But the only times you hear of them is when people are trying to get more folk implied

Yes, and that's plain old recrutiment/advertising of their cause. Proselytization refers to trying to convert someone to a religion, which they don't do.

It’s much closer to putting up advertisement against advertisement.

Correct.

That’s not true. It’s a bunch of for-profit organizations coupled with a recognized nonprofit

Yes, so an NGO. Where did I say they are a non-profit?

We don’t like religious symbols in public space, so let’s put more of these, yay!

Yeah, they try to put non-religious things instead like cool Dante's inferno statues. End result is that the religious symbols are banned, or if they aren't, that there are other non-religious symbols around them. As much as they are a religion legally, they are atheists and their symbols are not religious, just fancy branding.

Proselytism is bad, so we need to recruit more people to fight it.

Yeah, what's weird about that? Fire is bad so we need to recruit more firefighters to fight it. TST does not proselytize, as they don't try to convert you into any religion. The are just an NGO.

But agnostics don't believe in the existence of a deity. Are you maybe confusing it with deism?

And then after doing all that you still need to confirm a scary warning every single time you install an app. As if it wasn't enough.

The video game Eve Online, a game about spaceships, had a screen listing all spaceships in the game and their stats.

It went by it's acronym, which stood for Interbus Ship Identification System.

It had since been renamed.

But imagine the outrage if a terrorist group actually marked their payments like this – maybe the day before their suicide attack – with the thought that what does it matter anyway they won't be here to be investigated.

And the bank didn't investigate. The bank would be fined to hell and back and lose all trust, because they couldn't do "the bare minimum" in finding something this obvious.

Yeah, and currently you don't need to know what an apk is to install them.

From what angle is it easy to do?

• Enable developer mode (using a hidden process where you have to know where to find it)
• Go through a scary form
• Restart the device
• Wait 24 hours?!
• Go to the settings again
• Do some more scary confirmations
• Check another scary checkbox
• And then... confirm again every single time you install an app

And you are telling me it's easy to do? I can go publish a diet tracking app and Aunt Flo will happily go through this and I won't lose customers?

I feel like anything you want to get that’s not on the Play Store, you’re gonna be savvy enough to install.

Yes, that's my point. Google making it so that you have to be a tech savvy user to install anything from outside the Play Store is why there is nothing outside the Play Store that a non-tech savvy user would be interested in, because why would there be if no one is going to install it anyway. Fortnite was a big example where you had to download the APK from their website, and they sued Google that it was too hard for users. And it was before these changes which make it incredibly harder.

They also know it's you when you don't use it. I'm not sure how is it worse? Seems like a handy way to go around geoblocks.

Did they? I read the article and the conclusion is they got fined but didn't admit to anything, nor was any proof shown that they did anything. The whole thing was about Siri getting activated by ambient noise.

That's already the case. The new thing is that they want developers to share their ID to have their apps be installable on Android in the first place, even if they don't use the Play Store.