If it's my app, I'll use my logo. I consider the logo an integral part of the application's identity and I should control its identity. I promise I'll do my best to make it easily and readily recognizable, regardless of it using national colors, a rainbow or shades of white, pink and blue. If you don't like it, it's your problem, not mine.
Not picking on you specifically, because this attitude is extremely common among software developers these days, but I think this mentality of treating software running on users' machines as "yours" rather than "theirs" is at the core of a lot of problems with the modern software industry.
Software should serve the interests of its users, not its developers. The advent of ubiquitous internet connectivity, automatic updates, and business models based around selling ads rather than selling software have changed this dynamic somewhat and I think that's really unfortunate.
This is one of the most important points of the conversation. The other most important point would be the difficulty / impossibility of reverting to an older version of the application on mobile systems. When you put them together you get users powerless on their own devices, stuck in a needless dilemma between keeping the application in its new, worsened state, or throwing away the whole thing.
On my PC I download "portable" / .zip releases of software whenever possible, and I keep every single package. If a program has an update with a regression, I can just choose to not use it, or run it side-by-side with the older version.
On Android, F-Droid serves the last couple APKs for each app, and I download these to my PC also. However, Android makes side-by-side installation difficult unless you recompile the app with a different package ID. If it's a closed-source app from the Play Store, you're screwed. I would not be surprised if it's impossible on iphone.
So, I disable auto updates, and I ignore the boy who cries "important security fixes". Better luck next time.
> It is my belief the software is serving the betterment of society if it offends the people who don't approve my activism ;-)
When has ideological grandstanding ever been a successful strategy for convincing anyone of anything? Surely it would just further entrench the convictions of those who disagree with you, harming your own cause and helping theirs gain legitimacy in the eyes of those who are not convinced either way.
I disagree with this. Minds don’t changed based on one interaction. It changed based on your observations from the world.
Pride logos and icons in companies have made it so you can’t “not think” of LGBT anymore for example. This is HUGE for a lot of people. I’ll give you a specific example, before pride no one in Iran dared speak about LGBT. Now it’s unavoidable when all the apps and services you use have a pride version.
This has already lead to more acceptance privately re: lgbt. The next steps are pushing acceptance to welcoming to them “you’re not going to be treated differently”.
There is acres of christian art and media that simply doesn't register for the populace. People scroll by Jude Law as the Young Pope on Netflix and ignore the methodist Christian substructure of star wars. People can be told via memes that ObiWan is like space jesus and it's like water off a duck's back.
Christianity doesn't oppress people, they can't even identify it, when it is infront of the open eyes. People naturally don't even know what it is, that they reject. Can't describe what a priest would even say.
Bibles in the marriot is a charity and mormons are debatably not christian at all. Joseph smith was not jesus, sorry.
But make no mistake we all know what pride is, what lgbtq people want legislated and exactly how it's going to affect us. Our choice be damned.
1. Mcdonalds is 'normalized'. Everybody knows you can get a double quarter pounder at mcdonalds.
Christanity is not noticed. The public rarely knows the content of the faith it rejects. And the point is reinforced by the complete lack of knowledge about what it is and how pride might impact it, in this conversation.
2. "Normalization" and "oppression" are not words that mean what I'm talking about.
Christianity is "unknown" to the public and the LGBT politicians turn a blind eye to people they don't want to relate to. They are tripping over landmines they don't see. I pointed this out and was met with the same old desire to flee from relating to Christianity,
as we see from lgbtq activists all the time.
Not everybody thinks pride is a good thing nor that it should be shoved in their face, thinking that media spam is going to result in political conversions is hopelessly naive to how faith functions, what christianity is and without mutual knowledge of one another's worldview, it'll never be resolved in love.
I would argue that practitioners of the faith rarely know the content of the faith they practice. Hence the extreme anti-LGBT stance pushed in their politics and preferred media, despite the conspicuous lack of relevant scripture.
And this extremity is definitely something LGBT folks see all the time. Their states are passing laws banning them from sports and bathrooms. LGBT issues can no longer be mentioned in their schools. So don't play the pity card when Christians behave like monsters, and the non-Christian world responds in kind.
Yeah, software turned into service. Especially when speaking of apps, they are much more like a service, as opposed to a traditional good that you can own.
> Software should serve the interests of its users, not its developers.
The history of “rainbow washing” in corporate marketing material served the original purpose of saying “you’re welcome here”. There are many stores/places that choose to not serve queer people.
Publicly sharing that you will allow queer people to use your product is serving the interest of those users, but perhaps not the interest of every user. But the remaining users thankfully never had to question if they’d be served by that business, so there’s no need to signal anything to them.
