Week 2025-31
Android is getting freedom in app stores. And it might not be as beneficial for us customers as it seems. @vlkodotnet
This Week's Highlight: Epic vs Google
Google has lost its second lawsuit against Epic and has only 14 days to make changes to Google Play. Naturally, Google has filed for a delay (getting 3 weeks so far), because otherwise they would have to implement the following within two weeks:
Allow alternative payment methods (not exclusively Google Play Billing)
Inform users about other purchase options
Offer links to download apps outside Google Play
Google's loss was mainly due to the discovery that they made secret deals with phone manufacturers and game developers to share revenue. All this to prevent Epic from creating a competing app store. For the next three years, Google will not be allowed to:
Condition financial benefits on exclusive app releases on Google Play
Prevent developers from releasing alternative versions of apps outside Google Play
Offer benefits to carriers and manufacturers for pre-installing Google Play
Google's response is traditional: these changes will threaten user security.
Honestly, I somewhat understand Google's position. Some restrictions on app store providers should definitely exist. We all know how much bloatware manufacturers can pack into their computers, tablets, or phones when given free rein.
Business Insights
Two weeks have passed and Microsoft has also crossed the $4 trillion valuation mark. This was helped by excellent financial results for the last fiscal year. Azure saw the biggest increase, growing at such a pace (34% year-over-year) that it could catch up with Amazon cloud in about 4 years. Currently, it's $75 billion in revenue for Azure versus $111 billion for AWS.
Let's stay with Microsoft. Bing has always been something of a joke to us. First, it was Microsoft's attempt to compete with Google Search, but it improved over time. Today it has a 29% search share in the US and 11.6% globally - an increase of 2.1 percentage points in the US and 3.4 percentage points globally over approximately two years. Of course, mainly at Google's expense.
Reddit also achieved excellent results. Compared to last year's losses, it achieved a profit of $89 million. Revenue also grew to $500 million. The revenue growth is mainly driven by advertising. The question is how Reddit's core users will appreciate this business model.
Krafton, creator of the famous PUBG game, announced that it also wants to become a game development platform, similar to Roblox and Fortnite. By the way, Fortnite is no longer just an ordinary game - it has become a platform offering multiple game modes and even the ability to create your own.
Payment companies are pressuring game stores to suppress inappropriate NSFW games. Most recently, they created pressure that caused Steam and itch.io platforms to remove thousands of games with such content.
Self-Grow Insights
You often try new tools or techniques to improve your productivity, become more successful... blah blah blah... But maybe you don't need new tools - you need to change your own inner operating system. Of course, my colleagues at work would laugh at me here because they know mine can only handle one thread and I can only queue one task for later processing. Usually just the one I'm currently working on. That's why I need those planning tools.
Setting up your inner OS should be based on four fundamental pillars: mindset, skills/abilities, tools, and daily habits. The goal is to think better, feel better, and work better. The following guide will help you with that. If nothing else, it's an interesting mental exercise in how to approach this problem.
AI Insights
Currently, our idea of AI is as an agent we chat with and it does something. And surprisingly, it works because talking is a natural way to express what we want. But AI could be something more. Imagine if it could be an extension of our senses. Something like a HUD in a modern fighter jet.
Everyone already knows this from text editors (underlining spelling errors) or IDEs that offer suggestions while writing code. But imagine an AI HUD that, for example, highlights what it considers important parts of text. Or creates relevant links above them. Or directly in the IDE, instead of the active line, highlights all parts of code that could be potentially problematic. It's not suitable for all tasks, but it would be interesting.
Google NotebookLM no longer just generates podcasts where people discuss a topic. It can now also generate a narrated presentation, because visual impressions can help more than just reading text.
Google has a new Gemini 2.5 Deep Think model, which is the new king of AI thinking.
AI models are AI models and they can easily be exploited through prompt attacks. For example, a normal-looking package you install can hack through Gemini CLI using a readme file. Today, besides verifying code, you need to verify all sorts of text files in dependency package.
CAPTCHA's job is to keep robots away from your site. But try explaining that to AI agents that will click it for you anyway. ChatGPT Agent handles it perfectly.
Microsoft Edge is getting agent mode. Agent doesn't mean you'll become a secret agent. Agent means Edge will be able to compare products from multiple tabs, remove distracting elements from pages, and you'll get voice control options. It's currently free and you need to manually enable it.
Ollama has received a new UI interface with simpler context size settings and support for multimodal input, meaning you can drag and drop any file.
I also have a local model worth trying for developers. GLM-4.5 is a huge model, but there's a quantized 3-bit version for 64 GB Mac computers with Mx processors.
If you don't have a Mac, I can at least cheer you up with the just-open-sourced image generation model FLUX.1 Krea. It's 22 GB, so you should be able to run it on your computer, for example through ComfyUI.
.NET Insights
Microsoft has multiple versions of their .NET container images. The following article will help you understand which one is intended for what use.
An interesting tool that helps you visualize the syntax tree generated by the Roslyn compiler.
Link Drop
Netflix has published the first part of an article describing their journey to streaming live content. Live streaming is something completely different from offering just pre-generated video content. If you like case studies, definitely read it.
Servo is an independent web browser engine written in Rust. It's still in development, and we can be happy that Chrome will have at least some competition.
I may have an amateur photographer's untrained eye, but I like photos from classic DSLRs more than from the latest phones. Until now, I didn't know why. From the points described in the following article, it's probably the lens distortion.
Are you annoyed by that annoying popup window for signing into Google? Well, I have good news—you can turn it off. Look in your version of Chrome browser under Third-party sign-in.
Closing Visual
