This app aggregates information from various data sources and provides push notifications too. It is without a doubt the best source of this information and the app being unavailable significantly affects the day to day lives of a significant portion of the South African population who use it to plan around these power outages.
While the app also has a "chat" feature, it's really tangental to the primary purpose of the app and I expect that most users of the app, like myself, don't use that feature at all and only care about knowing when they will be without electricity.
In case you're wondering why they hell we have load shedding, it's because Eskom is grossly incompetent. Their incompetence is hugely exacerbated by nepitism and corruption where government has historically appointed people to Eskom management positions solely as "favours", rather than on qualification for the job.
However, in the EU this 1) isn't a regular occurrence, and 2) the grid has a tiered system for load shedding. I can't find a reference for the tier classifications right now, but if I remember correctly: tier 1 consumers (the ones who will be disconnected first) are heavy industries with huge power draw, tier 2 are other commercial uses, tier 3 is residential, and tier 4 is critical infrastructure (emergency services).
I don't think I've ever experienced a load shedding event that affected residential areas. There have been local blackouts but I don't recall any grid-wide emergency events.
South Africa also has actual load shedding, where industrial customers are asked then forced to reduce usage, but the black-outs are entirely different. They are region-by-region complete loss of power for all but the hospitals (but often take out hospitals and emergency services too).
Compounding this issue, the grid is not designed to be switched on and off frequently. While there is a set schedule for the rolling blackouts, transformers and other equipment will blow under the sudden loads, meaning your regional blackout may last a lot longer than planned. You may also get blackouts sooner or completely out of schedule for region, for which no explanation is given.
You can't really compare.
Industries can chose in their contract to be part of the load shedding system. It's done with their agreement and the system is purely based on the grid frequency. The disconnection is done on site in an orderly fashion. In a way, it's probably more correct to view it as industries electing to temporary disconnect rather than the provider stopping supplying them.
> I don't recall any grid-wide emergency events.
The European electrical grid is extremely resilient. It was accidently split in two a couple months ago and that was barely noticeable for the customers of either half.
There is also the mess we currently have in California. High winds blew stuff into high power lines and started a bad wildfire. In the lawsuits that followed the utility was told to shut down the risky lines under high wind conditions--which of course causes massive outages. Of course the utility is "at fault" because the ecology types blocked efforts to keep the vegetation away from the lines.
Eskom seems to have been around for a long time, but this problem seems to have kicked in a little over a decade ago.
Did something recently happen to Eskom to make them incompetent?
Apartheid South Africa's government focused on providing electricity mostly for the white minority, which it did well, but the majority of South African, especially in the rural regions, lived with no or unreliable power supply. Post 1994, with removal of sanctions, the economy opened up. There was a lot of international investment in South Africa. The economy grew strongly and the demand for electricity significantly increased.
The supply side was woefully mismanaged and didn't nearly keep up with the pace of the growth in demand. Corruption is definitely a key reason, as others here mention, with the effect being that power plants are not adequatly maintained and new planned power plants going far over budget and missing deadlines [1].
Besides corruption, there are some policitical constraints. Eskom provides power to municipalities who often don't pay. Soweto, with 1.3 million residents owe Eskom in excess of $1 billion [2]. The South African Supreme Court of Appeal has ruled that Eskom is not allowed to cut power to non-paying municipalities [3]. In contrast to a free-market system, Eskom price hikes are subject to regulatory approval [4].
One could debate the relative significance of each of these factors, but it's by no means due to only a single one of these.
[1] https://www.news24.com/fin24/Budget/how-medupi-and-kusile-ar...
[2] https://mg.co.za/article/2019-10-18-00-why-we-dont-pay-for-p...
[3] https://www.iol.co.za/pretoria-news/news/eskom-cannot-cut-el...
[4] https://www.moneyweb.co.za/news/companies-and-deals/electric...
Demand for electricity consistently went up over the past 20+ years, with no matching increase in generation capacity.