I'm pretty sure we are past the point where LGBT people need to be worried about whether a major bank will serve them or not. And yet the rainbow washing continues. Why is that?
> A 2019 study by Hua Sun and Lei Gao of Iowa State University found that from 1990 to 2015, same-sex couples were 73% more likely to be turned down for a mortgage than similarly qualified different-sex couples. In addition, same-sex couples who were approved for mortgages paid about 0.02% to 0.2% more, on average, in interest and fees.
I'm going to dispute "similarly qualified". Being married is a huge indicator of future financial stability, and for most of the cited time period, SSM couples could not get married. There are also many statistics which point to SSM relationships (regardless of marital status) ending sooner.
So if the banks are inputting this to a "go/no go" algorithm, the results do not surprise me at all.
We'll have to agree to disagree on whether we are past that point. I have seen no evidence of major corporations or banks refusing to serve LGBT people. Companies are simply hoping they can attract more customers by appearing relevant.
The part about it not being your problem is fantasy. When the author of this article leaves a bad review, it becomes your problem.
You are unlikely to be able to pursue the author and force them to remove their review, so your choices are to not change the icon, or change the icon and accept the bad review. That’s certainly your problem.
And here we see that even this discussion is political; a summary rejection of the premise of the article! At the end of the day, we're all people, and a lot of what we are boils down to politics. You can't exist outside of it.
It's political advertising and, like many, I don't want any ads in my apps. Normalizing political ads in apps is a two edged sword because, even if yours are righteous, there are plenty of unsavory political movements I don't want to see ads for and they would be just as "justified" as yours because they too sincerely believe their cause is righteous (even though we would disagree).
As someone else who was an SRE at Google years ago, you should indeed be very glad that we made hiring decisions based on merit and not personal politics. The SRE team I joined shortly after the IPO was dominated by libertarians and arch meritocrats who would have considered your attitude a clear firing offence. It was those sort of people who built the company.
But who knows? Maybe we should have done background checks to keep your type out. Certainly, Google has become a shadow of its former self now, filled with employees who seem to be phoning it in and spending all day searching for meaning in hating their own users instead of creating great new products.
We've all seen that, but by far and away the most chaotic people at Google are the ones who think they're "fighting hate". How often do we read about some massive drama caused by activist employees trying to get each other fired over some perceived offense? Seems incredibly common these days. It never happened when I worked there, because we were primarily libertarian laissez-faire user-focused geeks. And yet there was also no problems with "hateful people".
Weird that, no? There was no drama or employee in-fighting, yet also no racism, sexism or homophobia. How ever did we manage that.
I feel like this comment section is split by (1) people who assume that an app icon on a phone is a reasonable place to make political statements and (2) those who don’t.
I’m not against a cause just because I prefer my app icons to not change colors with the political season.
As someone said much better than I ever could, I don't want to impose my values upon others, but I want to show others who have the same values I do they are not alone.
Saying that you're changing your logo to "show others who have the same values I do they are not alone" implies that you're expressing some very exceptional values. I struggle to imagine what values are best at connecting to lonely people through their phone homescreen.
What this really is, is showing political compliance. Just like what Italians had to do in the late 30s to prevent their businesses from being destroyed.
How would you feel if most apps all over the App Store for one whole month used right wing political symbology to signal their compliance? I’m sure you’d get pretty angry about it. Try to put yourself in other’s shoes, and stop participating in this low-effort fascism.
Positioning your identity around sexuality (what pride month is essentially) is a left issue, sexual orientation or preference in general is not. GLBT people have allowed themselves to be used and abused by the system and the corporations unfortunately.
Claiming that hard left politics isn't really politics at all, is a silly and transparent tactic which fools nobody.
Imagine if half your app icons suddenly changed to incorporate dollar signs in celebration of Capitalism Month. Every day a new CEO is celebrated for their job creation prowess and you can't avoid it because it's everywhere. Would you simply shrug and say, well, we live in a capitalist country so it's not political? Of course not. The craziness that would unleash would bea sight to behold.
Luckily for you, people elsewhere on the political spectrum don't share your need to constantly sealion every conversation and space.
> Imagine if half your app icons suddenly changed to incorporate dollar signs in celebration of Capitalism Month.
Why would that be? Every month is "Capitalism Month". Also, I can't remember the last time capitalists (the ones with the capital, not their workers who aspire one day to have capital) were oppressed.
I knew someone would give this sort of thought terminating cliché as a reply. At least you aren't denying that these things are hard left politics.
