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Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”

purpleleafsoftware.com

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Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”

#281

Post by bilkow »

dTal wrote: post #263
anigionuio wrote: post #241

Why is it that software repositories work so much better than these app stores? Every app store on every platform is a wasteland of adware and malware, but I have never found such a program in, say, the Debian repos. App stores manage to be simultaneously more restrictive than a repository and less trustworthy than downloading executables through a web browser.

There's an element of curation - any rando can't just upload something to Debian, there's a web of trust. But mainly I think it's that repositories are invariably built from source. Everything in a distro repository is open source software, guranteed to have been built from source from scratch. F-Droid does this, and its repositories are as clean as any Linux distro's as far as I can tell. (This is why Moxie's claim…

Actually, F-Droid supports using the upstream developer signature for quite some time now if the build is actually reproducible.

https://staging.f-droid.org/en/docs/Reproducible_Builds/

https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidserver/commit/8568805866dadb...

Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”

#282

Post by tkxxx7 »

ucaetano wrote: post #236
wolco wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was open access to the internet when aol started giving away cd-roms. Rich and poor, educated and less educated roamed different sites often clashing. The interest wasn't massive because things were not super easy. Phones bridged the gap. Fast forward to today you have less choice but bigger buy buttons.

> rich and poor You seem to have a mental image of the internet that doesn't correspond to reality. Poor didn't have access, they couldn't afford a computer, much less an internet plan. Step out of the Hacker News bubble for a bit.

> Poor didn't have access, they couldn't afford a computer, much less an internet plan. Step out of the Hacker News bubble for a bit.

I was very, very poor. So were most of the kids I grew up with. Most of us couldn't afford new computers; that's true. So we bought old ones. My father - tears in his eyes - lugged in something ancient that he'd picked up for $50, having no idea how to use it but hoping that putting it in front me would do me some good. AOL had been mailing everyone in town (Detroit). Some kids got PCs from the nearby churches, some got them from the school (others still only ever used them in school). We collected and hoarded the access disks, and would go ringing each others' phones or knocking down doors to share websites we'd found. Imagine my embarrassment when I realized the AOL search results page was not the entire internet, and that I could click on any text with a blue outline.

> doesn't correspond to reality

I know there are people who managed (or didn't..) to grow up poorer than I did. But even poverty is a spectrum.

Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”

#283

Post by em500 »

anigionuio wrote: post #241

Why is it that software repositories work so much better than these app stores? Every app store on every platform is a wasteland of adware and malware, but I have never found such a program in, say, the Debian repos. App stores manage to be simultaneously more restrictive than a repository and less trustworthy than downloading executables through a web browser.

Debian (by far the largest repo of mainstream Linux) has about 70k packages, and gives approximately $0 payout to package owners. By contrast, Google Play and Apple App store have around 2 to 3 million apps each, and aggregated payout of double-digit billion dollars. It should be fairly obvious why they attract so many bad actors.

> App stores manage to be simultaneously more restrictive than a repository and less trustworthy than downloading executables through a web browser.

Downloading executable through a web browser is something entirely different than Linux repos. Not sure I agree it's less trustworthy than Google Play and especially Apple App store, comparing to Windows download side. If it is, it's mostly down to the the monetary incentives.

Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”

#284

Post by em500 »

golergka wrote: post #144
antocv wrote: post #134

Earlier 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?

Try not being a mobile app developer? A bit less snarky:

- Develop mobile apps for a company rather than sell your own on Play/App store. - Develop non-mobile apps. - Not-app programming (business automation, infra, embedded, etc). - Get out of programming entirely.

This is basically the same message for all the other displaced/disrupted jobs (coal miners, bank clerks, lift operators, cashiers). Nobody owes anybody a livelihood for a fairly narrow/specific field. Especially not in "mobile app development" which 10 years ago was close to non-existent as as job title.

Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”

#285

Post by ucaetano »

tkxxx7 wrote: post #282
ucaetano wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> rich and poor You seem to have a mental image of the internet that doesn't correspond to reality. Poor didn't have access, they couldn't afford a computer, much less an internet plan. Step out of the Hacker News bubble for a bit.

