221–230 of 530 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disclaiming liability is not an excuse for treating your customers poorly.
Google’s customers are advertisers, not app developers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google Play is not a monopoly! It takes one checkbox in Settings to open the floodgates to any app (or app store) you want, and device manufacturers (such as Amazon) can ship their own app stores pre-enabled if they want.
What percentage of android devices, in the world, have that box ticked?
Is it unfair to form a poor opinion of Google because it's typical for people to only ever share bad experiences? Anecdotally I feel like I have come across so many of these stories, and each of them sound terrible / symptomatic of a broken/apathetic company. It feels like the money keeps rolling in through ad revenues, and then spent on developing projects like Inbox, Reader, and 5 chat apps, all of which get discon…
2. I had two GMail accounts closed on me for no obvious reason. Both were eventually reopened, but one several years later because I got enough media attention to get their attention.
3. I know one company that lost all their mails because their paid App Engine account was closed on them. I know another company which lost its biggest customer when the CEO's personal Gmail account was suddenly closed. And I know two other people who has lost access to all the stuff on Drive.
Considering that each problem is a real disaster for the person experiencing it, and that you don't hear about such stories with Microsoft, Apple or even Amazon.
The fact is, that even though you only hear the horror stories, there shouldn't be so many of them that you here them all over. I am just one person, and I trust Google as much as I trust the Chinese government.
Even in systems with automated processes, the bare minimum for communication should be a log of activities that is visible to all parties (e.g. account owner and company). The log should remain visible for quite awhile even after a severe action such as a ban. And in such a log, every action taken by an employee should be marked with an employee number, even if it is a number that only means something inside the comp…
It sucks, but automating sharing reasons for flagged actions will be self-defeating.
Ultimately it needs to be reviewed by a person at the company who is equipped to judge the situation with more intelligence and discretion to determine if it's really fraud or not.
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…
So says you. This is what the ToS say: Google may terminate this Agreement with You for any reason with thirty (30) days' prior written notice. In addition, Google may, at any time, immediately suspend or terminate this Agreement with You if: (a) You have breached any provision of this Agreement, any non-disclosure agreement or other agreement relating to Google Play or the Android platform; (b) Google is required to…
Network effects are causing more and more important things to both expand into great significance and to be dominated by a single company (or pair of gatekeepers, both of whom must be appeased, as in the phone platform.) Your business can be utterly wiped out with no realistic recourse by any of a thousand actions that could be taken at any time by the giant, like an elephant stepping on an ant.
I'm afraid that the only real recourse is to have certain anticompetitive regulations automatically kick in once a business rises above a certain percentage control of access to some market or medium that has become significant. They lose the ability to unilaterally ban, for example, except in narrow cases involving fraud or suspected criminal activity, which will eventually have to be proved to some official. If they fail to prove it, the official will order compensation without the banned party having to fight the giant's lawyers.
I imagine he has a contract with the devs so he can get the app in some form (hopefully access to source too) and publish it himself. Of course, publishing to mobile phone stores can be difficult for non technical people, but if that is the case he can request "over the shoulder" assistance with screen sharing so he ends up being the one logging in and doing the actions.
In the iTunesConnect portal, you can assign roles to various parties, including roles that have permissions to publish apps, without having to give the admin's account credentials.
I don't remember if the Play Store has similar features.
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 r…