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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

#121

Post by goatinaboat »

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

It’s weird how Google knows everything about you when it suits them, and nothing when it doesn’t

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

#122

Post by jacquesm »

v7p1Qbt1im wrote: post #79
jacquesm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ironically you are giving Google to much credit. There is no real way to improve enforcement. At this insane scale, and with the extreme level of sophistication from scammers, and the privacy expectation from users it‘s almost impossible to do more than they are. Someone else said it further up. They can‘t just let employees snoop around in personably identifying data. Nor would you want that, right? The fact is, as…

If good and ordinary users are going to be collateral damage then that war is already lost.

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

#123

Post by ajnin »

I'm guessing some lawyer at the Montreal transit authority decided to report that app for violating some kind of intellectual property. And, due to Google's consistent cover-their-asses policy (of Youtube fame), they decided to shut down that app.

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

#124

Post by panpanna »

archi42 wrote: post #106
pnw_hazor wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

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

Not forcing per se. Google just provides a convenient services that devs are happy to use.

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

#125

Post by euph0ria »

The company I work for has banned the use of Google Cloud due to how they treat their Play Store developers, in particular that there never seems to be any human being that you can talk to and find out what you need to do to fix the situation. We do not want the same to occur to our servers or if there is an overflow from Play Store ban to GCP etc.

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

#126

Post by samcrawford »

I'm developing a consumer facing service right now, and it's stories like this that steer me away from expending the effort to develop as an Android and iOS app. At least on the web we're not (entirely) beholden to a single company that can unilaterally remove you with no recourse.

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

#127

Post by codedokode »

izacus wrote: post #91
NKCSS wrote: post #41

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.…

Meanwhile your ad network library was mining data in the background (they do that even if you don't show the ad) of users without telling them in privacy policy. You're not the victim in your case.

Would not it be better to make it difficult to collect data (e.g. show a popup asking access to those data every time) instead of just requiring a privacy policy that nobody reads?

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

#129

Post by master-litty »

maimeowmeow wrote: post #47
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…

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.

Is it an official new policy? Having a hard time finding any solid information about it.

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

#130

Post by codedokode »

huffmsa wrote: post #120
pnw_hazor wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That does not explain why Goog doesn't treat people like humans. If the app developer has been in good standing for years, and has a popular app, why not send them more information as to why they are in violation? And give them some time to fix it.

Because they're not using humans to do the reviews anymore. They're putting bots on the frontlines, then using humans to (maybe) handle appeals. But those humans are probably undertrained, underpaid and have zero context for each of their 1k cases, so they default to accepting the bots judgement. Which in turn feedback to the bot, justifying it's actions.

It might depend on popularity and download count. I am sure if there are some issues with Facebook app, they won't have to talk to a bot and they won't be banned in 12 hours.
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