Maintenance of current power plants hasn't been great either, and the supply/demand situation is precarious such that if any one of the power generation plant is offline for maintenance, there are likely to be compensatory blackouts somewhere.
> Malaysian news site fined $124,000 for five reader comments
> Malaysiakini’s co-founder avoided jail time
IMHO a lot of sites and apps should just remove chat/comment functionality and only allow emoji reactions.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ashwhale.s...
Edit: Despite all their shortcomings, I wouldn't mind seeing android phone makers join force and create an independent app store.
More like a strong disclaimer worth repeating for newcomers in the space.
These stories have come up several times over the years on HN and it is worth reiterating:
It is very risky if your product/company relies solely on another company's success and openness to you - especially if that company is not contractually obligated to continue providing you service.
You can wax poetic about the idea of an independent app store all you want, it doesn't change the facts on the ground in the current moment.
After 8 years of SEO expertise I honestly can say that there's nothing about SEO these days that makes sense, pages are not being indexed for weeks at a time, spam/crap at the top result. Throw in the endless (and ambiguous) requirements to adhere to the mighty G's requirements.
Note that this doesn’t mean don’t participate on platforms controlled by Google, it just means diversify your business so you have multiple income streams rather than just putting all your eggs in one App Store basket. Apps should really just be a client facing portal tied in to a whole ecosystem of solutions you provide.
Creating a Play Store alternative is hard for many reasons:
1) finance: the more countries you operate in, the messier it becomes. International taxes are one hard mess, KYC/AML regulations differ between countries, and to top it off there is the whole "international sanctions" issue especially regarding Iran (where it's fine and explicitly encouraged by the EU to do business with Iran, but any entity that has US exposure exposes themselves to liability in the US for violations).
2) vetting of apps against a constant onslaught of spam, malware, copyright violations: f-droid has it a bit easier since they require all apps be open source, but a commercial, widely used alternative will have to run static analysis, dynamic analysis (to catch runtime exploit attempts) and manual testing. All of this is expensive and requires expert knowledge of Android as well as IT security.
3) Implementation and hosting: an app store worth its name has a lot of binary assets to distribute to users (and again, you have to avoid getting into trouble with people abusing your service to spread illegal content, because there will be such cases rather sooner than later), the store itself has to be implemented, regularly adapted to account for changes in the Android core, you definitely want a focus on security to avoid some hacker distributing malware to all your users with a push...
4) Customer and developer support: it's a well-known meme that FB/Amazon/Twitter/Google are almost impossible to reach for ordinary people without raising a shitstorm on Hacker News or a well-funded lawyer team... but the key thing is, support is expensive to run.
The problem with the Parler situation is more that their average user is too incompetent and inexperienced with computers to understand how to download something that isn't literally laid out in front of them.
I refuse to use Google Play or create a google account so I use The Aurora Store which replaces the Google Play Store.
If I want to download some independent apps I head to F droid store or Aptoide.
There are even more independent and alternative app stores, but these are the ones I use.
Oh, and don't forget about github and app downloads directly from the web.
F droid allows you to install without Google play.
And why wouldn’t this App Store have any takedown policies? Or have to follow the same kind of legal restrictions? In the discussed example, this wasn’t even automated; an employee manually reviewed and chose to ban their app.
Some examples:
Terraria banned - https://twitter.com/Demilogic/status/1358661840402845696
New project banned - https://medium.com/@amton15127/why-you-should-not-use-fireba...
Google bans company - https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8kvias/tifu_by_gettin...
Google bans mail - https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-serf-on-googles-farm
Ban app for communicating changes during covid - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221447
Adwords ban - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23224791
Serverpunch bad support - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17431609
Delete app - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20826618
Google bans game with pandemic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229073
Google bans dev with no recourse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15197357
The thing I’d like to have Google explain to me is why they think it’s a good idea to bounce incoming mail for a user that’s been auto-suspended by an algorithm. In what scenario would I want that, especially when the account is locked at 3:00 AM local time?
