311–320 of 530 posts
Ultimately, I gave up trying to get the verdict overturned. Instead, I used my personal gmail account and created another developer account. I re-published my app and it has been in the play store for the last three years.
I think we have these "OMG (Google|Youtube|Adsense|Paypal|eBay) terminated my account and it's a disaster!" - once a week at least.
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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.)
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-google-bo...
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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…
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…
All businesses have risks. At least these risks you know about beforehand (a 99% chance that the app will sink like a stone in the sea of apps available, never to be seen again, along with every penny invested in it.
The app stores are swamped with apps. Every single one of those apps was some person's dream that they spent significant time/money/effort on - building an app and getting it on the store is not a trivial undertaking. The overwhelmingly vast majority of those apps will never make a cent for their creators.
From Google's perspective, one less app on their app store at this point is probably a good thing.
From the OP's perspective, unless they're seeing significant revenue from the iOS version, writing the whole thing off as a sunk cost and walking away is probably the best plan. Which is ridiculous, I know, but logically true.
And I seriously question if their cloud offerings have actual product designers attached.
One great example:
If you are using Google CloudSQL, you are one command away from losing everything:
> gcloud sql instances delete prod-instance-name
When you delete a CloudSQL instance, it also deletes the back-ups associated with that instance along with it. So if you accidentally delete your production database: Your backups? Poof. Gone.
It says this in the fine print of the on-demand backups documentation: https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/mysql/backup-recovery/back...
> They persist until you delete them or until their instance is deleted.
There is also no way to mark a CloudSQL instance as "protected" so one bad CLI command can lose you your production database and all backups.
In order to get an actual backup workflow that will not affect production traffic, you have to script your own database dumps.
For me, Google CloudSQL does not do enough to protect my production data from accidental deletion. I would argue it is unclear how your production backups are being handled. I would argue their product treats your production data and backups irresponsibly.
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Now back to the real world...
How is reading a legally binding contract with regards to your business not a real world expectation?
Sure, a ToS is different, and there's basically an implicit contract when you buy a service, but that doesn't mean that the ToS is all powerful. It can be still unfair practice. (Some jurisdictions have that too.)
Now of course courts can't really force G to do business with you, but as others mentioned they can be sued for damages.
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Google has the burden of proof to show why they are guilty by mere association, but won't do it, likely because they don't want to reveal any information about how they determine who is violating the ToS. There should be greater transparency and a better appeals process, but there won't be. At the very least it doesn't seem that Google has thought of a better way to handle the scenario where an honest client relies u…
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…
That's governed by their consortium (And if Google fusses at that, create a fork of Android and make a ProvidersDroid OS)?
A consortium of consumer oriented connectivity and device providers (that are also competing with each other) -- have to be able to stand up to this MonsterG, that's waging a war on small-sized-businesses and individuals.
The real problem is betting your business on someone's platform that you absolutely cannot control. I think we have these "OMG (Google|Youtube|Adsense|Paypal|eBay) terminated my account and it's a disaster!" - once a week at least.