> Poor didn't have access, they couldn't afford a computer, much less an internet plan. Step out of the Hacker News bubble for a bit. I was very, very poor. So were most of the kids I grew up with. Most of us couldn't afford new computers; that's true. So we bought old ones. My father - tears in his eyes - lugged in something ancient that he'd picked up for $50, having no idea how to use it but hoping that putting it…

Very poor where? In the US?

The "very poor" in the US are rich in most of the developing world.

Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”

#286

Post by dmitryminkovsky »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #265
dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not as good as google, but it still makes sense to make it (or something else) your default search engine for those 99% of times it actually works just fine.

But it doesn't work fine 99%. I tried to find a short story I read awhile ago, so I DDG'ed for "Berryman Parrot". DDG helpfully suggests a bunch of unrelated videos - a Coldplay video, a Tyler, The Creator sketch from the Eric Andrew show, and something about a C-line fencing tool. The actual search results are vaguely related, since the first one is a youtube video about birds with someone named Berryman in the desc…

Usually if there’s a Wikipedia article for a phrase it’s among the first hits for me.

Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”

#287

Post by wmeredith »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #119

From 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.

https://reddit.com/r/aboringdystopia

Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”

#288

Post by cr0sh »

onemoresoop wrote: post #251
xyN10 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I no longer find interesting things in the top results like 10 years ago. Some search terms only return about 100 results when there should be many more. Academic websites seem to have nearly vanished from the results. Perhaps the results get better if you pay Google by allowing them cookies, but I think that wasn't necessary 10 years ago either. So the difference is that in a non-biased library you find many more an…

Google has an interest into generally narrowing your results so it's easier to shove you through their hoops (advertisers, etc) and this behavior is becoming more common and a frustrating experience for me as well.

One thing I hate a lot about Google - and I am not sure why they do it - I can't even sum it up in a word or sentence. Basically you search for something, and it returns (supposedly) 10,000 matches, and 100 pages to go thru (or whatnot). You look at the first page, check a few, then move to the second page. Suddenly, the number of pages drops in half or more. Within a few more pages, things narrow down to 5 pages or less, with the last page having only 2-3 links.

I don't understand this "narrowing". I want to see every single damn result, I want to go to the "last page" and see those weird and obscure results. But nope, not any more.

They do a similar thing with image search; you search for something that you know has tens of thousands of images (ie - cats), but you are limited to maybe a total of 1000 or fewer images (show more results...show more results...END).

One last thing that occurs - and I am not sure how this is done; I don't think it is google - but how is it that I can do a lookup for something, and then in google's search results there will be exact matches for that something being searched for, but if you go to those links, invariably they forward you to some kind of spammy or worse "content" (usually doing nothing for me, because they assume everyone is using Windows - so they drop a link for a file that's an executable .EXE - yeah, sure).

It is almost like sites are (somehow) generating search results on the fly for google based on your keywords, but that can't be possible (?) because that isn't how google does indexing (that wouldn't even work or be efficient). So I don't know how it is that sites have my exact keyword matches (unless due to sheer numbers, my searches aren't that unique - but I do often search for very obscure stuff, and even those things pop up).

Meh...

Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”

#289

Post by foxyv »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #184
maxencecornet wrote: post #174

The exact same thing happened to me last week My ads-free really simple React Native app was removed from the play store for “deceptive ads” I don't care too much as this was just a way to learn React Native for me, but it's still really weird To be honest every interaction I have with Google products nowadays are bad: - This app kicked from the Play store - A bug with the new Adsense Auto-ads where you couldn't disa…

Can apps be decompiled easily? I'd imagine one could download the app, report it for whatever (eg ads), wait for the automated system to remove it, then upload your own version (with ads, and what ever else). Or if not decompiled, perhaps you got spearphished for access to your apps code, or it was acquired some other way. Similar things probably happen as far as malicious reporting for sales platforms (like Amazon).…

If they are Java, which most are, then yes. Unless you use obfuscation, Java decompile is trivial.
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