Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 607 posts

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

#101

Post by maze-le »

ddalex wrote: post #69
onli wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How do you know who is a legitimate dev and who is a scammer posing as a legitimate dev, to know when to work with someone, or to withhold information that would expose secret filters that you use? Mind, it's not that this dev got one app banned, he got ALL of them banned. There is an appeal process when you gone one banned, but he got multiple violations. He got all the violations in a span of hours, so he got unluc…

>> How do you know who is a legitimate dev and who is a scammer posing as a legitimate dev

If you cannot discern the two you shouldn't offer a service that claims it can... And if you do nevertheless, the operators of the service should at least acknowledge that errors happen and offer the possibility of a recourse

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

#102

Post by feanaro »

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…

How about Google stops using dark patterns in order to dissuade users from using alternative app stores or side-loading then? They can police their own app store any way they feel they have to, but then let's foster the culture of having multiple places to install applications from.

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

#103

Post by ThrowAway835629 »

StanAngeloff wrote: post #53

We were banned from the Play Store for violation of their Impersonation policy in mid July after publishing an update. We just got reinstated last week. During the course of the lengthy appeal I had an unshakable feeling I was up against The System™. I still believe I was communicating with a bot and not an actual human being — I refuse to accept a rational human being will behave the way Bob from Google did. It's su…

When my app update was rejected, I had the exact same feeling. This can't be a human being, I am talking to a bot. At some point I just gave up, which is still hurting a bit. What did you do to talk to an actual human?

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

#105

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

javert wrote: post #90
cbanek wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true that Google, Apple, and Facebook are now getting the treatment that Microsoft got a long time ago. But I'm not sure I agree that everyone would go free software if it didn't happen. If anything, I think another company would just come along and build something slightly less crappy but no more open. These days you don't even own the software anymore, it's just a subscription or SaaS. > Software companies mak…

In the U.S., phone providers are protected by the government. You can't compete with them. The government has basically granted them fiefs. I feel like cars are great. I don't know where the complaint is there. There is an enormous amount of variety in cars. It's really amazing. Definitely a triumph of capitalism. I also don't really have a problem with banks. There seems to be plenty of options. People mostly just c…

> I feel like cars are great

This is myopic, to put it lightly.

Toyota own the three brands that are the least costly cars to maintain, followed by Honda. BMW’s cost, on average, three times as much to maintain.[1]

I own a VW because I’m an enthusiast, but I drive a Honda because I also need a reliable vehicle.

Some BMWs should be regulated out of existence. Rang Rovers too. I work directly opposite my mechanic and we often joke, when all four bays have BMWs or Rang Rovers in them you couldn’t make one good car if you scarified the other three.

These cars are absolute garbage. VW’s too. They all have terrible reputations.

I don’t mean to imply the specs aren’t good, some of these cars are smooth riding and handle well, but heaven forbid if anything breaks.

1. https://autowise.com/carmakers-with-the-highest-maintenance-...

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

#106

Post by archi42 »

pnw_hazor wrote: post #89
aviraldg wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Android, you do have the freedom to install whatever app you want without having to root. You can also install alternative app stores.

You do have to fight through some dark patterns that discourage side-loading. But at least you can do it on Android. Also, it is getting harder to avoid using Google Play Services in your apps since they are putting more Android features behind that iron curtain as well.

There are multiple problems here:

1. As you stated, Google forces devs to rely on presence of the Google Play Services

2. Devs don't care: I don't see why e.g. Discord should not run properly on MicroG (I get push messages after logging in, but the app itself shows all friends as offline, no servers and a "can not connect to discord" message; from what I found online, it doesn't seem to be intermittent).

3. I wouldn't even know which 3rd party app store to use (okay, besides F-Droid for FOSS and some Google Play Store Proxy)

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

#107

Post by coldtea »

javert wrote: post #84
pnw_hazor wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Amazon warehouse workers also have the option not to work there. Amazon is not forcing them to be there and Amazon does not owe someone a job any more than any other business owes jobs to random people.

>Amazon warehouse workers also have the option not to work there.

A, the evergreen, "since nobody puts a gun on your head, you're free to work elsewhere".

Some people don't understand that limited job options, lack of skills (or money to increase them), need to feed a family, etc, are also "guns on the head".

To understand how much, consider than people can sell their bodies (for sex), or even get into slave-like servitude with no pay, just to get something to eat. Heck, in poorer societies (and even western countries, not more than a century ago) people would even sell one or more of their kids to help feed the others (and of course, would send their 8-14 year old kids to work).

Just because something is better than dying of hunger doesn't mean it's a "free choice" option. It's just, like avoiding getting shot from someone "holding a gun to your head" the best of shitty options.

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

#108

Post by feanaro »

ddalex wrote: post #69
onli wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How do you know who is a legitimate dev and who is a scammer posing as a legitimate dev, to know when to work with someone, or to withhold information that would expose secret filters that you use? Mind, it's not that this dev got one app banned, he got ALL of them banned. There is an appeal process when you gone one banned, but he got multiple violations. He got all the violations in a span of hours, so he got unluc…

> [...] to withhold information that would expose secret filters that you use?

It makes no sense to me that these filters are such a secret. Either you are doing something to deceive your users or you are not. Are you advising that we should just blindly trust an opaque set of rules that a giant corporation, whose interests are not aligned with our own, can use to ban anyone with no oversight at all?

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

#109

Post by philpem »

harrisonjackson wrote: post #63

I'd suspect a competitor flagged your app somehow. This seems to be a trending dark pattern. Across a lot of competitive platforms - Amazon Sellers, App Store, Play Store - even social media people are flagging content as abusive to hurt competing brands. Since normal support channels don't work, maybe report this to a bug bounty - this would be considered a type of social hack, right? Someone or something convinced…

From my experience with bug bounties, if it's not on the OWASP TOP10, they'll kick, stamp, scream and fight -- even if you say "I don't want the bounty, I just want this bug fixed".

(backstory: found a bug in Twitter which disclosed DMs. Reported it, Twitter engineer had a raging tantrum on Hackerone, H1 (I assume) mistook his messages for mine and banned me from the site. Found out a mutual was a Twitter engineer, sent him the POC. A few days later, fixed)

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

#110

Post by OkGoDoIt »

Havoc wrote: post #56
StanAngeloff wrote: post #53

We were banned from the Play Store for violation of their Impersonation policy in mid July after publishing an update. We just got reinstated last week. During the course of the lengthy appeal I had an unshakable feeling I was up against The System™. I still believe I was communicating with a bot and not an actual human being — I refuse to accept a rational human being will behave the way Bob from Google did. It's su…

>When did thing go so horribly wrong? When every company and their dog decided their content needs an app. Instead of using the nicely standardized thing called http and web browsers. That moved us from http straight to corporate technical fiefdoms with no control.

I’ve been building apps for Windows for over a decade (we used to call them programs or software) and this isn’t exactly a problem there. The problem is strong centralized App Store control, not native app development.
Post reply on HN