Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account

blog.usejournal.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 530 posts

Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account

#191

Post by mnm1 »

arkitaip wrote: post #76
mnm1 wrote: post #63

I feel lucky to have had this experience with a regular Amazon account. It has made me realize that this is a regular part of doing business with such companies and is to be expected. Internet accounts can all be closed at any time for no reason and they will be. I would never in a million years invest in iOS or Android apps whose success depends on these stores ran by artificial intelligence aka human stupidity. I f…

There's a pettiness and cruelty to this comment and those like in in this post that I don't understand. What is it about HN that consistently encourages people to be callous to the suffering of others and defeatist in the face of challenges created by corporations?

It's not callous, it's being realistic and trying to help others stay out of this miserable spot. If someone else is trying to do the same and the comment saves them months of work and thousands of dollars that would have been thrown out by Google/Apple/Amazon etc., that seems like a good thing to me. Having experienced essentially the same thing as the couple in the article and knowing it is futile to do anything about it might change your perspective too. Even they realize that at this point, their only hope is going viral. Yet an actual business analysis of where they went wrong is petty and cruel? You know what's petty and cruel? Shutting someone's account automatically using an algorithm and not allowing any human review of the situation whatsoever. That's what's petty and cruel. Trying to help people avoid this situation is anything but. It's too late for the couple in the article, but others might be wise enough to learn from this couple's (and many others') mistakes and save their time and money before opening such a risky business as app development for an app store.

Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account

#192

Post by hogu »

bdibs wrote: post #50

I actually just got my Google Ads account suspended because I forgot to update my billing address before adding a new card. The suspension was for "suspicious billing activity", tried appealing twice with the correct billing address, and was told the suspension is final (some automated email) both times. They won't take my calls because the account is suspended, which leaves me not being able to advertise on the #1 s…

I was also suspended.

- Having friends inside google does not help (I suppose at some level they can, but L5/L6 engineers aren't enough)

- Creating a new account with a different credit card does not help. Subsequent accounts they can link back to you will also be banned

- I haven't found a solution yet, except for keeping all of my new projects outside of google (no google analytics, no google search console (which obviously still allows your site to be indexed) no gsuite. That way if I never need google advertising, a co founder can pick it up and google has no way to trace the company back to me.

Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account

#193

Post by Animats »

The real threat to Google will come when someone sues over this behavior as an antitrust case. This is part of "supply chain" antitrust law. It's sometimes called a "refusal to supply", where a manufacturer refuses to sell to a retailer. That's legal if it is not "part of a predatory or exclusionary strategy to acquire or maintain a monopoly."[1] If you're the only supplier of something, antitrust law starts to apply. That's basic monopoly law.

That's a can of worms Google would not want opened.

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account

#194

Post by hogu »

rjknight wrote: post #23

It sounds like the problem is with the outsourced developers responsible for the app. It's their account which has been banned - for multiple violations of the ToS. Now, perhaps this is just over-zealous enforcement on Google's part, but it's also possible that these developers have created shady apps before, or are adding shady code to apps developed for others. The OP doesn't seem to know for certain what code is i…

I don't think you can - once you get banned, they run you through some automated thing which usually just tells you the decision is final, and you're banned for good. Then you CANNOT talk to someone. And if you do speak with a customer service rep that finds out you've been banned, they have to stop talking to you.

I had an account representative from google at some point. As soon as I was banned, all my calls were routed to voicemail automatically.

Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account

#195

Post by sheeshkebab »

hogu wrote: post #192
bdibs wrote: post #50

I actually just got my Google Ads account suspended because I forgot to update my billing address before adding a new card. The suspension was for "suspicious billing activity", tried appealing twice with the correct billing address, and was told the suspension is final (some automated email) both times. They won't take my calls because the account is suspended, which leaves me not being able to advertise on the #1 s…

I was also suspended. - Having friends inside google does not help (I suppose at some level they can, but L5/L6 engineers aren't enough) - Creating a new account with a different credit card does not help. Subsequent accounts they can link back to you will also be banned - I haven't found a solution yet, except for keeping all of my new projects outside of google (no google analytics, no google search console (which…

no gsuite is probably key - I'm thinking of terminating all my gsuite accounts simply due to no desire of having my business basically be terminated due to some stupid algorithms maintained by google's idiots.

Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account

#196

Post by jjeaff »

eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #92
mproud wrote: post #69

I don’t buy the guy’s analogy of crime and association. If you willingly lend the keys to your truck to someone else, and he or she commits a crime while using the vehicle, it might get impounded. Know the people whom you work with, or just do the work yourself.

That is a bit of a silly comparison. Even if you let a criminal borrow your car and they do something bad, there is some sort of legal apparatus to get your car back if it's clear that you were not involved in that criminal activity. The impound lot doesn't simply say "sorry, we saw your appeal, but we're gonna go ahead and keep the car forever."

You would think. But civil forfeiture doesn't care who owns what they take, only whether it was used in a crime.

You may be stuck paying court costs to defend your property and get it back. Which is why we have tons of ridiculous court cases like: "Bag full of hundred dollar bills V. US Government."

Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account

#197

Post by Pharmakon »

tptacek wrote: post #160
noonespecial wrote: post #27

The question I always have with this stuff is this: To attract developers, these platforms make some promises. A "review" process for supposed violations of TOS causing cancellations is always among them. But to me these "reviews" always seem either completely faked or some version of a lowest-level employee simply restating that the algo has made its choice and they are powerless. More incriminating is that every ti…

No, it's not fraud. A key element of fraud (civil and criminal) is that the accused knowingly misled, and to prove that you'd need to prove that there is no reasonable interpretation of what they said that they could have believed was true.

With Google they offer enough data points to analyze for just such intent. In the absence of intent fraud is out of the question, but a jury might be convinced that a persistent pattern of incompetence which is brought to Google’s attention again and again without change meets the bar of fraud, especially in a civil court with the mere preponderance of the evidence standard. The post-banning behavior of automated responses and refusal to escalate customer service calls won’t help them either. As in the case of MS back in the day, it can seem like the law is just disinterested, but the law is merely unbelievably slow and equally inevitable. The day some prosecutors can make a career out of taking on Google, they will, and by then Google will be fully on the wrong side of public opinion.

Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account

#198

Post by grawprog »

ben_w wrote: post #45
grawprog wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>App stores are the least-unreliable mechanism I have to trust executable code. And yet almost weekly I read a new story about malicious apps being found in app stores. Like this one posted today: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl... Personally I trust things from app stores about as much as I trust random things from the web.

Which is why I phrased it “least unreliable” rather than “best”.

Considering there aren't many totally reliable ways to avoid shady software save going through the source of a program line by line and verifying it yourself, least-unrealiable sort of comes across as best.

Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account

#199

Post by dhimes »

ashelmire wrote: post #128
rjknight wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at it from the other perspective - if Google doesn't police the Play Store then users are put at risk. When bad actors are detected, they're banned. It sucks if you've hired one of these bad actors to do development work for you, but that can't trump the need for users to be protected from malicious code. In an ideal world, code review of the app would reveal whether or not there's anything fishy going on. It do…

I’ve seen enough posts like this that end with the developers being reinstated to doubt google here. They need to provide actual humans as resources to developers and companies. They take a huge cut, they should provide the service. But really we should move away from these app stores.

Agree.

take a huge cut

Exactly. It seems there should be some certain legal "level of expectation" that they will act in good faith for 30% (I'm guessing- I don't use them).

But really we should move away from these app stores

Yep. Which is why I have to guess at the 30%.

I find this whole story very disturbing. I understand Google's need to protect their ecosystem from malicious code, and the desire to ban developers who try to do harm (although I suspect that the real bad actors find work-arounds for the bans), but I can't help thinking that this isn't the way a good (morally) company would behave.

I guess it points to way more developers out there than Google needs in order to have a vibrant ecosystem, so if they burn through some percentage it isn't worth their time. It makes me think of fishermen who fished ruthlessly and perhaps wastefully when the ocean harvest was plentiful. Years later, however, those fishermen face some dire times, with perhaps more ahead, because the harvest is more modest and future harvests are threatened.

Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account

#200

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Arnt wrote: post #110
lovich wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your theory here was true, why does every small business who gets in this situation get stuck with no recourse when its just a few hundred to fix the problem? Yes, Google could likely not handle the legal costs if everyone went after them in court. Much like prosecutors in the US, what Google does is go hard on anyone who tries to defend themselves legally. At the point the calculus a small business has to make is…

Do you have some examples of Google doing that? (Honest question. I would remember it if I'd heard about that happening, but I might very well not hear about it in the first place.)

I'd expect Google to be devious enough to say "as a gesture of good will we'll pay your legal fees if you sign this NDA".
Post reply on HN