Nobody ever overtly celebrates capitalism. It isn't true that there is such a thing as "capitalism month" in the same way there is pride month, with explicitly named events, flags suddenly popping up everywhere and so on. Communism has May 1st but capitalism? No. There never has been. You know this full well, which is why you have to lie to try and distract from the point - if there was such an event you'd hate it.
LGBT people aren't oppressed anywhere that celebrates pride day/week/month but at any rate, the obsession with dividing society into oppressed and oppressors is pure hard left ideology. Always was, since the days of Marx or even the French Revolution. It has no place being forced into people's lives via every possible angle - that is and always has been the strategy of highly destructive people.
You're not thinking things through which is sadly pretty typical of most people.
Let's create a scenario where the changing of an icon which is visible on your phone to anyone around you might actually present a danger in a certain country.
What if your app changed to have a gay pride flag and one of your users lived in an extremely homophobic country where any signs of support of homosexuality could actually result in fines or even jail time?
The poor user (Who may or may not agree with your ideology) who has been using your app for months has no idea that your icon is literally going to change without their knowledge or approval.
The app might be "yours", but once you gave it to another person to install it on their phone, you should not abuse their hospitality. You don't rerrange furniture in a home you're visiting if you have good manners.
When you invite someone for a repeat visit, you presume that they won't rearrange your stuff.
When they arrive and you catch them in the act, the damage is already done. (Can applications be downgraded in the typical walled-garden OS environment?)
> private companies/app makers can do as they please. You consented to them doing as they wish
However, there is a license, and this goes both ways.
Or would you consent to the statement, "Yup, users are private individuals and can pirate software as they please. The developer has consented to this by publishing the software."?
Sure, so let’s just not give feedback on apps ever again, because the same big companies we demonize at every turn for being advantageous capitalists can do whatever they want - courtesy of ToC and other such legalese. Pack it in, folks!
Ok, I'll take it. It's your app. I rather not wear the clown shoes when it comes to understanding property and expression rights, but also etiquette in app/business spaces.
You might own the app's code but if the user paid for the app, they're entitled to not wanting their screen to become some billboard to The Current Thing™. Buy a few billboards and airtime if you feel you should shove your political beliefs and opinions down everyone's throat. With this behavior, you're the representation of everything wrong with corporate political activism and the tech industry at large: You're the app's developer, and for some reason you think you know more than the user.
You're free to modify the logo on your corporate office, but the app logo is part of the license deal or purchase. On the home screen, it's not exclusively yours anymore, specifically, when it comes to posting message via this logo that are not covered by that license.
(We may think of exceptions where an app is specifically about posting such messages, like an iconographic motd, but this is not what's here addressed.)
Great! While we can argue over whether not changing an app icon is immoral, it is your prerogative to make that trade off. Let’s just not pretend the tradeoff doesn’t exist.
> I remember it being considered a problem for the seller if a potential customer does not like offered product.
That doesn't sound like making a informed tradeoff, that sounds like the adage of "The customer is always right", which is a very different approach to business.
I highly doubt any company making a statement by changing their app icon hasn't considered the impact and I'm sure is actively watching metrics like uninstall metrics. And I'm sure given they're making the change they found it an acceptable trade off.
So in short, I don't really understand what you're point was trying to make, unless you disagree with my premise that the companies made an informed decision to modify their app icon?
I mean let’s be clear here, we are taking about a symbol that’s for the backing of the rights of a group of people. There would be large problems for society as a whole if the pendulum swings the other way.
This pendulum refers to virtue signal-ing. Presumably the rights of these groups does not depend on the current fashion or zeitgeist of signaling support via trite visual updates.
That's why they're down-voting you. That's why they're posturing about not being able to say what they think, because they know what they think won't fly here, yet. Meanwhile, of course, out in the real world, we have right-wing preachers talking about how gay people should be shot, we have half of the political mainstream suddenly accusing LGBT activists of being pedophiles...but we're supposed to believe these guys here that it's just them suddenly being weird and territorial about the icons on their screens
Is there anything more pathetic than pretending that not being able to argue against something and escaping with "this just further proves my point" is an own? Probably not.
If you do that you a paid customer, you are perpetuating a bait and switch fraud.
If you are doing that in a free app, OK, but you are going to get bad reviews from the users you vandalized, and might be violating the advertising/spam rules of the platform your are distributing on.
If it's my app, I'll use my logo. I consider the logo an integral part of the application's identity and I should control its identity. I promise I'll do my best to make it easily and readily recognizable, regardless of it using national colors, a rainbow or shades of white, pink and blue. If you don't like it, it's your problem, not mine.