. Minor inconvenience does not outweigh major improvements in my mental wellness.(Edit: I mention mental wellness because those products, and the ads they carry, are designed to be addictive.)

&gt; Sure you can, by petitioning your government to draft laws and so on.Ask the government to do something about it? They&#x27;re allies, they&#x27;re in it together.There is no scenario where they don&#x27;t take out encryption this decade. It&#x27;s a top priority and big tech is going to very happily assist them. Big tech will give them what they want, they will act as an arm of tyranny assisting the government in smashing human rights, and in return they&#x27;ll get to continue to expand (they&#x27;ll get a light touch regulatory treatment). It now has a lot in common with how China handles their giant corporations (so long as you do what we tell you to, you get to exist and thrive), and big tech in the US looks more like a CCP apparatus by the passing day.All forms of expression and speech will continue to be restricted more by the passing year. The government won&#x27;t need to do it themselves, big tech will do the dirty work with a wink and nod. That includes all app stores, all online content and forums, all software.So, when you can&#x27;t petition your government any longer because it&#x27;s hell bent on taking your liberty away, what does that leave? The War on Domestic Terrorism of course. They&#x27;ll create it, spur it, and then have an excuse to crack down on their own invention (not terribly different from how they ran the war on drugs). The US will be a horrible place to live in the near future. The foreign war on terrorism, in which the US did such unbelievable vicious things to other nations, will now turn inward, and the monster will come home, rolling over human rights as it goes.

Do you expect these companies to stand still and wring their hands while you convince the government to stomp on their cash cows, or are they going to take some of the money you and your data have earned for them and lobby government more effectively than you ever could?My bet’s on the latter. And so long as we all continue to support them (while claiming “but my boycott won’t do any good”), they’ll continue to use that financial support to ensure the continued non-involvement of the government in their affairs.Doing nothing costs nothing, but it also changes nothing.

&gt;lower the quality of my lifeQuitting Facebook will objectively increase your quality of life.

You gotta be a man with principles. And why do you think your petitioning the government would make as much of an impact in this case, when opting out of using their services deprives them of revenue and data almost immediately?

&gt;So I should probably lower the quality of my life to make a statement that will have no impact on them at all?God forbid we &quot;lower the quality of our lives&quot; for such lowly things as principles!&gt;Sure you can, by petitioning your government to draft laws and so on.Else what, you&#x27;ll vote for another party? Both parties (in the US) take money from Big Tech, and they vote the same shit anyway. That will &quot;show them&quot; nothing. Especially since their stance on such laws is 1&#x2F;100 of the things you vote a party&#x2F;candidate about (so you will still vote for them if you agree on other matters).

If your quality of life depends on big tech then I suspect your life is of low quality in the first place.

&gt; You don&#x27;t need them, you might even enjoy life more without them.So I should probably lower the quality of my life to make a statement that will have no impact on them at all?&gt;You can&#x27;t change how they operate.Sure you can, by petitioning your government to draft laws and so on.

It&#x27;s not impossible. You just have to make choices.

What people and authorities?I stopped using these services and told people to contact me via sms or signal. No problems so far.The people who won&#x27;t make that extra step aren&#x27;t worth my time because clearly I&#x27;m not worth their time.

&#x27;You can&#x27;t change how they operate&#x27;We used yo have laws..And opting out is literslly impossible, there are people and authorities i -have-to- communicate with, and its impossible outside those platforms

&quot;massive dependence&quot;Switching from gmail to another provider isn&#x27;t like living without electricity, it takes a couple of days updating some external accounts to reflect your new email; I did it.Buying shit from somewhere that isn&#x27;t Amazon isn&#x27;t exactly trekking through the jungle for 3 weeks. All you have to do is type in another domain. There is no shortage of non-Amazon sellers with similar prices.Switching from Chrome to Firefox takes 5 minutes, you can import your bookmarks and whatnot. Maybe you&#x27;ll have to type in a password again. No climbing K2 level difficulty there either.Android and iOS aren&#x27;t that different, you can click a browser, camera, or email in either in the same amount of time with the same UI.Sure it&#x27;s effort, but it&#x27;s not a hell of a lot of effort.

I did it:- LineageOS + MicroG and F-Droid for mobile.- NextCloud (and DAV) running on an old laptop for calendar, contacts, and file storage. The mobile app uploads all my photos automatically. It backs up to Backblaze-ProtonMail with a custom domain for email.Amazon is pretty avoidable. Shipping has gotten faster and cheaper everywhere else at this point. At least for the rural place I am.I&#x27;m not particularly tech savvy. This took a significant time effort for me. At this point, it&#x27;s all pretty stable, I don&#x27;t really have glitches anymore. I imagine the average HN user could easily replicate it, and if this type of setup got more popular, it would invariably get easier to set up.

