Earlier quoted context omitted.
Work elsewhere.
Huh? We don't work at Google, we use Google services
The Goog employees, several who comment here at HN, could stop it tomorrow. Not plebes like you and me.
Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app
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Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app
#32Shutup! I heard they pay well. /s Programmers here at HN could stop this behavior in a minute. They do not care about you.
>Programmers here at HN could stop this behavior in a minute. Thousands of others would replace them next minute, so why do you think it would change anything?
I'm sorry this isn't even true of low skill workers. Turnover is destructive in the best case.
If 50% of talent left it would be a disaster.
Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app
#33All apps are still hosted here if any have interest: https://www.apkturbo.com/apps/montransit/org.mtransit.androi...
Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app
#34The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it. My company has a half dozen stories like this about Google in the last year alone. Know what Google is doing to its AdSense partners on a massive scale? They wait until your site has just under the earnings when they have to write you a check, then they terminate your AdSense account for “polic…
> how badly a company can treat its customers
App developers are not customers; they're indentured peasants.
Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app
#35I don't really see any mention of it, but do you at least have some idea of what may have triggered this issue? I see that your open-source Android app is serving ads. I'm also curious why your app isn't on F-Droid?
Seems it wasn't on F-Droid because it uses some Google Play Services (for maps, ads, location, etc), and nobody took the time to make a fork without those non-free dependencies.
https://github.com/mtransitapps/mtransit-for-android/issues/...
Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Downvotes incoming! Other explanations from Google programmers: "the work is interesting"
Just because the company is doing shitty things doesn't mean that every engineer does. Plus, imagine how it could work in reality. You finally got your place at Google. You know what the company is doing. And at some point you are asked to work on one of these grey things. What do you say, that it's immoral? If so, where exactly do you draw the line? Who is to decide what's still acceptable and what not? You've known…
It is immoral. Perfectly legal or not.
I know why they do it. They like the money. They like the perks. They like the feeling of being in a special elite group.
Google does not have to be evil. It just is. The technical employees of Google could change it overnight if they cared.
Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app
#37Seems like a good time to bring it up again -- 18 years ago my Google ads account was locked for reasons unknown to me. I'm still waiting for an answer on my appeal. Yes, I was one of their first few thousand advertisers. Even back then they treated us like crap when they could have easily had a human review every decision.
Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app
#38Shutup! I heard they pay well. /s Programmers here at HN could stop this behavior in a minute. They do not care about you.
Downvotes incoming! Other explanations from Google programmers: "the work is interesting"
Not having worked at Google yet, but having plenty of experience with other big companies: things are not black and white. There is no "evil" per se, it's just a shit load of conflicting interests, different priorities and different pressures at play: nobody wakes up in the morning and decides "I'm gonna fuck up this webmasters day today for the sake of it". It just happens that some innocent people end up in an unfortunate corner case of a tool trying to protect against scammers.
I can totally understand how in a flagging tool with a false positive rate of 0.01% some innocent publisher got caught by mistake, and got its app banned. Is that publisher important enough so it's worth manual review time? What's the risk to expose the internal heuristics to make EVERYBODY happy? Oh, wait, you can't make EVERYBODY Happy.
I can tell you this shit happens EVERYWHERE. It's just the way the law of large numbers works against you. If you want to make ALL your customers happy, your only choice is a bespoke dev type of thing, because you then to deeply cater to your each customer.
It's the same shit everywhere, and you're interested in working on large bits, it doesn't really matter where you go. Google, FB, Amazon, everywhere you're going to have people that are unhappy with your product/service/decisions. So if it's the same, why not go to the ones that pay better/got more perks/look best on your CV?
Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app
#39Perhaps a sneaky competitor exploited some flaw in the app reporting process to knock the app off the store?
This makes sense to me. They got 4 policy violations and a multi-violation ban in the span of a day.
A Facebook Audience Network policy ban is also listed in the timeline. That wouldn't be Google's policy, right?
Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app
#40Shutup! I heard they pay well. /s Programmers here at HN could stop this behavior in a minute. They do not care about you.
>Programmers here at HN could stop this behavior in a minute. Thousands of others would replace them next minute, so why do you think it would change anything?
True, but Goog would be like Boeing, Weyerhaeuser, the government, Geico, etc. Each have 1000's of programmers, but no one works for them unless they have to.
Certainly SW luminaries wouldn't. But the pay is good.