Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by maehwasu » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 10:12 AM UTC

huffmsa wrote: post #119

Seems to me that Google is turning on a lot of deep learning models in production which aren't production ready. Search has gone to shit recently. Image search is hot garbage for anything but images with well known people / places / things. You can't reliably filter or sort news results by date. YouTube is filtering pro LGBT content but allowing weird Eastern European pedo videos. The play store is apparently moderat…

This sounds like exactly what you'd expect from a company that is bleeding talent and morale.

Note: I do not have any information that that is what is happening in Google; I'm just saying what my guess would be if I were presented the situation as "these are the symptoms at Company X. What is the problem?"

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

#152

Post by jefftk » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 10:13 AM UTC

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…

> People who work at Google know they are working for a terrible company doing terrible things

I work at Google, and I don't think it's terrible. Neither do most of my coworkers. There are things I wish were better, and things I'm working on improving, but overall I think Google's impact on the world is strongly positive.

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

#153

Post by master-litty » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 10:15 AM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #62

pnw_hazor wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Goog employees, several who comment here at HN, could stop it tomorrow. Not plebes like you and me.

If you think you can solve it, come apply for a job at Google. This kind of thing is a seriously hard thing to police in a fair and reasonable way. Real spammers have become very sophisticated, and separating them from good users is very very difficult. Many bots steal real human accounts for their nefarious behaviour. Human review of accounts doesn't help much either - you simply can't allow a human to delve through…

I had an on-site with Google last year and didn't quite make it in.

Since then I've noticed HN has an aggressively negative opinion on Google's general affairs, and most of it makes sense on the surface. It almost feels like I dodged a bullet.

But comments like these shine a completely different perspective. The OP's story is extremely frustrating but it doesn't seem to stem from a lack of care, in your eyes.

If someone were really motivated to solve problems in that area, do you really feel they would be given the time to explore it? I get the impression these sort of projects would be underprioritized.

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

#154

Post by jstanley » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 10:19 AM UTC

andrewfelix wrote: post #57

"I don’t think my app is deceiving Google Play Store". I feel like there's more to this story.

That strikes me more as the "100% literally correct" wording common of technical people, rather than the "just about honest enough that it's not fraudulent" wording that you seem to be suggesting. I think his app is genuinely not deceptive.

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

#155

Post by tommilukkarinen » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 10:23 AM UTC

We has a small niche product in Google Play, worked 100% offline, so quite secure for the user privacy and so on, had ratings of about 3.7. The service had generated about $30.000 and would have generated another $30.000 in it's lifetime, unless Google had, quite unjustly, taken it out spring 2019. When we tried to discuss about it, we got what we understood was a threat to close our account. Obviously we talked to some person, I wonder if he had been told to treat us like sh or if there was some other reason. Obviously, for the next apps, we are thinking furiously on how to not be dependent on app stores.

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

#156

Post by ddalex » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 10:25 AM UTC

feanaro wrote: post #108

ddalex wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Play Store developers are not users - they are customers for the Play Store product. Nobody is forcing them to develop for Play Store; or to use Ad Sense or any other Google product.

When you're starting your relationship, it's very clear (in the ToS) that they can reject your apps or terminate the relationship however they choose. If they would start quitting developing for Play Store because of these opaque rules, perhaps Google will listen to them. But reality shows that this problem doesn't happen often enough, so the opaque filters work as intended.

So yes, I advise that, if you don't like the rules of Google, don't go play with them. It's the only thing that can change the rules of Google. (and FB, Amazon, etc).

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

#157

Post by jacobush » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 10:25 AM UTC

janoc wrote: post #136

jacobush wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Most device manufacturers do not provide updates for Android on time" Only because Google lets the device manufacturers off the hook. It's a problem of Googles own invention. Trading away customer security for market share. Adding: very successfully too, this isn't the first time I hear how you should almost feel sorry for Google that they have to put so much into google services instead of Android, all because of t…

True. And about as helpful as offering a coat to a dead man. It is not a problem that is retroactively fixable by other means than by what they are doing now. They could take Android closed source and put a restrictive license on it demanding that timely updates as a condition of use. All that would achieve is that the large vendors will either stick with the old, still free to use, Android or start working on their…

Everything you said rings true, except the part about proprietary license. That's orthogonal to enforcing updates. That is a contractual issue, not a licensing issue.

Google could for instance not allow the manufacturer to connect to their Google Play store unless the manufacturer played ball.

But where does this all put us? We are OK with crap, insecure devices being shoved all over the markets? What can be done.

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

#158

Post by Crinus » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 10:36 AM UTC

aviraldg wrote: post #115

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.

What you call dark patterns are ways to ensure users don't accidentally load malware onto their device. They can definitely do better though - I think a good first step would a dialog to choose trusted alternative app stores such that installing apps does not require a separate confirmation step (as is currently the case.) The Google Play Services moves are unfortunate, but required. Most device manufacturers do not…

> What you call dark patterns are ways to ensure users don't accidentally load malware onto their device.

They are still dark patterns, that they also have found excuses for those dark patterns does not make them any better. In fact most of the stuff (not just Google's) we see nowadays that take control away from the users - very often in ways that entrench monopolies and the status quo - use "but security" as their primary defense.

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

#159

Post by tomohawk » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 10:42 AM UTC

Guilty until you prove yourself innocent. It's efficient, but unethical and immoral.

Requiring large entities such as government or monopolies to consider you innocent until proven guilty in a 3rd party controlled system, such as a court, is a fundamentally important check on power.

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

#160

Post by tapland » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 10:46 AM UTC

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…

Two of the admins in our new WoW-guild got banned by Discord for inviting guild applicants (who had submitted forms asking to be invited) to our server.

After a few messages there is phone verification and then after continuing to send out the accounts were banned. Contacting support was just a big 'we confirm the terms of service breach and we so not reinstate accounts'.

Those accounts were in some cases the sole admins of discord communities, and the ToS breach can't have been of anything specified in the ToS, but just falls under 'anything we decide in addition'.

But there is no alternative service people want to use.