Google removes ICE-spotting app following Apple's ICEBlock crackdown(theverge.com)
135 points by funkyfourier 9 hours ago | 110 comments
- Wowfunhappy 8 hours agoFrom: https://onefoottsunami.com/2025/10/03/iceblock-blocked/
> Gosh, it’s almost like Apple serving as the exclusive gatekeeper for what software can be installed on the iPhone (and iPad, and Apple TV, and Apple Watch, and Vision Pro) is a bad thing that creates a single point of failure which can be abused by increasingly authoritarian governments.
Apple should not be able to decide which apps their customers are allowed to use. It's one thing to make decisions about which products are allowed in your store, and quite another to unilaterally ban software from what is many people's primary computer.
There should have always been a side-loading switch. It doesn't have to be easy to find, it just needs to be available in the event of an emergency. Any possible security arguments to the contrary pale in comparison to the importance of maintaining a free society.
We live in a digital age, and software is a form of free expression. We would not (I hope) find this situation acceptable for eBooks, and we should not find it acceptable for software.
I am horrified that Google has decided to move in the same direction on Android, and I urge them to reconsider before it's too late. Right now, these apps can still be sideloaded on Android phones, so to be honest I don't care that much what Google does with the Play Store. But what happens next year?
[-]- GoblinSlayer 8 hours agoIf phoneposters cared about that, they would buy a general computer. And yes, situation with ebooks is the same.[-]
- Wowfunhappy 8 hours agoPlease direct me to the general computer in a phone form factor that isn't some fiddly Linux gadget.
What e-reader doesn't allow side-loading books?
[-]- Y_Y 7 hours ago> sideloading books
This madness is straight out of Right to Read [0].
[-]- Wowfunhappy 4 hours agoI understand why some people have a negative reaction to the word "sideloading", but to me it just means acquiring media from a place other than the manufacturer's official channels.
On Debian, compiling software from source or installing a deb you downloaded via a web browser would be "sideloading".
- craftkiller 7 hours agoAh the old "I want freedom but I refuse to accept any inconvenience to get it"[-]
- Wowfunhappy 7 hours agoI don't know how I would live my life without access to mainstream mobile apps. I have to use an app to pay for the laundry machine in my apartment building. At school—I'm a teacher nowadays—we use an app to mark student attendance during fire drills.
Freedom of speech should not require living in the woods secluded from society. It is the responsibility of all of us—especially major institutions—to work to preserve that. I can't do it on my own.
[-]- craftkiller 7 hours ago> laundry
Keep an old android phone in a drawer somewhere. Take it out when you do laundry.
> mark student attendance
If your workplace requires you to use an app then your workplace can issue you a phone that you keep at work. I don't use my personal devices for anything work-related and you shouldn't either.
[-]- Wowfunhappy 7 hours agoI can't practically carry around two different phones all day at work, especially given how big they are now. (It's not like I work at a desk, I'm constantly running between different classrooms and other spaces.) The "work" phone would end up being the one I had on my person most of the time.
...but frankly, I am such a geek that it doesn't really matter for me. I have a tiny 11-inch laptop that I usually keep somewhere nearby, or I can VNC into my home desktop computer from my phone.
The thing is that normal people shouldn't have to do this! I say this as someone who does believe that everyone should become more tech-literate and capable with computers. One of the subjects I teach is 5th grade computer science. I don't expect all or even most of my kids to become professional software engineers, but I want them to know enough that they'll be able to make computers work for them instead of the other way around. This is one of the reasons I became a teacher.
I don't expect all of my students to buy and carry around multiple phones in order to protect democracy.
[-]- craftkiller 6 hours ago> how big they are now
Request that your work phone be this: https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-star
If all it is doing is taking attendance then you don't need a large phone.
> normal people shouldn't have to do this!
I agree, but this is what's happening. Google and Apple are taking away the freedom, it's time to put up or shut up.
- atmavatar 6 hours agoReminder: the moment you start using your phone for work-related material, your workplace has the right to access and remove data from your phone.
Never, ever use your personal phone for work stuff.
