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Open letter from an Android developer to the Google Play team

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Re: Open letter from an Android developer to the Google Play team

#101

Post by jacquesm »

chx wrote: post #55
aikah wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the danger of building your entire business on someone else's platform. Now Android is a bit more open than Apple's App store since on can install third party apps outside Google Play, but I personally always got an answer from Apple, even if it took 3/4 weeks, every-time there was an issue with a deployed application. Google? Unless you know somebody there or you are a big shot it's impossible to contact them,…

> It's the danger of building your entire business on someone else's platform. This is so often repeated but by this logic noone should write mobile apps.

It's by the exact same logic that scientists still publish papers through Elsevier. We, all of us, enable these monopolists.

Re: Open letter from an Android developer to the Google Play team

#102

Post by icelancer »

space_invaders wrote: post #95
chx wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the danger of building your entire business on someone else's platform. This is so often repeated but by this logic noone should write mobile apps.

> but by this logic noone should write mobile apps But they shouldn't. 99% of apps out there could just be a PWA, specially in the Android ecosystem that favours them.

Been arguing this forever. Jobs was actually correct. He just pivoted because he figured out that an App Store could make him billions and control end-to-end the economy and the device, which is always what he's wanted.

Web apps are the way to go. Not mobile apps in a store.

Re: Open letter from an Android developer to the Google Play team

#103

Post by ufmace »

mavelikara wrote: post #39
zaroth wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously, they get a cut of App Store revenue. Android is worth many billions of dollars to Google, and having quality apps on the store is an essential part of the ecosystem. To be sure, this is Google failing in a way that they should care about, and likely do care about, but failing none-the-less. The reason is because their culture will not allow them to succeed in these types of human interactions. And there is…

> this will eventually cost them billions of dollars It does - in Google Cloud. This reputation of automated customer service played a non-trivial part in the initial lukewarm response enterprise customers gave. The Eng teams at potential customers looked at the way Google treated their marketing teams and steered clear from Google's - sometimes superior - offerings.

Yup. For whatever Amazon's other faults may be, they will do stuff like assign actual human salespeople to your account, who have the time to listen to you and the authority to do things. You can create problem tickets for their services, which go to skilled engineers somewhere that have the time and authority to run down and address any weirdness you encounter with their services. Plus they keep even their old services online for a sort-of ridiculous amount of time to keep up with slow-moving corporate update processes.

Re: Open letter from an Android developer to the Google Play team

#104

Post by peterwwillis »

gwbas1c wrote: post #71
_nickwhite wrote: post #20

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?

Class action lawsuit

In theory yes, but I can't imagine what the claim would be; "They won't let me make a business out of selling apps on their platform" ?

It feels like monopoly would be easier to prove: "There is no other competitor to provide an app on these devices and people depend on them for critical tasks". In a way, this mimics the breakup of Ma Bell. AT&T controlled all the phone service, and they also created all the hardware that ran all the phone service. Rather than divest their ownership of the hardware, AT&T proposed to break itself up, so "local operating companies" would own the last mile, supposedly creating competition.

Google could do the same thing by allowing device manufacturers (or whomever) to install their own Play Store, and users of devices could choose what Play Store to use.

Re: Open letter from an Android developer to the Google Play team

#105

Post by sjwright »

I keep hearing stories like this and I remain utterly bemused that the median narrative about Android vs iOS has barely changed in response. There's a lot to love about Android, but I think more people in the tech sector need to realise that their mental model of the phone marketplace has more to do with historical perception of Android being "hacker friendly" than the current realities.

Android is open source! Oh wait— it's becoming more closed every release cycle, to the point that a pure AOSP experience is something only a determined geek would ever love. iOS and Android are now both blends of open and closed source, albeit in different ratios.

Google's app store is developer friendly! Oh wait— approvals are now slower than Apple, they're banning developers with no explanation, yet the store is still full of crapware and scams. At least Apple's policies seem to have a tangible trade-off.

