“In China, Mercedes-Benz is engaging in a local cloud partnership with Tencent to support its automated driving systems. An enriched UI for automated driving functions including an advanced lane-level map view is planned.”
This is how deals are done in China. You want to expose your cloud service to Chinese users? You need to partner with a Chinese company that will effectively run the cloud infrastructure, possibly run the server software, and definitely have access to all of your IP and certificates.
The real question for me is what does an ADAS system rely on the cloud for? Hopefully nothing in real time.
The concern among many eastern countries regarding cloud usage is location of data storage. ADAS system could rely on cloud for
- Getting updated maps (HD in some cases)
- Storing/uploading camera data for analytics/replay
among other things...
Yes actually, I have experience running a cloud service where we had to deploy two environments: China and ROW (rest of world). AutoOEM of the same magnitude as Mercedes-Benz.
Seems pretty trivial to eventually add, compared to trying to enforce correctness on results from user-provided tags in titles.
I'm a little surprised you can't search for "no ads" apps outside of e.g. Pass listings, but I'm really glad they're not defaulting to just a title text search and cluttered listings of Farming Simulator [NO ADS] [NO IAPS] [NO REFERRALS] [NO TIMEWAITS] [NO DLC].
Given that they already highlight ad-free apps, prominently display ad-or-no-ad statuses at the top of every app detail page, curate specifically-ad-free lists of recommended apps, and use "ad-free" verbiage as a selling point to promote individual apps (as well as lists of recommended apps), I don't think it's fair to just jump to assuming Google's purposefully against making it easier to find ad-free apps.
I'm not even sure I'm convinced that ad-free apps don't generate revenue for Google, even ignoring the ad-free apps that DO generate revenue for Google through IAPs and other non-ad means.
They don't highlight ad-free apps. They put a "contains ads" note on the others. You mention IAP, which is also a tag you can't search for. I remain skeptical that a company specializing in search won't let you search on that data, 13 years after launch, for any reason other than money.
You can't search/filter for anything other than type-of-app/game. In fact, they added the tags for ads/IAPs and hoicked them to the top of the page, rather than sticking them with the rest of the app metadata below the fold. I'd be more willing to think a lack of ad-status filters was nefarious if it was suspiciously missing from a list of other searchable filters.
The fact that they don't have any support for filtering just says to me that they don't really care about app discovery outside of what they build suggested lists for, which seems orthogonal here since some of the suggested lists they curate are literally titled "Ad-free games" (plus "Offline games", "Premium games", "No-interruption games", etc which are also all largely filled with no-ad games, with a few exceptions).
Maybe they're omitting entire features / filter systems just so they don't have to add the sub-ability to just see which apps don't have ads, but I doubt it. As other comments have stated, a lot of people just don't want Amazon-like product titles crammed with keywords on keywords, especially when they're not even checked for correctness. I'm one of those people.
I'd say this probably boils down to a differing fundamental assumption we have: your comment seems to imply you might think big companies are inherently out to maximize profits through manipulating people, even if that means intentionally making a product worse for customers. If that's the case, there's really no point in debating here since that's a completely different conversation and I doubt either of us have the necessary internal evidence needed to convince the other of the real intentions behind withholding this specific feature.
its trivial to add, yet hasn't been added in almost 15 years, it is very much a title text search and nothing about this move indicates otherwise.
there is no economic interest from google to make ad free apps actually findable, and no chance somebody making a better play store is going to usurp their position.