[-]- craftkiller 5 hours agoOn top of that, someone brings a lawsuit against your company? Well your personal phone that you used for work is now being impounded as evidence. Both inconvenient and invasive.
- Spivak 7 hours agoIf you expect people to take real-life inconvenience over an abstract perceived freedom you will be disappointed until the day you die. People buy computing devices to do things. If the device has freedom but can't do the things they want it's a really cool paperweight.
Streaming services which lock you into DRM won over the slightly inconvenient but free thing.
Your time will always better be spent getting government to make the convenient thing more free than trying to move a river by gathering people with buckets.
[-]- craftkiller 7 hours agoOh, I don't expect people like them to take real-life inconvenience over freedom. I am just tired of them pretending they care about freedom, when all it takes for them to give up is having to use a "fiddly" operating system.[-]
- Zak 7 hours agoI've been running Linux on the desktop for 20 years. I'm happily running Linux on a tablet (a Microsoft tablet at that). I run a third-party Android build with root on my primary phone. I am the ideal user for a fiddly operating system.
I put PostmarketOS on a spare phone and spent a good bit of time playing with it. It would be painful to try to daily it at this time, and completely unusable for many of the common smartphone use cases.
- y0eswddl 7 hours agoAhh the old "I'm going to pretend my utterly ridiculous suggestion is a reasonable and rational and expectation of the average human"
- savolai 7 hours ago”The 15.18.5 update is also having an adverse reaction to sideloaded books. If you deliver a book using Send by Email or copy it to your computer via USB, a critical issue may arise, where a pop-up appears with an ‘Invalid ASIN‘ number. The new DRM system is attempting to locate the book in the Amazon store to decrypt it, but since it can’t find it, it reports that the book is invalid. Amazon claims they are working on the issue, ... ”https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45393505
- fallinghawks 6 hours agoGoogle has been clamping down over the past year or two on sideloading too. I used to be able to install games restricted to Japan if they were uploaded to apkpure, but every one lately gets stopped either by Play Services or the Play Store under the claim of "safety" and can't be worked around.
- bootsmann 7 hours agoOnce again we are back to deriving the DSA/DMA from first principles.[-]
- Wowfunhappy 7 hours agoI love the DMA in theory, but as currently implemented it doesn't fix this problem, because they're letting Apple enforce their stupid notarization scheme for alternate app stores. Apple can just pull notarization from a politically inconvenient app.
I also haven't heard anything about Europe being excluded from the upcoming Android crackdown, so apparently Google has decided it's DMA compliant. Which makes sense given what Apple is doing.
- tdeck 7 hours ago> “removed apps that share the location of what it describes as a vulnerable group after a recent violent act against them connected to this sort of app"
Apparently armed, masked thugs covered in body armor dragging people off the street for the federal government count as a "vulnerable group" now?
[-]- 0xy 7 hours ago[flagged][-]
- axus 7 hours agoI think that attack was independent of the app. Everybody is "vulnerable" to bullets, perhaps they should ban the guns instead of the app?
- valiant55 7 hours agoHow many ICE officers were shot?
- myko 7 hours agoYes, more extremist rightwing violence that targeted vulnerable people (immigrants ICE were treating as subhuman)
- thrance 7 hours agoA mentally ill right-winger 4chan edgelord shooting at immigrants, to be precise. No ICE officers were harmed in this hatecrime, don't you worry.
- antfarm 9 hours agoI already lost all remaining respect for Tim Cook when he kissed the ring in the oval office. I wonder how Steve Jobs would have handled the current political challenges.[-]
- b00ty4breakfast 8 hours agoHe'd probably be up to his eyeballs in magic crystals and antivax nonsense by now[-]
- chvid 8 hours agoLol - exactly - why do people expect the politics or broader principles of Steve Jobs to be any good?[-]
- Workaccount2 8 hours agoThe dude literally tried to cure his cancer with fruit. There would probably be an RFK edition iPhone.[-]
- 93po 4 hours agohis reality distortion field became too powerful and backfired on himself
- howieburger 7 hours agoGiven what has been learned through neuroscience, how ossified and normalized for life most become, it feels like a good argument can be made much of the elder cohort is stuck in a pseudo religious and pseudoscience middle ground of thought.
