541–550 of 665 posts
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Try Flutter! Great SDK to get started with mobile development, and dart is a really nice language
Having tried neither, Flutter sounds like the polar opposite of both the experience and capability that GP mentioned. I'm sure it's nice but can it be developed interactively in a PC browser as described above?
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I think your thoughts on this are plausible, if not likely. However, the usual complete lack of communication by google is the actual problem. Perhaps droidscripts could mitigate googles concerns, if they had the decency to explain them.
But if they do, a malicious actor can use that information to circumvent their restrictions, and its their walled garden, so they have very little incentive to tell everyone exactly what they don't like.
This is the epitome of security by obscurity.
This is the same story that HN readers have read hundreds of times over the past couple of years, just with different subjects. Independent developer/small organization gets their app/YouTube channel/Google account shut down overnight because of false positives triggered by their system. It takes weeks and insistence with bots to just get to speak to a human. When you get to speak to a human, they usually respond wit…
TL;DR: They are being accused of ad fraud, without any evidence provided, and they are asked to reply with an analysis of why they think their traffic ?? is legit (when they have no idea what is it that Google considered "not legitimate"). The biggest issue here I don't think is the malware tag, but the ad fraud accusation. Even thought as somebody pointed out the page linked can be biased, based only on what they st…
the ad-fraud accusation is my biggest concern as well. they provide no information or clues leaving the author to guess. the author guesses that somehow someone extracted their identifiers from the apk. google comes back and says more clearly that it's something to do with how the ads are positioned, essentially accusing them of trying to trick people to accidentally click. this information should have been provided…
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A valid explanation, but not one I believe applies here. This ban is not only not explaining how it detected unwanted activity, it is not explaining what activity it detected. "We detected you faking ad impressions, though we won't tell you how we (believe we) know" is very different to "We detected you (or your app) doing something wrong, stop doing it and you will be fine. We won't tell you what you did wrong".
"Our ML system registered a hit on your account, which is almost always associated with policy violations, but we don't know what the trigger was, or why that set of data about your account is almost always associated with policy violations... it just is."
AdSense is the product where Google pays you for running banner ads; they can and frequently do kick people off of it for secret reasons. When my company was kicked off of AdSense back in 2010, I wrote about it extensively. https://www.choiceofgames.com/2010/08/were-banned-from-googl...
Google will never tell you why they ban people from AdSense, and there's no effective way to appeal. (They have an "appeal" process, but what are you supposed to write in the appeal when the charges against you are secret?!)
At least we can still publish Android apps, right? (We now run Facebook ads instead.)
But Google's email to DroidScript saying that the DroidScript app was removed from Google Play Store for "Ad Fraud" says otherwise.
Publishing status: Suspended
Your app has been suspended and removed due to a policy violation.
Reasons of violation
APK:206 Ad Fraud
App violates Ad Fraud policy.
If Google ever yanked our Android app over "ad fraud," we'd have no recourse. We've appealed our AdSense rejection a dozen times over the last 10 years and we always get a form letter rejection. We have no idea what they think we did wrong, and we never will, so we can never fix it.
Thank god we don't run AdSense ads anymore. Based on this, I never want to run them again!
This is the same story that HN readers have read hundreds of times over the past couple of years, just with different subjects. Independent developer/small organization gets their app/YouTube channel/Google account shut down overnight because of false positives triggered by their system. It takes weeks and insistence with bots to just get to speak to a human. When you get to speak to a human, they usually respond wit…
Google is 1/2 of the mobile duopoly. No app developer can avoid Google Play Store (for publishing their apps) and Firebase Cloud Messaging (for sending push notifications to their apps).
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Are Play Store regulations the only defense against this kind of attack? If so, then yikes!
Android's fine-grained permissions system isn't a good fit for something like Droidscript; one script could use a permission for valid reasons, then another could do something bad.
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Are you serious? It takes a minute to disassemble literally any APK with AdMob SDK and abuse their ID's. These values are not secrets. If a billion dollar company like Google can't detect simple fraudulent activity like this, how are their ads supposed to be worth a single dollar?
> how are their ads supposed to be worth a single dollar? Hard truth: a lot of internet ads is fraud. With paper, radio and TV, any ad buyer can cheaply verify that their ad spending ends up where it should by buying a paper at a random train station or listening to the airwaves. On the Internet, it's worse than the Wild West, with fraud and deception on every part of the chain.
Good luck verifying that the FM radio station you bought as spots on really averages 150,000 concurrent listeners. Sure, you know your ad was there, but that doesn't help you.
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I used to work detecting ad fraud. Publishers would do bad things, call in, and try to get their account rep to get details. Obviously I can't say "of the last 2500 ad clicks zero of them had any mouse movement over the ad before the click event" because then the publisher obviously just fixes their fraud software. This isn't specific to Google or even advertising. Every company has figured out when dealing with abus…
What about false positives? How did you account for that?
There are literally no false positives. It may be fraud, it may be the ad is too close to a back button and gets accidently clicked, it could be the ads don't display right. But at the end of the day, it is a revenue decision.