I agree that going cold turkey on every trace of these orgs would be unrealistic. There&#x27;s a lot to be said for locking down phones and shopping locally, but taking control of the assets those orgs hold is where it really pays off no matter who you are.Migrating email is intimidating, but alleviates the highest cost risk and is actually pretty painless. In my own case, I started a Fastmail account and told it to use my own domain and sync from my gmail account. I didn&#x27;t have to commit to anything until I felt like it. After a couple of weeks I started lazily updating a few subscriptions as they got forwarded from gmail, and replying to people with &#x27;hey, check it out this is my new email&#x27;. Now, Fastmail could vanish and I&#x27;d be temporarily inconvenienced for only as long as it took to staple my domain to some other email host. Losing access to my gmail account before making that switch would have been a disaster.

&gt;I am not willing to root Android.Why is that? I&#x27;m not being snarky, I just don&#x27;t understand why.The difference between a rooted and non-rooted android is like the being in the wheel group or sudoers file on unix&#x2F;linux and not being in them.Personally, I like to have full control of my own property.What reason do you have for not wanting that?

Personally, I heavily rely on Google and Amazon. All my emails, purchases, photos, and browsing goes through them. Opting out would mean uprooting gigabytes of data to other services, which takes time to research, backup, and transfer. And even then you can&#x27;t fully get rid of them, because switching to Apple from Android costs money, and I am not willing to root Android. This is merely my personal situation, but saying that people don&#x27;t need Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon is ignoring the massive dependence these companies have forced onto users and the cost of leaving, which is not worth the time and money for many.

I’m there. We’re early, everyone else will eventually abandon ship.

Amazon is great, Twitter can be great if you use it well, and the other two are pretty easy to drop.

Let me get my dusty PDP-11 then... &#x2F;s

&gt; You can&#x27;t change how they operate.You can, by pressuring politicians to create laws and regulations. It’s just something the US hasn’t tried all that much lately.

Far better to opt in, recover control of the legislature from the large corporations and Reclaim the State.There&#x27;s nowhere to run away to.

Opt out. No Google. No Facebook. No Twitter. No Amazon. You don&#x27;t need them, you might even enjoy life more without them.You can&#x27;t change how they operate. But you can change how you operate.

If you think about it, a lot of Google and Apple&#x27;s power comes from their dominance of the smartphone market.I hope that mobile computing follows the path of desktop computing, and we end up with more viable small-device OS options.

What is matrix? Like the movie? Or the math thing?(<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matrix.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matrix.org&#x2F;</a>)

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matrix.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;projects&#x2F;client&#x2F;element" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matrix.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;projects&#x2F;client&#x2F;element</a>

Just monopolies protecting our democracy, like Adam Smith envisioned.

That&#x27;s true, but you can also disagree with the decision. It&#x27;s not iOS where there&#x27;s no alternative.

Wouldn&#x27;t this just not be a problem if they rewrote it in Rust?

Not if the &quot;Hanlon’s Razor&quot; crew gets here first

We really can&#x27;t. Smartphones are practically a mandatory part of modern life. My previous job required me to have one for tons of work-related authentication&#x2F;software.There is no choice outside Google&#x2F;Apple when it comes to mobile devices. None which are fully compatible with a normal person&#x27;s way of life, or which provides access to the same apps.It may be technically possible to avoid them, but &#x27;technically possible&#x27; and &#x27;competitive alternative&#x27; are worlds apart.

&#x27;Private company, they do what they want&#x27;That&#x27;s correct, but we can still boycott companies that do this.

Does that make you part of the obnoxiously useless comment gang?

No one is convinced of that. Do you only advocate for things because you’re afraid you’ll be in the same position someday?

I&#x27;m convinced they think they&#x27;ll be billionaires one day and so always jump to their defense.

&#x27;Private company, they do what they want&#x27; gang arriving in 3, 2, 1..

But wouldn’t that bring down most software companies... terms and conditions have some pretty important legitimate uses...

Legislation equating these walled gardens as a new kind of monopoly.  Legislation making “terms and conditions” less like laws, and less enforceable.

