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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

#41

Post by NKCSS »

My game ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nkcss.shad... ) was suspended because I did not have a link to my privacy policy in the app (required when you serve ads for some reason). My game only shows an ad every other time you abort a game or ask for a hint, if you just play without hints/aborting games, you'll never see an ad. It was up for about 6 months, ~1000 installs, then it was taken offline. I was busy for another 6-9 months, after digging into the reason why it was taken down, I created a privacy policy page, added a link in the app to the page and re-submitted it, then appealed/asked for another review on the play store and admob and after a few days, everything was restored again.

It can be a pain to find out the exact reason, by in my case, after fixing what they wanted to have changed, it was all ok.

Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

#42

Post by ddalex »

jacquesm wrote: post #6
techntoke wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would want any company that is abusing their power to face consequences. However, it wouldn't surprise me one bit to find out that some of these companies complaining about getting banned are legitimately doing something wrong and their only cards to play are hoping for a political reaction, rather than suing Google in court and being exposed for why they were actually banned.

Sure. But it wouldn't surprise me one bit either if there was an active policy on the part of Google that optimized for profits at the expense of the rest of the world either. See, if a company can do something for years then the least thing you can do is explain why they've been banned, 'policy violation' is such a great fig-leaf for a lot of trickery that it should be a requirement to spell out exactly what the vio…

> optimized for profits at the expense of the rest of the world

This is literally what each and every company does - P&G could sell me the toothpaste cheaper, but guess what, they want my money. Very rarely a business deal - money exchanging hands - is "fair" to everybody involved. What would you expect, somebody stop trying everything to make money because of the "greater good"?

Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

#45

Post by pnw_hazor »

ddalex wrote: post #38
pnw_hazor wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unfo…

People who work for Google are supporting a company that is building the dystopia my children will have to deal with.

Google programmers have other options. But the pay and prestige is not there. I can understand why people work at GOOG and FB. But it does not absolve them from being part of the problem (a big part of problem).

But there is no reason for people who work at GOOG to be respected for working there or otherwise held in high regard by their peers in the industry. It is a job for them, okay, I get it. But there are plenty of jobs for them to choose from.

Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

#47

Post by maimeowmeow »

pnw_hazor wrote: post #29
ummonk wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all the Google programmers who're here at HN started working elsewhere nothing significant would really happen. Google would continue to operate the same way. Except maybe making it to the front page of HN would stop functioning as an ad hoc appeals process for Google decisions.

That's what everyone says about bad places. That's what they always say when asked to do terrible things. There will be people they could hire, but it wouldn't be anyone that would get invited to conferences, and so on. Nobody that would make Stanford proud. People who work at Google know they are working for a terrible company doing terrible things (there are plenty of those...) but those programmers, every single o…

Google has a new policy to not rock the boat, including snitchin on anyone who might be.

Probably not that large of a group of people that both read hacker news, read this exact article, even care about such things, and work at google. At a company of that size, they are maybe fancy cogs, but still replaceable.

Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

#48

Post by robk »

dollar wrote: post #3

The 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…

Of course they wait until a payout to do a deeper analysis. Most sites that sign up are spam and fraud that never earn much. So a payout threshold is a natural way of gating the spending of resources to weed out fraud and junk.

Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

#49

Post by onli »

ddalex wrote: post #38
pnw_hazor wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unfo…

This is not about making everybody happy. This is about completely wrong behaviour: You can suspend scammers fast, but if you also catch legitimate developers with your scam protection you have to have processes in place to give 1. valid explanations why 2. time to react, at least retroactively 3. a legitimate possibility to appeal. Google does none of that, fixing that process is possible and has nothing to do with a law of big numbers or the difficulty of making everybody happy. The adsense scam Google is running, if the description provided here is correct, is just fraud.

Both is just Google being evil.

> nobody wakes up in the morning and decides "I'm gonna fuck up this webmasters day today for the sake of it"

You can be sure that happens as well in every organization of that size. It's just another reason you have to have a proper appeal process in place, not the automatic dismissal system Google has.

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