Apple and Google have been taking a lot of heat for their app store policies recently, with developers bristling at the companies’ insistence that apps distributed through their respective stores follow very tight restrictions that many see as anti-competitive.
Microsoft, meanwhile, also has an app store. You probably don’t use it very much, and developers have certainly been slow to adopt it. But Microsoft is now trying to draw a contrast between its policies for the Microsoft Store and those of its competitors with a new list of principles to “promote choice, fairness and innovation.”
It’s , presumably in an effort to attract developers and users, while also avoiding antitrust investigations.
In other recent tech news, now that Google is selling 5G phones, the company has announced that its Google Fi network also supports 5G. Western Digital joins Samsung in offering super-speedy PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs. Purism hopes to bring more mobile apps to its Linux phone… with your help. And Fedora Linux is bringing back its smartphone dreams.
- 10 app store principles to promote choice, fairness and innovation [Microsoft]
Microsoft wants you to know its app store doesn’t have the same restrictive rules as Apple and Google’s regarding payment methods, competing app stores, etc. Also, Microsoft wants you to know it *has* an app store. - Faster coverage and more options with Fi and new 5G phones [Google Fi]
Google Fi announces 5G coverage map (it’s basically the same as T-Mobile’s) and now you can also buy some Samsung phones from Google’s wireless network, including the Galaxy Note 20 5G, Galaxy S20 5G, and Galaxy A71 5G (coming soon). - Western Digital just announced its first batch of next-gen SSDs [The Verge]
Western Digital introduces its first PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSDs with support for read/write speeds as high as 7,000 MB/s and 5,300 MB/S respectively. 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB versions should be available by the end of the month. - Purism’s Fund Your App asks what apps you’d like on the Librem 5 (and if you’ll donate to get them) [LinuxSmartphones]
Linux phones can run thousands of desktop apps. But many aren’t optimized for small screens, and some of the most popular Android and iOS apps aren’t natively available… yet. Purism wants to know which apps you’d like to see running on the Librem 5 smartphone, so it’s asking you to vote… and donate to help fund development. - Fedora Mobility wants to bring the Linux distro to smartphones [LinuxSmartphones]
The Fedora Mobility team has been largely inactive for about a decade. But earlier this year one Fedora user ported the popular desktop Linux distribution to run on the PinePhone, and now that unofficial port is the foundation of a new official project to bring Fedora to the PinePhone and other Linux-friendly smartphones.
Today I got #fedora running on my @thepine64 #pinephone.
(Lots of help from mozzwald on Discord, using megi’s 5.6 kernel.) pic.twitter.com/qFkOcZPnCA
— Nikhil (@jhanikhil) February 17, 2020
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