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Our app was banned because the button says “Report User” and not just “Report”

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Re: Our app was banned because the button says “Report User” and not just “Report”

#31

Daily reminder that your business/project/hobby should not depend on anything controlled by Google. Edit: Despite all their shortcomings, I wouldn't mind seeing android phone makers join force and create an independent app store.

Yeah, SEO has become hell hole in the last 6 months. Crippled businesses across the board from what I've seen and heard on the grape vine.

After 8 years of SEO expertise I honestly can say that there's nothing about SEO these days that makes sense, pages are not being indexed for weeks at a time, spam/crap at the top result. Throw in the endless (and ambiguous) requirements to adhere to the mighty G's requirements.

Re: Our app was banned because the button says “Report User” and not just “Report”

#32
For those not from South Africa, this app is primarily for people to be able to get notifications or look up when their area will be affected by a "planned power outage", or as Eskom (our state owned power utility) refers to it, "load shedding". "Load shedding" is enacted whenever they have a power production capacity issue where different areas take turns without power so as to not let the power grid collapse.

This app aggregates information from various data sources and provides push notifications too. It is without a doubt the best source of this information and the app being unavailable significantly affects the day to day lives of a significant portion of the South African population who use it to plan around these power outages.

While the app also has a "chat" feature, it's really tangental to the primary purpose of the app and I expect that most users of the app, like myself, don't use that feature at all and only care about knowing when they will be without electricity.

In case you're wondering why they hell we have load shedding, it's because Eskom is grossly incompetent. Their incompetence is hugely exacerbated by nepitism and corruption where government has historically appointed people to Eskom management positions solely as "favours", rather than on qualification for the job.

Re: Our app was banned because the button says “Report User” and not just “Report”

#33
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same is true for Facebook. My website and ad accounts were banned one day without a reason. They said it did not meet community standards. There has been no recourse since 2 years.

I once tried to advertise on facebook. I was editing my ad, and when I was trying upload an image or something, it went into some sort of infinite loop of trying to reload the page. Then, seconds later, it was banned, taking down my business page and my personal account as well. Still down after two years and going through their "appeals" process, which involves trying to log in with my old password, saying it was a…

There is no appeals process unfortunately. For the past 2 years I have been asking for an update regularly and the only response I get is an automated response saying that they have checked my ad account and there is nothing they can do about it.

My website is still blocked by Facebook's sharing debugger and my ad accounts with balance in them have been blocked without a reason given.

Re: Our app was banned because the button says “Report User” and not just “Report”

#34
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same is true for Facebook. My website and ad accounts were banned one day without a reason. They said it did not meet community standards. There has been no recourse since 2 years.

I once tried to advertise on facebook. I was editing my ad, and when I was trying upload an image or something, it went into some sort of infinite loop of trying to reload the page. Then, seconds later, it was banned, taking down my business page and my personal account as well. Still down after two years and going through their "appeals" process, which involves trying to log in with my old password, saying it was a…

I got banned from Gumtree for a similar system. I was using a script blocker, uMatrix (but have since stopped because of the hassle), and the site wasn't coded to handle something with reCAPTCHAs not loading and the error messages were useless. Support said it's an automated system and for contacting them about the ban, they blocked my email as well.

Re: Our app was banned because the button says “Report User” and not just “Report”

#35

This is the other side of the Play-store problem. The other side is the tax. Play store employee can ban your app = destroy your business at any time. The reason can be 'new policy', 'misunderstanding' or something more problematic, such as influence from your competitor to the employee. A 'power to destroy business', should not be a click away from some random employee.

"they should have built their own phone with their own app store" - the hn community, when it suited their political agenda

What political agenda?

Re: Our app was banned because the button says “Report User” and not just “Report”

#36

A lot of crying from the dev in these tweets, but has he considered that Google has a valid point? A button which appears to "report user" but really "reports content" is a big no-no in 2021, where being able to report user content is very important in a legal sense. It just feels like immature whining to me.

The point is not whether Google has or not a point regarding UX, but more about banning the app and giving extra work to the team during a weekend.

This is the kinda thing that could have been handled by "please submit another version with the correct text ASAP or we'll ban you in X days".

Re: Our app was banned because the button says “Report User” and not just “Report”

#37
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's unrealistic if your target is android phones. You can wax poetic about the idea of an independent app store all you want, it doesn't change the facts on the ground in the current moment.

Or you can just make a web app. Unless you are doing games or anything requiring lower-level hardware access, like a bluetooth scanner or something.

Why stop there? Web apps can trivially be taken down if your domain registrar, hosting provider, datacenter partner or payment solution decides to kick you out.

Re: Our app was banned because the button says “Report User” and not just “Report”

#38

A lot of crying from the dev in these tweets, but has he considered that Google has a valid point? A button which appears to "report user" but really "reports content" is a big no-no in 2021, where being able to report user content is very important in a legal sense. It just feels like immature whining to me.

This feels like a minor point even if it's valid. This is like allowing the police to confiscate your car for a single defective bulb.

Re: Our app was banned because the button says “Report User” and not just “Report”

#39
post #18

Daily reminder that your business/project/hobby should not depend on anything controlled by Google. Edit: Despite all their shortcomings, I wouldn't mind seeing android phone makers join force and create an independent app store.

The same is true for Facebook. My website and ad accounts were banned one day without a reason. They said it did not meet community standards. There has been no recourse since 2 years.

You do have a recourse, same as with any other business: you can always take them to court.

Re: Our app was banned because the button says “Report User” and not just “Report”

#40
post #26

Daily reminder that your business/project/hobby should not depend on anything controlled by Google. Edit: Despite all their shortcomings, I wouldn't mind seeing android phone makers join force and create an independent app store.

There's already F-Droid and the Amazon App store.

f-droid doesn't have payments, Amazon is yet another faceless mega-corp that has had its fair share of sellers accusing them of various shady things.

Creating a Play Store alternative is hard for many reasons:

1) finance: the more countries you operate in, the messier it becomes. International taxes are one hard mess, KYC/AML regulations differ between countries, and to top it off there is the whole "international sanctions" issue especially regarding Iran (where it's fine and explicitly encouraged by the EU to do business with Iran, but any entity that has US exposure exposes themselves to liability in the US for violations).

2) vetting of apps against a constant onslaught of spam, malware, copyright violations: f-droid has it a bit easier since they require all apps be open source, but a commercial, widely used alternative will have to run static analysis, dynamic analysis (to catch runtime exploit attempts) and manual testing. All of this is expensive and requires expert knowledge of Android as well as IT security.

3) Implementation and hosting: an app store worth its name has a lot of binary assets to distribute to users (and again, you have to avoid getting into trouble with people abusing your service to spread illegal content, because there will be such cases rather sooner than later), the store itself has to be implemented, regularly adapted to account for changes in the Android core, you definitely want a focus on security to avoid some hacker distributing malware to all your users with a push...

4) Customer and developer support: it's a well-known meme that FB/Amazon/Twitter/Google are almost impossible to reach for ordinary people without raising a shitstorm on Hacker News or a well-funded lawyer team... but the key thing is, support is expensive to run.

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