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

341–350 of 530 posts

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

#341

Post by mcguire »

avip wrote: post #112
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…

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…

Have those TOS been validated through the courts?

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

#342

Post by adventured »

avip wrote: post #112
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…

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…

There's no such thing as a terms of service that gets you out of openly commiting fraud.

The issue isn't the ToS. It's fighting Google in court. If fraud is occuring, the ToS will not actually protect you.

You want to know what's keeping Jack Dorsey and Sundar Pichai up at night right now? They both recently openly lied to Congress and can be put in prison at any time for it. A powerful congressperson merely has to decide to act on it. Dorsey has begun walking back Twitter's aggressive deplatforming against the political rightwing because he's scared now, he knows they can get him on lying to Congress. They can get anyone on lying to Congress, all they have to do is get you to testify extensively, then you're fucked. It's why Google didn't want to send their CEO to testify.

The only way to deal with a corporation as powerful as Google is to get their executives in front of Congress or on record in front of federal agents and pin them to the wall. Once they've testified enough under oath, they're effectively in a permanent minefield. They have to be very careful with all related business practices after that.

That works when you have a hot political issue, like election tampering. I doubt it's possible to scare up enough attention for app store bans. The only recourse there is to pursue it in court and or hope some state AG will jump on board.

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

#343

Post by gesman »

arduinomancer wrote: post #320
gesman wrote: post #312

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.

What's the alternative? Never develop any mobile apps?

It's up to developer to weigh the risks and make an informed decision.

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

#344

Post by noonespecial »

on_and_off wrote: post #165
heptathorp wrote: post #51

> I had created a Google Developer Account simply so I could pass on the login details to my app developers who uploaded and updated the app via my account each time. Sounds like one of those developers was previously banned for violating ToS and Google suspects the author is the same person with a new account trying to evade the ban. Instead of sharing login details, the correct thing to do is add a user and give th…

It seems reasonable to me as well. So far 99% of the people I have seen complaining about their account being suspended were unwilling to read the ToS, even less to try to comply with them. I am pretty sure that the review process does mistakes as well, but as always bad actors spoil everything for everybody. FWIW, I had 2 apps removed from the play store earlier this month. They were all based on the same codebase (…

Right. Now imagine how it would feel if you made your entire living off those apps, the ban was for life, and they didn't even bother to explain to you what you did wrong.

Many people are in this exact situation. That is why they are upset.

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

#345

Post by [deleted] »

honkycat wrote: post #316

Google is such a joke. They need to get their heads out of their asses. Constant stories of bad support. Youtube is a complete horror show. 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…

[deleted]

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

#346

Post by benologist »

[deleted] wrote: post #337

[deleted]

Oracle revealed Google's Android revenue was $31 billion in 2016 with $22b of that being profit. AT&T, Comcast, Amazon etc suggest it is possible to support a few million developers/customers within $22b.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2018/01/06/apples-ap...

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

#348

Post by munchbunny »

catach wrote: post #188
fareesh wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The part I don't get is... where in Google leadership does this issue get lost on the company's priorities? Of all of the rational explanations I can come up with, it feels like someone looks at the data and either says "nah we don't lose much money from this" or "nah it's not a real problem". Is that actually true? Could it be something to do with company culture? Something like "if we solve a hard problem by assi…

Human-based support at Google-scale is also insanely expensive.

It's not that black and white. There's "no support", "lots of support", and somewhere in between is "more than what Google has right now."

I think that, when you are the gatekeepers to some people's livelihoods, there's some amount of ethical responsibility to exercise judgement. If you can automate judgement, then great, but if you can't, you should probably implement it with humans.

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

#349

Post by topspin »

manigandham wrote: post #325
topspin wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a PC. Amazingly it can host software from many sources. Some of those sources include boxed software I ordered from various retailers, software aggregation and distribution services like Steam, the operating system vendors own proprietary software distribution system and a large number of unaffiliated software vendors that operate their own web sites. It seems that we had long since solved the 'problem' of soft…

Yes, this is HN, we all get it. But theory isn't reality. What's the solution today other than going back in time and blocking appstore monopolies?

WASM maybe.

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

#350

Post by roenxi »

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…

When dealing with a bureaucracy (ie, not Google specific) a "review" might not mean "reconsider the issue" instead meaning "check the process was followed".

In an extreme example, lets say that a bureaucrat takes an action because they have an unreasonable personal dislike of something. A bureaucratic review of the situation will confirm that the person had authority to act as they did then close the case. The reasoning behind the decision may not be examined at all in the review.

A symptom of things getting bad is that reviews will never seem to achieve anything, because a bureaucracy won't take unauthorised action, so any action is by definition going to pass a review. Very frustrating to deal with that sort of system. This sort of thinking is so screwy that it makes sense for the reviewer to report directly to the original decision maker, because the reviewer isn't supposed to challenge the decision, they are supposed to make sure that the decision was made by the person they report to!

Post reply on HN