Most > 50 were born into a more traditional and religion-centric life and only adopted technology. The first generation educated along vaguely scientific lines.
In the US at least, born after 1980 is roughly when opinions begin to veer into favor of empiricism and less "anything goes" new age woo and post world war extravagant capitalism due to being the only functioning manufacturing economy after the war.
- arcatech 7 hours agoThis might give you some insight: https://www.anildash.com/2025/09/09/how-tim-cook-sold-out-st...
- techjamie 2 hours agoI will say you have to respect that he would eat his own dog food though. It's one thing to be wrong and contradict it in private, it's another to be wrong and actually live it.
So many powerful people are the former.
- argsnd 8 hours agoAmericans elected a mob boss to their highest office and he also appointed many of the judges in the legal system. As a corporation your choices are to give in or to get crushed.[-]
- davidw 8 hours agoGiving your lunch money to a bully all but guarantees they'll be back for more.[-]
- nerdponx 8 hours agoThis is literally how extortion by organized crime works. It's the same mechanism. Of course they'll be back for more, but if you don't give them your money, they will beat the shit out of you and then come back for more anyway. You know what's expected of you, and the alternatives are generally much worse.
Incidentally it's also a textbook presentation of the Manufacturing Consent Propaganda model, except it's not only propaganda, it's an outright authoritarian coup.
[-]- thrance 7 hours agoExcept Apple and Google are incredibly powerful, and the Trump administration has shown they mostly fail to follow on their threats (yet, at least). If some entities are able to stand up against the nascent fascist regime, it's them. But as we all know, corporations and fascism are like peanut butter and jelly.[-]
- argsnd 7 hours agoI think the Trump administration has been rather good at following through on their threats. US import tariffs are insanely high right now and he's been able to successfully fire whoever he wants.
All Trump has to do to destroy eg. Apple is get rid of the exemption from the tariffs they've been given for electronics manufactured in India.
[-]- davidw 7 hours agoI mean, Jimmy Kimmel won and Apple is way more powerful with far deeper pockets.
This admin isn't all powerful, as much as they try and project that image. Apple and I think Google have a pretty big reservoir of good will among the public at large.
These folks won't be in power forever, but the cowardice of people like Tim Cook will always be remembered.
- watwut 8 hours agoNah. They are the most powerful members of a society. It is ridiculous how they get treated with less expectations then anyone else.
They have choices and they are consciously choosing this.
- mdhb 8 hours agoI think the world’s richest company could have at least attempted to push back. They aren’t some helpless victim here.
- jordanb 8 hours agoCorporations and especially Silicon Valley were pushing hard for Trump because they were furious about Lena Khan.
Don't let them pretend that they are innocent in all of this. They're all polishing their jackboots right now.
[-]- argsnd 7 hours agoOh I have no sympathy for them. I understand their behaviour but to me it's just a reason to avoid patronising American companies.
I also think there's a little bit of quid pro quo happening here - in exchange for giving into Trump's whims and kissing the ring they've had antitrust investigations watered down and patent disputes solved.
- stefan_ 8 hours agoYes, they all conveniently gave in the moment after. Google just paid another $25M. Is this the lawful order defence?
- cs_throwaway 8 hours agoExactly the same.
- buyucu 7 hours agoSteve Jobs was the kind of person who would do anything for more money. He would have kissed the ring even harder.
- alexandre_m 8 hours ago[flagged]
- 1970-01-01 7 hours ago"vulnerable group"
Google, name your non-vulnerable groups. Could those being taken away be considered a "vulnerable group" or a non-vulnerable group?
This is pure hypocrisy in the wild.
[-]- tdeck 7 hours agoThe right wing's long-cultivated victimhood narrative is reaching its natural climax. Nowadays you can literally be the boot stomping on a human face forever and also be a victim because you stubbed your toe.
