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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

#261

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…

> Something has changed dramatically at the company in the last 5 years

Founders effectively retired. Google has a new CEO

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

#262
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…

> Our client was perfectly reputable, ran multi million dollar ad campaigns on television and radio, and was FDA approved.

I’m not trying to be a jerk here, but it sounds like your client is selling dietary supplements which Google has been (IMO rightfully) aggressively removing.

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

#263

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.

This is why I moved my clients off G-Suite and onto Zoho. And it's why where possible, I advise people to build clean web-based mobile apps which do not require a "store".

Since we have no practical alternative to Play Store and Apple Store for native phone apps, we'll just have to settle for slightly fewer features and slightly less performance with non-native apps. (And no, sideloading isn't an option. Most users are barely able to install a native app via a link directly to their store.)

For Google, it's simply not worth their time to maintain a staff of humans to prevent these false negatives. They are not committed to the app developers just as they are not committed to their non-government G-Suite clients. They are committed to their primary revenue streams. And the reason they can simply not care about some human losses (stories like TFA) is because they are a monopoly when it comes to Android apps. And while Amazon is not an admirable company at all (based on how it treats its sellers or low level employees), their cloud business seems to have more human oversight - or at least a less heavy-handed automated banning system.

Google's behavior will continue to be profitable enough that they won't change it... for many years, or until the regulators come at them. Since the US regulators are now almost entirely corporate lobbyists themselves, we'll have to depend on the EU to fight it. (And since the EU is becoming corporatized as well, the window of opportunity is shrinking.)

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

#264
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…

> Our client was perfectly reputable, ran multi million dollar ad campaigns on television and radio, and was FDA approved. I’m not trying to be a jerk here, but it sounds like your client is selling dietary supplements which Google has been (IMO rightfully) aggressively removing.

I won't argue your point. I think Google should remove those.

However it would be nice if Google at least made an attempt to explain to people why they are banking them. And an appeals process.

Right now this is basically the wild west with if sherif says it, it is reality. We need more of a due process.

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

#265
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This also makes me feel even more strongly that the FTC should really clamp down on these very strict app stores. https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/amicus_briefs/app... Both the App Store and Google Play stores I think are basically illegal monopolies. I should be able to install whatever app I want, without having to jailbreak my phone and deal with warranty nonsense from the manufacturer. Just like my comp…

This suggests you do not understand what "monopoly" means. Apple's iOS model is a feature, not a bug. If you are unhappy with the app rules there, or with Apple being the curator of what's available, then iOS isn't for you.

Apple is more like a government regulating a market. Going somewhere else is possible in theory, but in practice not really.

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

#266
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. Upton Sinclair

I work at Google because they pay me money that I can donate [1] and I wouldn't work here if I thought that was making the world worse. [2] I left Google in 2017 to work for a startup I thought was more positive than earning to give [3] and then I rejoined later that year after the startup didn't pan out. [4] I'm open to arguments that I should be doing something else with my time!

[1] https://jefftk.com/donations

[2] https://jefftk.com/p/value-of-working-in-ads

[3] https://jefftk.com/p/leaving-google-joining-wave

[4] https://jefftk.com/p/rejoining-google

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

#267
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…

> Our client was perfectly reputable, ran multi million dollar ad campaigns on television and radio, and was FDA approved. I’m not trying to be a jerk here, but it sounds like your client is selling dietary supplements which Google has been (IMO rightfully) aggressively removing.

Yeah, that's what I got out of it too. As soon as I hit "FDA approved" I had to pause and consider that maybe Google isn't the bad guy here.

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

#268

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, s…

Please don’t abbreviate as H1. It messes up my pronunciation of the Hackerone program. Hackerone rhymes with macaroni.

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

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happens to me all the time now too. Even when I put the phrase in quotes it still omits words or says "search for X, do your really want to search for Y" But maybe our use cases are the outliers, and the new search is what works for most people.

> But maybe our use cases are the outliers, and the new search is what works for most people. I think it's a probability problem more often expressed in terms of medical tests / false positives. If a million people search for but 1% of those make a typo and search for instead, whereas a thousand people deliberately search for , Google's observation of a search for is 90% likely to be a typo. However well-intentioned,…

I just tried "wrod". Google asks if I meant "word", but it does perform a search for "wrod".

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

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does matter, even if they used bots, The bot would detect something. The bot would go through some rules to determine what it would flag. The bot should report on it. We detected something suspicious about your ads. We detected that you're abusing the battery life. We detected adult contect. Give them something! Even a clue!

The code is probably in place to do that, but it probably errors out and no one who needs access to those logs has access or knowledge of them, and the humans handling appeals are probably siloed off from the bots and devs, so they think things are fine, and the devs think things are fine, since no one is complaining.
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