61–70 of 197 posts
Getting boned because of the inability of the English language to distinguish between free and free, that's a new ring of machine learning hell.
The play store review program is there to serve the installing users, not the app authors, so even a high rate of obvious false positives is probably considered acceptable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is astonishing is that despite the scale at which they operate we rarely hear about the problems. False positives seem to be ridiculously low.
Is it really rarely? I feel like I'm hearing about it all the time. The comments in this thread reenforce this feeling. Having to make it to HN frontpage to get support from Google seems also a much too common occurrence. My assessment would be false positives are way too high and customer support is close to non-existent. And we're hearing only about a tiny fraction of the problems with the majority being stuck in c…
Interestingly enough, back in the day Google used to be a darling of HN community. I suspect folks might be disappointed to see how things turned out at the end.
ugh, that's annoying.. At least you made it onto HackerNews, so your problem might get silently resolved in the shadows It really sucks that Google can't be bothered to provide 5 minutes of human support despite taking such an enormous cut of all revenue from these apps
1. It wouldn’t be 5 minutes. This could easily take hours to resolve. 2. Even with human support, companies like this would continue to be incentivised not to share what exactly triggered the ban in order to protect their systems from spam and abuse. You can’t provide services to billions of people without automation. 3. Human reviews would be performed by humans. Have you ever met humans? You’re replacing an imperfe…
If your program is abusive, have the abuser remove the function until it's no longer abusive. The entire we cant tell you does seem like crap.
So, the relevant bit from the Play Store policy documents is probably: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ... That policy seems very reasonable. Is the policy being misapplied here? Hard to say, since it's describing the spirit of the rules rather than an exhaustive list of specific violations. It doesn't seem that anything in the title would be misleading. But the original title is kind of i…
Just call it the Card Wallet and be done with it.
I'm genuinely interested in hearing from people who believe that Apple and Google should have a monopoly on deciding what apps people can run on their phones. In case of Google's Android, one can still install third party App Stores, even they take away auto-updates and such. Apple is a much worse offender. In either case, why does anyone think that they should have a monopoly there and why is nothing being done to f…
I'm old. I like that I can generally trust installing apps on my phone because Apple vets them. It is one less thing for me to think about.
Likewise, I have young children. I also like that I can generally install an age appropriate app for them, because Apple's vetting process. Again one less thing for me to think about.
On the flip side, I banned the kids youtube app, until Google came down hard and removed ads and started moderating videos aimed at kids. Prior to that, it's algorithm was serving up highly questionable content to kids. Now, I feel more confident letting my kids watch videos on Kids Youtube (though I typically have the sound off...)
My experience of Google Play is that it is 100% corrupted. I worked with companies that tried to get their apps back onto Google Play for YEARS without success. How do you solve something like “this app is not compliant with program X” when the app was never registered for that program for just that reason? …and the "support".
ugh, that's annoying.. At least you made it onto HackerNews, so your problem might get silently resolved in the shadows It really sucks that Google can't be bothered to provide 5 minutes of human support despite taking such an enormous cut of all revenue from these apps
1. It wouldn’t be 5 minutes. This could easily take hours to resolve. 2. Even with human support, companies like this would continue to be incentivised not to share what exactly triggered the ban in order to protect their systems from spam and abuse. You can’t provide services to billions of people without automation. 3. Human reviews would be performed by humans. Have you ever met humans? You’re replacing an imperfe…
That's kind of true but I think that a company the size of Google could afford to assign someone to look into providing more information in a scenario like, "you are using geo-location without asking permission". Since the need for permission is not a secret, telling the vendor this causes less friction and makes people hate you a bit less.
Sure, you might also have a "secret" system that does something like "if failed 5 times in a row, blacklist them" but that is just security by obscurity and doesn't seem to stop that many people. Also, in the case where the vendor is an easily verifiable company selling, presumably, something that is fairly easy to view/check, it doesn't seem to be asking for much to either get a human or to get some automated messages.
Apparently they employ 140K people! That is a lot of people to not provide any human support.
I have the same experience with the Google Play Store. For all the complaints people have about the Apple App Store, at least their reviewers are human and you can discuss things with them. And they block updates but don't remove the app without warning! My experience with the Google Play store: I get an email on a friday night after working hours stating that the app of my company was removed after a routine check a…
The Play reviewer took down the app because they thought they needed sign-in information to test it (like the OP). However, this was based on a misunderstanding of some menu item in the app - the app, in fact, is perfectly usable without signing in.
I replied to the original email I had received about the problem, and... A few days later, a real human replied that they agreed with my take, and had removed the objection. However, they had found other policy violations, regarding the maturity rating viz-a-viz the app contents (it's a game). They included screen shots, showing that they had not only played the game, but pretty thoroughly, too.
Again, I followed the recommendations to comply (went over the rating wizard) and requested a re-evaluation. This was done a day later and the app re-instated. Done.
I was super surprised about how well the process worked. I even went through the trouble of completing their little support survey with praise. I had been bracing myself for a Kafkaesque nightmare when the app was taken down, considering just how many app updates Google reviewers must be going through on a daily basis, and I'm pretty sure each violation is met with some sort of discussion from the developer's side. Not to mention the reputation Google has earned for support. It goes to show that people have different experiences, and not all of them are negative.
EDIT: Just wanted to add that I don't think the OP's story is particularly egregious either. So Google auto-translates your app title? I guess you opted into this somewhere, at least they don't do this for my app. And I would never assume that Google would sit and hand-translate app titles to every language. And in either case, it actually looks like OP got timely and fairly accurate advice. I must sound like some starry-eyed Google fanboy, but I'm really not, just not seeing it here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah they only review when you make a new release, so maybe these apps just haven't been updated in a while
"Text Free - Call and Text Now" Updated January 10, 2022 "Free Now" - Update January 11, 2022 Many other examples have recent updates too.
But yeah - the rules seem quite arbitrarily enforced.
As said in other discussions about Google - I decided to untangle my life from Google further. Quite hard actually as I am a paying GSuite customer and a lot of stuff actually is tied to this account. :-(