- kread 8 hours agoHappened in 2019 in Hongkong: https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/10/20907596/apple-hong-kong...
In 2025 in USA?
[-]- ants_everywhere 8 hours agoI've wondered for a while if the experience with protesters organizing on apps was what made China prioritize TikTok more.
TikTok's initial rise predates the protests by about a year. But it explodes and overtakes other social media apps starting in 2019 and into 202.
- K0balt 8 hours agoI’d say this is a perfect candidate for a web app / PWA.[-]
- howieburger 7 hours agoGovernment will just hijack the domain as they have with torrents and other things they don't like
Am working on a mobile app that requires in person keygen/sharing via Bluetooth, syncs selected data between devices once keys exchanged and new local IP is shared (over something like Signal; discovery is hard/expensive so I am going with a low tech manual option to notify peers how to reconnect)
Flood the field with alternatives to keep The Man on his toes and distracted.
The main problem with hyper normalized and streamlined society is it just makes it easier for The Man to spot and squash dissent. What is dissent when the people are peacefully not following orders by making passive surveillance difficult.
[-]- hedora 4 hours agoThat sounds like a nice setup for decentralization.
I've long thought people should just fork DNS. This already sort of happens with ad blocking commercial services, but I'm thinking it might be time for something that runs over a mix network, where devices have multiple trust roots for DNS services, and run a quorum computation when there's disagreement.
Ideally, disagreements between the roots could be escalated to a web browser UI.
- captainkrtek 8 hours agoHmm how different is this fundamentally from the ability to report police locations (speedtraps) in Google Maps?[-]
- blfr 5 hours agoThere were no terrorist attacks on traffic cops lately.
- raffael_de 7 hours agoNeither ICEBlock nor Red Dot are OSS. Seems a little hypocritical. Why not provide the code on GitHub? Why not offer alternative download sources?[-]
- Y_Y 7 hours agoSeems to me like it would be a great opportunity to make a list of subversives, judt by exfiltrating their identity via the "app". Cooperation from the developer is optional.
There's precious little reason to distribute as an app, except for exploiting the user. If all you wanted to do was show things on a map then the web is already well set up for that. In fact the apps are probably just embedding a web browser anyway (haven't checked).
I'm no fan of ICE, but I wouldn't trust these developers either.
[-]- tdeck 7 hours ago> There's precious little reason to distribute as an app, except for exploiting the user.
This is a very Hacker News centric perspective; most of us probably use the browser on our phone for hours every day. But a lot of normal people simply don't - if it isn't an app, they won't really use it. I find it strange, but I've seen this over and over again.
- ajross 7 hours agoThat there isn't a free software implementation here is indeed bad. Trying to fight about software liberties at this moment when the apps are being de-facto banned is Just Not the Time.
But absolutely start a project under a permissive license. That's a great idea.
- pmdr 7 hours agoSo... we're building the most secure devices ever, so secure that only two megacorps have final say on what we can and can't install on said devices (if we want a usable device). Browsers are heading the same way, we sure enjoy our Manifest V3 security.
The CEOs were all there at the inauguration. Is anyone really surprised that they're taking orders from this administration?
[-]- cmxch 21 minutes agoPerhaps this should have been thought about when devices started to be secured completely from the user.
- qwerty_clicks 8 hours agoCould a web app be as secure and useful?
- Waterluvian 8 hours agoIs it illegal for Americans to track their authorities or are the corporations all doing this quite voluntarily?[-]
- davidw 8 hours agoIt's the equivalent of posting on social media that you just saw some ice agents at such and such an address. Completely protected speech... At least it is unless the Roberts court shadow dockets it.
- ranger_danger 8 hours agoIANAL but I research this stuff quite a bit.
Doxxing of federal employees' personal information in certain circumstances is technically illegal (but many people think it isn't): https://www.robertreeveslaw.com/blog/doxing-arrested/
But publishing location information of where authorities happen to be in public at a certain time... I don't think is actually illegal. The Apple app author also believes he is 100% legal and is seeking to go to court over this.
https://www.kpbs.org/news/science-technology/2025/10/03/lega...
