I do think that the redress model is broken. It might require money, but there should be a path, to put up a stake for a good-faith review. If they judge you not a spammer or time waster, you should get to talk to a person with an advocate or adjudicator.
Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”
141–150 of 336 posts
Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”
#142Can we sue Google when they do things like this? No single entity should wield this much power. And we should rewrite the laws to make this so. Google and Apple wanted to be in the role of gatekeeper, so they should be beholden to the apps on their platform. We had a web where developers were in control of their own deployment. Everything was decentralized and required responsibility and diligence. Now the power is o…
Not a lawyer, but anti-trust could apply.
Before going down that road, before asking if all the legal conditions are met, the starting point is that you have to show harm to consumers. My experience of $200 in fraudulent credit card charges and apps that change to malware on a minor update suggest that this is in the interest of consumers. There's a neverending supply of bad actors in this line of business.
Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”
#143From the blog comments: > Good luck man. I had an app removed because someone did a review of it and their review had screenshots of my app and Google banned the app for copyright infringement siting them as the source. No appeal, one strike, never got through to a human. If true that’s laughablly insane.
You, still using google for anything, is insane. OK, harsh word, but really, your behaviour is modified by the search results/ads/suggestions you see. Every search you do, leans you to continue using Google in the future, and looking at the web through their eyes.
How is that any different than literally any other way of discovering information?
Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”
#144From the blog comments: > Good luck man. I had an app removed because someone did a review of it and their review had screenshots of my app and Google banned the app for copyright infringement siting them as the source. No appeal, one strike, never got through to a human. If true that’s laughablly insane.
You, still using google for anything, is insane. OK, harsh word, but really, your behaviour is modified by the search results/ads/suggestions you see. Every search you do, leans you to continue using Google in the future, and looking at the web through their eyes.
If you're a mobile app developer, what choice do you have?
Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”
#145Looking at this from another lense, think the reason why so much moderation is automated is that these companies do Human Ops (might be the wrong term) where essentially it's important to employees mental health not to be working on menial moderation duties. So to improve the quality of employees working life they use bots to do the same job.
Now moderation seems to be automateable but could a bot do customer service?
Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”
#146I hear a lot of people complain they got falsely banned by some automated process. But automatic processes are easy to game, so just do what the spammers likely do, slightly edit the app, re-upload using another account and IP, etc, repeat. I'm sad every time I install an Android app, thinking how much crap/spyware it will install on my device ...
Android should allow other "app stores", just like you can have different browsers, you should also be able to have different "app stores". Just like there is not just one "store" in the physical world. Then there could be niche stores that focus on some category, or quality.
Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pretty sure that 99% of apps on the store make so little revenue that it's not worth it to pay someone competent to review them, especially with all the ad supported free apps. So a very low percentage of apps pay for the cost of running the app store. A fixed filing fee would level that imbalance.
Developers pay $25 or so on sign up.
And after paying those $25 they are free to spam the review team with hundreds of submissions? Doesn't sound sustainable to me.
If App Stores charged a fee per submission, that would drastically cut down on spam submissions, and free up resources for those of us who actually put a lot of effort into our apps.
Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
You, still using google for anything, is insane. OK, harsh word, but really, your behaviour is modified by the search results/ads/suggestions you see. Every search you do, leans you to continue using Google in the future, and looking at the web through their eyes.
If you're a mobile app developer, what choice do you have?
Publishing on the web or iOS is always a choice.
Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
You, still using google for anything, is insane. OK, harsh word, but really, your behaviour is modified by the search results/ads/suggestions you see. Every search you do, leans you to continue using Google in the future, and looking at the web through their eyes.
True. Although I mostly use google for [Technical Keyword] not working with [Technical Keyword], rather than [Who should I vote for]. I actually use hn.algolia.com more often when I want an opinion on something important to me :-)
I use hn.algolia.com as a more reliable source to look for info & opinion on a lot of things a lot more than I use google.
I feel like there ought to be a google competitor now that google is so crappy.
Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is absolutely possible to do this without making people mad. The solution is simple: educated, intelligent customer service for developers. Heck, make them pay a developer subscription fee to make the customer service cost-neutral. Or make them pay a refundable deposit to escalate a situation for manual review by a trained developer, at the cost of a market salary for however long that developer would take to revi…
I shouldn't have to pay for that customer service if Google or Apple's cut is 30% of app revenues.
Realistically, if you spent 20 hours developing the app, you're already $3000 invested on this project. Another $100-$500 isn't THAT big of a deal when you look at it in those terms