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

Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

blog.pushbullet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 811 posts

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#131

Post by foobarbazetc »

lol.

We have the same problem, but on the Google Play Store.

We have an brand name app used by millions of people. We uploaded an update where the only change was a new Firebase library.

Google rejected the update for vague reasons (“violation of Google Play policies” but not telling us which one).

Appealing the rejection, the CSR just pasted the vague policy thing back at us. We asked for more information and they just closed the ticket.

So we took the exact build that was accepted, incremented the version number, and uploaded that. Rejected again.

And there’s no real human to talk to.

No idea what’s going on at Google.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#132

Post by crazygringo »

I understand that with many spam-related heuristics, a company like Google chooses not to share exactly why a site or e-mail server is blacklisted -- because an actual spammer can evade that metric and still get away with everything.

But I don't believe that thinking applies whatsoever to apps or extensions. There are far fewer of them and parties need to work together. It's unfathomable to me why Google doesn't point out which specific permissions a reviewer has flagged as suspect, or given an option for the developer to give the justification specific to each option.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#133

Post by nikolay »

Google are cutting the branch they are sitting on. I only use Chrome because certain extensions are not available on Firefox. During all these years, they've become impossible to deal with. I open Chrome with 10 tabs and after a couple of hours it's using gigabytes of RAM. From a thin client, it became the thickest client in the visible universe. It's time to consider options... not that there are many.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#134

Post by freehunter »

wlesieutre wrote: post #36
Baeocystin wrote: post #11

Another long-term PushBullet customer here. Anyone at Google who is listening- this kind of behavior kills my desire to continue using your products dead. I need functionality, of the type PushBullet has provided for years, to do my work. The recent nerfing of ublock origin has already had me feeling iffy on things. Behavior like this is simply unacceptable. If you want people to use your services, you need to have s…

Chrome is a trivially easy product to switch off of compared to other Google properties like Gmail and YouTube. Have you tried Firefox recently?

I've found the exact opposite to be true in my very specific experience. Five years ago I used every Google product under the sun, today the only Google product I use at all (even search) is Chrome because it's the only one I haven't been able to replace.

I try Firefox with a fresh install on nearly every major release and I keep it installed as a secondary browser, but I can never manage to use it as my daily browser. For whatever reason, none of my company's (major tech company but not a competitor to Mozilla in any way) internal web pages load in Firefox. No error, no warning, nothing in the console, just zero content. Blank page. I've tried it on two computers with the same result and just nothing. No extensions installed, nothing I've installed on my network or computer to block anything. It just doesn't load anything.

On the other hand I keep Firefox installed because Chrome refuses to load my dev environment with a self-signed certificate. Firefox will let me click "I accept the risk" but Chrome just refuses to load with a self-signed cert.

I'd love to use just one (preferably Firefox) but I guess the web is still hard to get right.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#135

Post by tomsmeding »

celticninja wrote: post #92
jonny_eh wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Email me pat [at] trypigeon [dot] co and I can send you some of the things I did that maybe have helped. Please post here so everyone else can learn too.

I assume GP is trying not to help those the automated system intends to catch

Or, of course, said poster would like the maintainers of the automated system not to realise the workarounds for their system. :)

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#136

Post by stingraycharles »

thorum wrote: post #94

Does your browser extension really need to access localhost/* - as in, port 80 on my local machine? That would make me very uncomfortable about installing the extension. Would it be possible to restrict the extension to accessing a specific port or endpoint that is used by PushBullet?

This is a very good suggestion, and could very well be the root cause of these rejections. It’s a potential security vulnerability that is triggering the violation.

I hope the author sees thorum’s comment!

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#138

Post by freehunter »

jpalomaki wrote: post #107
gowld wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't Google provide support instead of vague threats? Provide a permissions audit tool, recommend ways to reduce permissions, provide a dev tool to automatically report on permissions that haven't been used while running an extension. Is banning someone's entire Google account across all services a proportionate response to a developmer having trouble with Google's confusing permissions API?

Usual answer is that this would make it easier for malicious actors to bypass the limitations. Likely there is some automated system running these checks.

Security through obscurity is no security at all.

Edit - this is a basic principle of security: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#139

Post by bzb3 »

freehunter wrote: post #134
wlesieutre wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome is a trivially easy product to switch off of compared to other Google properties like Gmail and YouTube. Have you tried Firefox recently?

I've found the exact opposite to be true in my very specific experience. Five years ago I used every Google product under the sun, today the only Google product I use at all (even search) is Chrome because it's the only one I haven't been able to replace. I try Firefox with a fresh install on nearly every major release and I keep it installed as a secondary browser, but I can never manage to use it as my daily browse…

You can bypass the Chrome dialog by typing "thisisunsafe" in the error page.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#140

Post by jmiserez »

majewsky wrote: post #78
djannzjkzxn wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the more limited use case of “get a link from a desktop to my phone right now” I have really enjoyed using an extension on the desktop browser that pops up a QR code linking to the current tab. Then I just point my phone camera at the QR code on the monitor to open the link on my phone. I like this setup because it doesn’t require any pre-configuration to link the desktop and the phone. Your friend sitting next t…

I use wl-paste | qrencode -s 20 -o - | display - for this purpose. Shows the contents of the current Wayland clipboard as a QR code. For X11, replace `wl-paste` with `xsel -b`.

Oooh nice. Better yet, you can show that QR code directly in the terminal:

  qrencode -t ansiutf8 google.com
Looks identical. In WSL, you can use 'powershell.exe Get-Clipboard':

  powershell.exe Get-Clipboard | qrencode -t ansiutf8
Post reply on HN