[-]- ranger_danger 3 hours agoAnother point I forgot to make (can't edit anymore)...
It could possibly be found that the government illegally pressured or "coerced" a company like Apple/Google to remove "speech" (an app) they didn't want.
https://robertslaw.org/1st-amendment-protection-against-usin...
- arnath 8 hours agoNot illegal, not exactly voluntary either. Companies are caving to threats from the Trump administration
- nsxwolf 8 hours agoIt’s perfectly legal, but also perfectly legal for a corporation to choose not to sell or distribute a particular software application.[-]
- codedokode 8 hours agoIn a free market the consumer always has a choice between companies doing censorship and companies doing censorship.[-]
- Waterluvian 8 hours agoNot sure you intended the double positive but I think it’s funny and apt.
- noir_lord 8 hours agoYep and one day maybe we'll get one on mobile devices.
Today isn't that day alas.
- nsxwolf 8 hours agoHow many times are we going to re-litigate this? Until there’s a law requiring side loading options, you have the web.
Everyone here was totally fine with the “gay cure” apps being pulled.
[-]- UncleMeat 8 minutes agoI have no problem saying that good things are good and bad things are bad. The idea that nobody is allowed to have content preferences is ridiculous and not actually a thing that anybody believes.
- 93po 4 hours agothere's a difference between not allowing very harmful hatespeech and saying something like "I saw a cop at this address"
yes, the web exists, and while it's not functionally preventing all possible phone access to the app, it's increasing the barrier to entry in a way that meaningfully massively reduces its use
- Amezarak 8 hours agoMost people also seemed to celebrate Parler and Gab being pulled/denied. It was perfectly obvious that the same logic could be used to do things like this, but many people seem to be totally surprised or oblivious.[-]
- myko 7 hours agoThe difference is the government's hands in such actions[-]
- Amezarak 7 hours agoWe've had multiple leaks and reports that the government was directly involved in these censorship cases prior to January 20, 2025. So no, that's not the difference.
On this very forum, people (not you) argued it was perfectly acceptable because the government was only "asking", not requiring.
Unfortunately, the civil libertarians have been drowned out for years by people who believed that it was right to do whatever it took to shut down right-wingers/misinformation/disinformation/hate speech/Russian propaganda/conspiracy theorists/Hunter laptop posters/whatever. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, they are shocked and outraged, even as they built the tools, institutions, mechanisms, and political support used to do this.
- Hizonner 8 hours agoIt is not legal for the government to induce a corporation to do that with threats of unrelated, bogus litigation, enforcement fishing expeditions, interference with the legally required government contracting process, or the like. Since the Trump administration has a consistent, well-established pattern of doing all those things, we can all assume that's what's going on.
- myko 7 hours agoWhen it's removed due to the chilling effect of the government attacking our first amendment rights this gets murkier. Do you think they make this choice if the regime weren't going after their political enemies?[-]
- jmclnx 8 hours agoCouldn't someone port that to a WEB interface ? Then you access it via Firefox.
Maybe a PITA to use compared to a app, but at least it could not be banned.
[-]- tdeck 7 hours agoDespite how shitty Google and Apple are being, this is probably the best way to accomplish the project's goal in a reasonable timeframe.
- netfortius 8 hours agoGitHub (while it still works)???
- ChrisArchitect 4 hours agoEarlier source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45468219
- buyucu 7 hours agoIf you needed a reminder for how awful Google's new sideloading restrictions will be, then this is it.
These restictions will give governments total control over what apps you can run on your phone.
- myko 7 hours agoThis is awful. The US is rapidly declining.
- ath3nd 8 hours ago"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power"
Is a quote often wrongly attributed to Mr. Fascism Benito Mussolini himself, but whoever said it had made a damn good point. Be aware that what you are seeing now fits the exact and precise definition of fascism.
It's amusing seeing the US descend so quickly in pure unadulterated fascism and the amount of denial and attempts to sugar coat it or window dress in places like HN. Then forums like this will go dark, and next thing you know, the brownshirts from the modern Gestapo/Stasi/ICE would be knocking on your door.
