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Tusky has been removed from the Play Store

chaos.social

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Re: Tusky has been removed from the Play Store

#3
See also when the Matrix client Element was removed in a similar fashion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25964226

I think it would be best to rename this submission to "Tusky (Mastodon app) suspended from Google Play Store" because people who do not use Mastodon have no context for what Tusky is.

Re: Tusky has been removed from the Play Store

#4
post #3

See also when the Matrix client Element was removed in a similar fashion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25964226 I think it would be best to rename this submission to "Tusky (Mastodon app) suspended from Google Play Store" because people who do not use Mastodon have no context for what Tusky is.

Right, thanks for the hint. Title has been changed.

Re: Tusky has been removed from the Play Store

#6
post #2

You know what I am going to say... Google Play is owned by Google and is a private platform. They can remove, ban, suspend any app or app update they want when it breaks their policies. That is tough.

Ostensibly, you are correct. However, an increased problem of app curation is that, all too often, perfectly innocent apps can get caught in the cross-fire of bad automation.

The fact that most people get their apps from one of two app stores (Google Play, App Store) makes this situation somewhat worse for people that effectively develop apps for the platform in their spare time. There are alternatives, like F-Droid...but, it's still not the same as mainstream distribution.

Re: Tusky has been removed from the Play Store

#7
Seems pretty obvious what the problem is to me...

The privacy policy should have a button saying "I accept and understand the privacy policy, now sign me up". Instead the actual button is just "Sign up". That language doesn't meet the store policy.

Simple issue with a simple solution.

Re: Tusky has been removed from the Play Store

#9

Seems pretty obvious what the problem is to me... The privacy policy should have a button saying "I accept and understand the privacy policy, now sign me up". Instead the actual button is just "Sign up". That language doesn't meet the store policy. Simple issue with a simple solution.

I mean, in practice that would probably work. But an interesting caveat is that apps for federated networks don't typically have one singular privacy policy. It varies server by server. Architecturally, this is a different beast than having a client for a specific service, like Twitter.

I guess they could probably get around it by showing an instance's policies prior to user registration, but not every server actually has them, or needs to (in the case of self-hosted servers)

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