Handset makers could start some sort of ... Open Handset alliance, oh wait..that&#x27;s how we got Android.Nope. Better alternative would probably be some sort of blockchain thing with reviews baked in and maybe authority nodes (devs with experience) could validate&#x2F;clear apps from having viruses&#x2F;etc... or just have a reporting mechanism so apps get pulled when suspicious.

That would make legit ban very slow and ineffective tho

It would already help if the rules of the app stores were decided by a parliament. And kicking a provider out of the store requires a court ruling.

I wonder if there is a way we place these App Store decisions into the hands of a third party. Either that or break Android away from Google and forbid them from colluding.

Ok, that&#x27;s some historical revisionism I&#x27;ve not see before. The term sideloading was invented by an internet storage service company to refer to copying files between remote storage buckets without having to do an upload or download. The term then got adopted by the community for copying MP3 files to a player from your computer.

This would have happened no matter the outcome of the US election. The trend towards consolidation of corporate power is really inexorable.

A lot of people already know that you can get apps directly as .apks, but the majority of them have been conditioned by corporate &quot;propaganda&quot; that they&#x27;ll be almost certainly getting malware that way. The term &quot;sideloading&quot; was invented to ostracise and discourage the practice of acquiring software independently --- which was the norm up until Apple and its walled garden appeared.But now, perhaps when sufficiently large numbers of people realise that what &quot;malware&quot; means to the big corporations is different from what it means to users, we&#x27;ll have another mini-revolution back to the independent sharing and community trust model that the industry tried to eliminate because it would subvert their control.I don&#x27;t want to get too political here, but after seeing the outcome of the US election, and the events from then until now, I knew that stuff like this was going to happen.

&gt; What they were talking about is giving up on smartphones and social media altogetherThat&#x27;s incredibly encouraging to hear. It seems to be a common feature of &quot;I quit Facebook&#x2F;Twitter&#x2F;whatever&quot; accounts that once you break the immediate addiction there&#x27;s no real urge to go back, so if this does happen it should have a decent chance of sticking.(And as a mobile refusenik I sometimes feel like the last holdout left, so a bit of company would be nice.)

People on here think that most &quot;normal&quot; people are going to figure out how to sideload apps.No.I visited my parents church at the beginning of this year and very few people were talking about that. What they were talking about is giving up on smartphones and social media altogether which is probably not a bad idea.

Stallman was right all along.  The Google and Apple play to lock down your devices in order to &quot;keep you safe&quot; was not about malware or data privacy, it&#x27;s about keeping away what THEY classify as thoughtcrime.  It&#x27;s about keeping you under their shoe.  Now feed them your data or else!

OEMs and software vendors have been pushing hard towards locking-down and controlling people&#x27;s computing devices and people have largely been indifferent.It genuinely seemed all was going to be lost until the tech industry went crazy exercising their control. Their recent (and imo unjustifiable) actions have clearly demonstrated to everyone what it means to hand over control. It remains to be seen whether people will grasp this chance to reverse the course that this rotten industry has charted and is adamant on following.

France uses Matrix but not Element. They forked it and called it Tchap.

&gt; not sure what it&#x27;s based onAs far as I know it&#x27;s based on element or at least co-develop by the element so while their &quot;business&quot; should not be affected directly. The secondary affects this will have if it continuous does affect them indirectly I think.The more worrying think that this is by far not the first time Google (or Apple) have taken down clients to &quot;non http&quot; networks. Sometimes blaming them for content on the network sometimes not saying anything. Which lets be honest is absurd given that they would have to delete all web-browsers using this arguments.

They use their own matrix client : tchap. They also use their own app store (not sure what it&#x27;s based on)
Therefore, French ministry that use matrix may not be affected

I wonder if France will have something to say to Google about this in the EU.. France uses Matrix. Google&#x27;s powerful, but they&#x27;re not a legislative body.

What would be funny is if every developer who has an app in android, were to in a single day submit their own &quot;branded&quot; version of matrix&#x2F;element.Basically as a protest. This can have far reaching effects for anyone worried about privacy, walled gardens, competing with social networks, etc...

Go to the fdroid website, and download the store.Alternatively, pull the code from git, and follow the instructions to build the apk.

Is there a guide to doing this safely? As in, protected from malware.

If anyone needs a download, you can easily install&#x2F;sideload via f-droid or the app can be trivially built with &#x27;.&#x2F;gradlew assembleDebug&#x27; (provide your own keys to build a release version)

Riot is the name of another Matrix client*edited - the old name of Element, apparently.

