71–80 of 244 posts
Google is what, a 3/4 TRILLION dollar company, based on market cap! It's absolutely unfathomable that they have such a prolific reputation of non-customer service and inability to contact them. Any other company would suffer massive consequences with customer service that poor. What will it take for them to turn this around? Maybe they believe they are too big for this to matter?
IMHO, an ethical course of action for Google employees is: 1. quit your job 2. apologize to the global community of users and developers 3. give half your money to a charity
Who are you to say what's ethical or not?
(You've asked an extraordinarily odd question. There's a context in which such a question might imply that the OP should look to God and religious texts for guidance rather than rely on their own reason, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you're not suggesting that the bible/Koran/Baghavad Gita/whatever offers words on the matter of Google employees and their relationship with their employer that supersede human judgement.)
Without knowing more about the "sophisticated anti-piracy system" employed by the app author, it's hard to determine if Google's claim of malicious behaviour is valid. This could be something as simple as bytecode obfuscation, or something as complex as scraping every bit of personal information available through possibly-questionable means and sending to an insecure server. Copy protection schemes are notoriously us…
Regardless of the reason, the fact that you can have your livelihood taken away without an explanation or human contact is pretty worrying.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regardless of the reason, the fact that you can have your livelihood taken away without an explanation or human contact is pretty worrying.
What if the reason is they were scraping all your private data against the Terms of Service, and hiding it in obfuscated dynamic bytecode loading... if that was the case, you think it's still bad that they can be kicked off the app store? I mean, we only have the developer's word that they weren't shipping malware in these bytecode files, unless someone reverse engineers it (unlikely), or Google publicly explains the…
I'm the developer of a relatively popular app (50M+ on the Play Store) and have had very disappointing experiences with the Play Store, but in a rather opposite way from the OP: Once an app reaches a certain level of popularity, you begin to see "knock-off" apps, which are apps with a curiously similar name and icon (and screenshots and description), but which in fact don't do anything except blast the user with full…
Heck, some apps are so bad that they ruin the reputation of the entire niche (for example, a document scanner app). If the first few apps that a user downloads does not scan documents, he's naturally assuming that no apps can do it.
Reporting those apps never worked, so I stopped reporting them. Instead, we now focus on improving our apps and hoping for the best.
I'm the developer of a relatively popular app (50M+ on the Play Store) and have had very disappointing experiences with the Play Store, but in a rather opposite way from the OP: Once an app reaches a certain level of popularity, you begin to see "knock-off" apps, which are apps with a curiously similar name and icon (and screenshots and description), but which in fact don't do anything except blast the user with full…
The modern SaS enviroment is scam central taking advantage of the publics computer illiteracy. So color me skeptical.
Google is what, a 3/4 TRILLION dollar company, based on market cap! It's absolutely unfathomable that they have such a prolific reputation of non-customer service and inability to contact them. Any other company would suffer massive consequences with customer service that poor. What will it take for them to turn this around? Maybe they believe they are too big for this to matter?
If you're a Google Ads buyer, Google is easy to contact. If you're a mere Google products user, good luck getting help via their crowdsourced message boards...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regardless of the reason, the fact that you can have your livelihood taken away without an explanation or human contact is pretty worrying.
Having a system that tells malware authors precisely what behavior triggered an alarm is also not great. There is no solution.
My developer account has been getting mails about "apps that are not compliant with permission requirements". The problem is that these are 3 year old, UNPUBLISHED apps. Turns out, you cannot delete old apps . You can only unpublish them. Google will still keep the app up if even one phone has the app installed. I wrote back saying that this is a years-old app that I no longer even have the source code to. The reply…
Can you just publish an empty APK (after creating the project) up to all of them? Or is that not how this works?