That’s something that actually happened to me this weekend. For anyone at Google, NO ONE wants their incoming email bounced because of your crappy ML algorithms.
I had been forwarding all of my email from my domain to my personal Gmail (the irony) so haven't lost anything except a Sundays worth of incoming emails which bounced.
In my case I was still using a free account for my custom domain, grandfathered in. I guess I get what I paid for...
Due to their marvelous design, you need a personal account to run an advertising account for your place of work. Luckily she hasn't been logged out on her work laptop yet or she couldn't do a large part of her job.
Business support? Yeah good luck, try googling and you'll get pages of dead links or suggestions to click something when you're already logged in.
What we need is some anti-trust litigation with teeth.
Play store employee can ban your app = destroy your business at any time. The reason can be 'new policy', 'misunderstanding' or something more problematic, such as influence from your competitor to the employee.
A 'power to destroy business', should not be a click away from some random employee.
Yes, the vast majority of apps have no business writing to any location other than their own storage, and in general even reading other areas should be subject to severe restrictions.
However, there are some apps that have a *legitimate* need to be able to wander freely through the file system. Specifically, apps whose purpose in life is dealing with files.
The latest run-in I've had with this: The Goodsync Android client, which now appears to be basically useless. It's a file synchronization tool, what good is it if it can't wander where the user wants it to? Now I have to plug my phone into the computer to do the same task (the file system lockdown doesn't apply to access from the PC) that I used to be able to do simply by having the phone in the room.
Now that being said. If you are dependent on google for revenues...
No one forces / forced businesses to rely on apps for their business. Websites do exist and work well, so there are alternatives.
It exists everywhere, it is called monopoly and this is only an example thereof.
Businesses could also, for instance, be destroyed by ARM Holdings refusing to license the ARM architecture to them, or Valve deciding to pull a game from Steam.
Especially with technology, there are a great deal of monopolies that exist.
It's user generated content. How is reporting a user functionally different from reporting content?
This makes me even more driven to switch to F-Droid for everything I possibly can. Hopefully we'll see a daily-drivable Linux smartphone before too long so I can ditch Android all together.
A user may just be wrong about something or not quite understand something. They're not trying to deliberately cause disruption, there's no need to fault the user. Remove the content, inform the user, move on.
It's only a problem is a user continues to submit reported material.
Elsewhere I am a moderator on a forum and I have seen exactly the same mistake, zapped it (the errant line, I left the rest of the message alone) on the spot and PMed the user--and been thanked for doing so.
Which isn't to say that Google's actions are at all justified here. This kind of thing makes me extremely wary of continuing to do business with them.
I think it is kind of strange that even a private messenger needs to implement a report system for messages.
Really? So if a random person decide to report me, plain text uncrypted messages will be sent to WhatsApp?
Even if this does not happen regularly, this means that WhatsApp have means to read my messages, which is scary enough.
See here for a meaning of the word Poes in Afrikaans. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/poes#Afrikaans
Wonder if Google is aware of that and has been getting lots of "reports" by genuine users that are offended by this? And this weird "technicality" is just a cover for why they really got banned/taken down.
They have a one-hit wonder that they're trying to ride the wave on. So instead of sticking to the functionality they had (notifications/schedule/etc) which was perfect for users, they decided to add a "comments section" it seems for people to vent their frustrations. So no sympathy from me, despite Google being in the wrong here.
[1] https://twitter.com/hermaritz/status/1371017176593928194
There's not much more to expand on the core functionality of notifications & schedule visibility.
But if Google sets clear rules about how your bad people/behavior reporting button must look, I don't see Obvious fault in such policy.
Not all of whom are human.
There was a great thread on moderation just now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26458826
PS: I work for a competitor of one of google's products.
To be fair, we cleaned up our artefact management but still. Google is evil.
Stop complaining and find a way around it.