I believe the parent comment is referencing the fact that the Element application used to be called Riot [1].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;element.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;welcome-to-element&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;element.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;welcome-to-element&#x2F;</a>

Riot is the name of another Matrix client.

The other comments are right. I found it mildly amusing that this happened after the name change, which was presumably in part motivated by some worries over political correctness.Sorry for the confusion, throwaway.

Like the other comments said, that wasn&#x27;t the meaning, but also yes.

According to my country&#x27;s history, they indeed did.

Not funny.
Do you think the riots are leading to better society&#x2F;life ?

I will bite: Firefox, the one that cares about privacy and open standards, even if it has a lot of income coming from a search bar deal with Google.

Here&#x27;s a short list of some browser engines that are not based on google&#x27;s or paid for by google:Webkit: [1] It&#x27;s a thousand times easier to compile and was the original base for chromiumServo: [2] This is much more recent, I haven&#x27;t looked lately (until today) but it looks to be making rapid forward progressElinks: [3] and friends, these are more capable than you&#x27;d think (hackernews works, even if you don&#x27;t build it with javascript enabled.)Also it&#x27;s surprisingly easy to write your own engine, it&#x27;s just keeping up with some of the more political stupidity&#x2F;abuse is hard.[3] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;elinks.or.cz&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;elinks.or.cz&#x2F;</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;servo.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;servo.org&#x2F;</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webkit.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webkit.org&#x2F;</a>

Which one? The one also made by Google, the one paid for by Google, ones of those based on the one made by Google, or the one made by the other smartphone OS owner with a walled garden?

I would say the exact opposite. Do not use your browser, use a native application whenever you can.

It&#x27;s only a matter of time until they start banning browsers for not blocking certain websites.  It&#x27;s the exact same logic.

The browser can not do push notifications when the device is locked. Which is kind of a core feature for IM.

Stop using apps whenever you can.Use your browser.

Recently I&#x27;ve been seriously considering finally ditching iPhone because I share the same concern. After all, Apple did the same to another company recently... so we know they are willing.

I&#x27;m in the same boat here, at least on Android alternatives such as F-Droid exist, however I&#x27;m concerned about the repercussions for MDM, as in our case (intune) we go through the Play store.My largest concern is if Apple follows suit, which could lead to large problems with our employees who use iPhones.

It&#x27;s surprising to me you&#x27;d switch to a new platform because of this when it still works on the desktop. You could install it via F-droid or an APK, use alternative frontend app or you could even just use the web interface.

We&#x27;re in the same boat - fortunately we&#x27;re a small company so it&#x27;s not going to be brutal to switch if we have to, but we&#x27;re huge fans of the privacy and encryption features and it would be a disappointment to have to go back to the old standards of Slack or Teams.

Only new ones. At least my installation is still there.

Does this also affect existing installs, or only (attempted) new ones?

This is very disruptive to me. Our business chose to use Element because of the privacy and interoperability functions it afforded us through end-to-end encryption and the bridges feature (matrix.org&#x2F;bridges).

F-Droid has Element and a few other Matrix clients available.

There is other clients available too.The protocol is essentially decentralized

How do push notifications work when it&#x27;s not intergated with Google Play?

It&#x27;s a shame EV certs are so hard to get. APK signatures use certificates and we could use the already existing CA infrastructure to make app stores unnecessary but stuff didn&#x27;t work out that way.

F-Droid is the best way for open source apps, but also most APKs are available outside of Play Store via websites like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apkmirror.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apkmirror.com&#x2F;</a>. It&#x27;s a bit of a risk to load apps like that, though.

How can I install Matrix on an android phone without using the Google Play store?

I don&#x27;t use any google services other than youtube at all, but this is hard to justify, even for google.

Again the giants overplay. But when does the hammer come down upon them that they like to so wield?

I think I don&#x27;t.Sometimes I get notifications, sometimes it may take hours for me to get the notification.I rarely use instant messaging for important things, and when I do, I make sure to check my phone often so I don&#x27;t miss the messages.Is this stupid? Maybe, but I&#x27;m not going to install Google&#x27;s closed source crap on a device that I carry almost everywhere. If that means I become a social pariah, then so be it.

Both Signal and WhatsApp work fine. It requires workarounds from the app developers, but it&#x27;s not impossible to implement.

Then how do you get instant messaging notifications?

I hope more apps start allowing to directly download an .apk file from their website.I don&#x27;t have Google Play Services or the Play store installed on my phone nor do I want to install them. Yes, it&#x27;s my responsibility to update the app, whatever, just give me the file.

Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store