Make no mistake about Google and Apple: moderating anti fascist apps or content is abetting fascism (that applies to HN mods as well).
[-]- tdeck 7 hours agoThe more it's fascism, the less you're allowed to call it that.
- nsxwolf 8 hours agoI don’t understand what anyone was expecting.[-]
- K0balt 8 hours agoSome people are still under the impression that they live in a democratic republic under a constitutional doctrine of permissive freedom and the rule of law.[-]
- GoblinSlayer 7 hours agoIt's just a monopoly.[-]
- Schiendelman 7 hours agoThat is fascinating to think about. Could we have a model where there wasn't?
- fulafel 8 hours ago> Google told 404 Media that it didn’t receive any warning from the DOJ, but that it “bans apps with a high risk of abuse”
Seems to be something else in this case.
- nsxwolf 7 hours agoA nuisance app that generated zero revenue for these app stores was used in a murder. It’s a PR no-brainer to simply remove it just as they constantly remove other apps for all sorts of reasons.[-]
- StopDisinfo910 7 hours agoA perfectly legal application was arbitrarily removed from distribution without any due process because it displeases those in power.
Funny how perspective on things can change depending of the amount of boot licking people enjoy.
- EdiX 8 hours agoHopefully this will give people pause the next time they think about linking to https://xkcd.com/1357/.[-]
- howieburger 6 hours agoI am all for letting low effort labor exploiters create low effort comics. Same as I am for my having no obligation to support them directly by reading their comics.
Entertainers are a kind of contemporary secular faith healer and tribal shaman, imo.
To mix metaphors, stopped clocks who can be right and worth listening to only in very specific situations.
- myko 7 hours agoWhy would it? The key difference is businesses / people making choices and the government coercing businesses / people to make choices the government wants. One is a first amendment violation, one is exercising the first amendment.[-]
- EdiX 2 hours agoAsk yourself who is more legitimized to take such enforcement actions: a handful of privately owned corporations acting in concert or a democratically elected government?
No, the "first amendment only applies to government" is cope of the highest degree, it was always a cope.
You accepted that an oligopoly could dictate what you could do with devices you owned because it suited your preferences and now that you are on the other side of the sword you squirm.
The correct answer was neither all along.
- mindslight 6 hours agoA company with significant coercive power (through sticky market effects) is much better thought of as a governmentesque censoring entity rather than some mere group of individuals exercising their individual speech. What you're describing is not a virtue of the first amendment, but rather a shortcoming of its implementation and a subsequent failure to properly regulate corporations/LLCs/etc. OP is right - people's ready embrace of corpo-authoritarianism when it lined up with their social mores set the stage for where we are at now. That comic has always been a low point of Munroe's.[-]
- myko 4 hours agoThis is a long winded way of ignoring the fact that this is government coercion, something the 1st amendment was designed to prevent. What you're talking about is _not_ something the 1st amendment was designed to prevent.[-]
- mindslight 3 hours agoNo, I am most definitely not ignoring or downplaying that.
> What you're talking about is _not_ something the 1st amendment was designed to prevent.
Yes, in fact I explicitly acknowledged it as a "shortcoming of its implementation".
What I'm taking issue with is your whitewashing corporate censorship as "exercising the first amendment" in your first comment.
- Zak 5 hours agoXKCD's point stands as long as nobody has a monopoly on an important medium. Apple and Google effectively do have a duopoly on mobile app distribution, and mobile apps are an important medium for speech in 2025.[-]
- mindslight 3 hours agoFrom the first part of your comment, it directly follows that neither Apple nor Google has a required monopoly on the important medium.
IMO, we need to stop thinking in this broken paradigm of "-opolies" (with its loaded requirement to define what constitutes a given "market") and look at the actual coercive power they wield through market stickiness. Apple and Google both wield much coercive power with regards to software running on mobile devices.
[-]- Zak 2 hours agoThat does seem to be what the EU is trying to do with its "gatekeeper" classification.