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Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account

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

#261

Post by samat »

avip wrote: post #248
SiVal wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caprices of TOS details, reviews, algorithms, service quality, or whatever are not the real problem. The real problem is when you can't reasonably choose to do business with someone else and move on, as they are free to do with you. 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 app…

Sounds like you’d like to see Google classified as a class II common carrier...

Hell yes!

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

#262

Post by simple_phrases »

w8rbt wrote: post #240
sheeshkebab wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Keep G Suite, but buy your own domain (whatever.com) so you are in total control. If they ban you, just change DNS records to point to zoho or some other provider.

> Keep G Suite

Why, so Google can pull the rug out from under me at the least opportune moment?

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

#263

Post by tacon »

gambiting wrote: post #79
noonespecial wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm nowhere close to a lawyer and law is always a head-scratcher for me, but I'd hope that if that theory held even the slightest amount of legal water, a letter for your lawyer to their legal team might be enough to nudge them to fix your account and that'd be the end of it.

That's basically how it works. It costs you very little(couple hundred £ at most) to ask a lawyer to craft a letter to send to Google legal team saying they have to resolve the issue for you within 14 days or you will be taking them to court. And if there's one thing that's absolutely certain is that Google's law team's time is way more expensive than whatever lawyer you found to write a letter or two is going to cha…

No, Google sends a "litigation paralegal" to small claims court. But you will eventually lose:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-i-sued-go...

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-google-bo...

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

#265

Post by yoz-y »

AnaniasAnanas wrote: post #170
ben_w wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

App stores are the least-unreliable mechanism I have to trust executable code. I don’t even enable JavaScript by default. Do you have an alternative trust mechanism that can’t be subverted via, for example, algorithmic voting?

> App stores are the least-unreliable mechanism I have to trust executable code More so than the repositories that various linux distros use? I honestly think that something like apt for android would be a much better solution - too bad, it will never happen because it would mess with google's monopoly.

Distro repositories are great but they are several orders of magnitudes smaller than the app stores. Ubuntu has ~50k packages available, app stores host millions of apps. Package maintainers to a great job but I don't think this model can scale up.

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

#266

Post by sverhagen »

m-p-3 wrote: post #73
wand3r wrote: post #6

I imagine the comments will be either: its your fault, dont trust google and have a strategy that totally relies on a party out of your control, & in this day and age you have to do this and this happened to me with google/apple/paypal/microsoft etc. While i think relying on google (or a single platform) is dangerous, these platforms really need to address these issues. While their isn’t much competition, they are re…

> have a strategy that totally relies on a party out of your control If it's possible to implement the app as a PWA sure, but then discoverability becomes an issue. Sadly, App Stores are a natural monopoly and everyone expect them to be fair but they clearly can't.

Are they a natural monopoly by choice or by necessity? Not sure what "natural" means, here. I could imagine some sort of federation that would make them less of a monopoly, understandably not Google's choice, though.

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

#267

Post by Aeolun »

hogu wrote: post #194
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 r…

I’m assuming this means you were paying them as well?

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

#268

Post by yoz-y »

43920 wrote: post #142
ben_w wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

App stores are the least-unreliable mechanism I have to trust executable code. I don’t even enable JavaScript by default. Do you have an alternative trust mechanism that can’t be subverted via, for example, algorithmic voting?

I think there's a couple solutions to this. First, "trust" should depend on your own evaluation of the developer, based on metrics like how long their app has existed, customer reviews, what protections they have around handling data, etc. You have the ability to do a much better job evaluating trust than Apple or Google are likely to. But even beyond that, sandboxing needs to be made effective enough that even if yo…

Disregarding security, the app stores also (try) to filter out crap applications, blatant rip-offs, applications that steal your data or ruin your battery by mining bit coins. These things usually don't really need to circumvent the sandbox. One can of course argue that the stores don't really do a great job policing the right things but they are efficient to some degree (e.g.: the recent facebook spy-vpn fiasco).

One other thing is that, at least in Apple app store, the review process catches use of private APIs which are in theory harmless but are not considered stable and could cause the application to crash if a minor update changes the way they work.

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

#269

Post by JetSpiegel »

FireBeyond wrote: post #253
confounded wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google’s customers are advertisers, not app developers.

Those app developers who have been dutifully paying fees to Google may be surprised to discover that they are somehow not also paying customers...

Ancillary customers that Google throws some crumbs to, not the raison d'être of the enterprise.

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

#270

Post by sbov »

reaperducer wrote: post #252
SiVal wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caprices of TOS details, reviews, algorithms, service quality, or whatever are not the real problem. The real problem is when you can't reasonably choose to do business with someone else and move on, as they are free to do with you. 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 app…

The real problem is when you can't reasonably choose to do business with someone else and move on, as they are free to do with you. Something I learned the hard way when I first started out in business is to never make your business dependent on a single entity. Whether it's a supplier, or a publisher, or a telco, or whatever. They are all single points of failure, and unless you're a huge business, one failure can b…

> Something I learned the hard way when I first started out in business is to never make your business dependent on a single entity.

Seems impossible. Assuming you're an internet business, how did you make your business not dependent upon your domain registrar?

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