I thought the Apple platform had the best consumer experience and that's why folk love it -- it "just works" -- cause they keep the riff-raff out of their gated community.
Perhaps they let this one slip through because their team was too busy dragging out the review process for our cannabis compliance application, they can only afford so many reviewers after all. We wouldn't want children accidentally getting their hands on regulatory compliance data for deadly deadly cannabis. (which could happen with our application, after they had signed up and verified their agency cannabis license (which only takes many months/years and $$$$$s to get))
Apples app store is way worse than the google play store. i was shocked at how bad the app store is with shitty ads and promoted content over organic search results
And yet, the top result for "Bitcoin wallet" on the play store isn't a scam. And on it's definitely not a scam on F-Droid where I would personally look for a Bitcoin wallet.
It did - before cheapo enshittification started creeping in. I believe some time ago I saw some research on the quality of App Store app review process … zero protection.
But, even at this stage, Apple is still “the best”, because of the slower pace of the corruption and in comparison to the toxic dumpster fire of the alternatives.
Android and Windows are spyware/malware masquerading as OSs.
Or, we can say that all of them are dumpster fires, even if Apple is maybe the best of the shitty app stores.
On Apple though, you don't have anything other the App store. That's something to consider. On Android, you have the chance to install F-Droid for example.
Really frustrating as folks can advertise that crap but, regulated cannabis is blocked. Heck, we can't even mention our product/protocols on these $BigCo sites or they'll kick us off forever! Trying to publish in the AppStore along side all that scam-ware -- nope, sorry can't have that deadly cannabis around here.
Another unfortunate thing of their Open Source Program is that companies that make open-source (MIT, GPL) and have a commercial offering as well (eg: GitLab themselves) are not allowed to use their Open Source Program.
We make software for the regulated cannabis space; we work with government agencies. Despite years of folks indside and outside the industry telling these government regulators to NOT use expensive single-use RFID tags -- they've been plowing forwared with it since 2014. The lobbiest and industry had their ear and the indivudual voices of reason couldn't effect change. How can government make good choices for the citizen when their is money in their ear? How can the citizens become a louder voice than the money-in-the-ear?
In one case; we spent like a year with an agency working on design goals for a track-and-trace system. At the end, they had only one conclusive finding -- use algorithimic IDs for a distrubted/federated type system; they even stated in the findings to use 128bit IDs (eg: ULID/UUID). Then when they implemented their system; that wasn't indidcated as a requirement and the other soft-findings from their year long study were completely ignored.
Similar with other systems; eg some States appear to intentionally sabotage their cannabis tracking systems; reducing data integrity and making enforcement more difficult (subjective). Then act shocked when there are events of labs fixing the metric and inversion of materials.
This aspect of things really ought to scare everyone a lot more. All of the enormous mega-corporations involved in card processing are so heavily regulated and so dependent on the Federal Government, that it doesn't even take actual laws to make them do things. Just get a couple of regulators in place to vaguely hint that they might have a hard time at their next compliance review if they don't ban thing X that we don't like today, and boom, it's gone. Only a few companies can even afford to operate in this space, so that's all it takes to effectively ban something from the whole financial market.
Right, but my argument is that that blocking is the problem? And you'd be silly to think that any of the other concerns aren't still there for cash buyers. Hell, many of the pot shops are now scanning your ID.
I should note that the only path to legalized cannabis is still, strictly speaking, at the federal level. It is a federally illegal thing. To pretend otherwise is a dangerous risk a lot of places are willing to take.
100% of of these folks doing card-type payments are playing cat and mouse (I know because I'm very involved in this industry). Some don't tell their up-stream processors what they are doing. Others are constantly shifting their processing through various gateways. None of it currently runs on the credit-rails. But all the debit-rail processing is happening in a dark-grey area. One of these debit-rail providers has like four banking parterships per state they "work" in -- so when they strike out on one, they can move to another. You can observe that in the retail store when they say "oh, EBT isn't working today".
And more importantly, in 2014 when the regulated cannabis industry started -- electronic only would have blocked it -- or created an additional huge hurdle. It's taken eight years to get to this crap-tastick hack of workarounds and outright lies.
Perhaps they let this one slip through because their team was too busy dragging out the review process for our cannabis compliance application, they can only afford so many reviewers after all. We wouldn't want children accidentally getting their hands on regulatory compliance data for deadly deadly cannabis. (which could happen with our application, after they had signed up and verified their agency cannabis license (which only takes many months/years and $$$$$s to get))