Android gives customers hardware choices! Oh wait— the choice is between a cheap device that got its final software update five days after it shipped, a mid-tier device that might get updated next year, or a flagship which will probably get next year's major update and only security fixes thereafter.

Android gives customers software choices! Oh wait— what's the current messaging platform that Google is pushing this month? Do you, the human reading this paragraph, really care if there are eight hundred or eight thousand camera apps in your phone's app store?

Re: Open letter from an Android developer to the Google Play team

#106

Post by erklik »

manigandham wrote: post #66
jbarham wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Even with Google ads, there are plenty of 7-figure spenders who have trouble reaching customer service.

I have called their 1800 number and they have been fairly helpful. Maybe I am just lucky.

Re: Open letter from an Android developer to the Google Play team

#107

Post by Causality1 »

Reminds me of the issue an HN poster had several months ago trying to cancel his Google Fi subscription. Google just does not have the company culture to handle things out of the norm or the interest in developing one. They and their customers live and die on the word of software, which for me is unacceptable. My mission-critical providers all have a person in the loop somewhere, a human being to whom I can give our name and support account password, who can just reach right in and fix an issue no matter what the algorithm or the database says. Computers are just too goddamn stupid sometimes.

Google doesn't do that. If they can't automate it they won't do it. That works fine for being a search engine. It doesn't work at all for being, for instance, a telephone service provider or an ISP.

Re: Open letter from an Android developer to the Google Play team

#108

Post by Semaphor »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #84
dmitrybrant wrote: post #65

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…

Given how amazingly good Google is at filtering or identifying content when it benefits them to do so (e.g. Content ID, and I have never seen anything pornographic break through YouTube's filters), I must believe that it would be extremely easy for them to implement the fix you desire. Edit: Hmmm, assuming the app that you are talking about is freakin' Wikipedia, I'm assuming that if the Wikimedia can't get anyone fr…

> Given how amazingly good Google is at filtering or identifying content when it benefits them to do so (e.g. Content ID,

Content ID? The one where regularly stories break of it misidentifying things?

> and I have never seen anything pornographic break through YouTube's filters)

I have. But to be fair, that was 2 or 3 years ago.

Re: Open letter from an Android developer to the Google Play team

#109

Post by mayankkaizen »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #89
HenryBemis wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people wrote below but I didn't see the key words that came to my mind. You are not Google's customer. You are Google's product. The customers are the ad/tracking networks. Unless you pay Google for some services, you are their product. Products don't complain. They sit in the super market waiting for a customer we to pick them up. We have discussed plenty that "if _it_ is free then you are the product", I am af…

This is incorrect. I have rented a movie from Google. I am their customer in every sense of the word. I cannot get customer service for my rental. Whether something is free or not has almost nothing to do with the service you get unless your account is in the tens of millions of dollars.

You are still more of a product than a customer. Renting a movie vs giving your data. Guess which is more important to google?

If Google were purely in a business of renting movies, it would have give you some customer service. But it isn't in that business, so it won't give you a damn.

Re: Open letter from an Android developer to the Google Play team

#110

Post by antoinevg »

chx wrote: post #55
aikah wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the danger of building your entire business on someone else's platform. Now Android is a bit more open than Apple's App store since on can install third party apps outside Google Play, but I personally always got an answer from Apple, even if it took 3/4 weeks, every-time there was an issue with a deployed application. Google? Unless you know somebody there or you are a big shot it's impossible to contact them,…

> It's the danger of building your entire business on someone else's platform. This is so often repeated but by this logic noone should write mobile apps.

No buts. EXACTLY this.

Unless you are a unicorn or a huckster writing mobile apps is no longer an attractive business.

We provide a hybrid app development platform for mobile and over the last nine years we've watched a steady exodus of developers from the app space.

The only folk who are still relatively unaffected are the business developers.

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