It just amazes me that developers try to cram editorializing into the title of the app, when you're already given a search word field and a description field in which to tell the world about your app. IRL nobody searches for "Cheerios - Toasted Whole Grain Oat Cereal for the Whole Family".
Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
81–90 of 197 posts
Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#82I 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…
I swear I am not a Google plant. I JUST went through the same process the OP did (literally yesterday). 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,…
> So Google auto-translates your app title? I guess you opted into this somewhere, at least they don't do this for my app.
The way I understood it, what they are actually doing is auto-translating the localised (by the developer) title back to English for the purpose of running automated checks on it, and rejecting based on this automatic translation turning a word that implies nothing about price in the original language into the English word "free".
Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#83Earlier 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…
No post body was provided.
Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
HM is a bubble with bias against Google. People here seem to believe that bashing this company publicly will somehow change how they operate. 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.
Well, yeah. I too am in the bubble of realistic experience of having apps repeatedly pulled out from underneath me.
Excuse me for being in that bubble.
Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#85which one is more incompetent as a service company - Amazon, Google, Facebook, or Apple? I think my ranking would be Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, but that is not so much decided via any sort of logical evaluation but only due to my feeling on the matter.
I think AWS is the best, but only because you can have a paid support plan, and real humans will reply to your support requests.
I've used Amazon support proper for Fire TV stick issues and a human (via chat) was able to resolve my problem relatively quickly and painlessly.
Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
HM is a bubble with bias against Google. People here seem to believe that bashing this company publicly will somehow change how they operate. 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.
It's almost as if over a decade or more if time that people can see the result of behavior they didn't see as problematic initially.
Or that google might have changed how they operate in small ways as they are steered differently.
Expecting any one person to still have the same opinion of any one other person a decade later might be asking a lot. It's nothing strange that a community of people would have differing thoughts on a whole company of people and product and policies.
Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you realistically solve this problem? Part of what makes these platforms so attractive to the end user is in fact app curation. Strict control over APIs and power usage, all sorts of minimum standards and mandatory integrations are contributing enormous value to these ecosystems.
What makes these platforms attractive to the end user is that they're the only things available for sale down at the phone store. And what makes the decision between the two available choices is what your friends have, or what you already have, or what's on sale, or about a trillion other things that are more likely to be "top of mind" for the average buyer. I bet not one user in 1000 gives any thought to "app curati…
I very much appreciate how freely I can install apps from the app store. I hear about, I install it, I try it out, no worries. Whereas without curation I'd spend twenty minutes making sure it was mentioned by multiple sites or people I trust and doing a set of web searches to check for reports of malicious behavior, and I'd still worry about it, especially about updates. Putting out a good, well-behaved app and then putting out a malicious update that is required for the app to work with the latest OS update would be a common malware vector.
I'd probably uninstall half my apps every major OS update. How often do I use this app? Once a month? Is it worth doing a few quick web searches to see if the latest update is malicious? Nah, just delete it. I can do without.
Once or twice I've had to install a major OS update just a few days after it was released, which would mean no time for other people to discover malicious app updates. What would I do then? Just roll the dice? What if the initial update is fine, but then a week later it's replaced with a malicious one, to catch people who put off updating?
Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#88I'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…
How would you realistically solve this problem? Part of what makes these platforms so attractive to the end user is in fact app curation. Strict control over APIs and power usage, all sorts of minimum standards and mandatory integrations are contributing enormous value to these ecosystems.
I would not mind my apps on iOS being curated by Microsoft for example and some people would probably prefer their apps on Android devices being curated by Apple... or Microsoft or EFF or Mozilla or Signal or say a new community of volunteers who come together just for this purpose.
It could also be that I trust a group of vendors while I don't trust some others as a user. For example, someone would maybe want their Android apps to be delivered by Apple, Samsung and Mozilla... but not by Google or Amazon for example.
The phone makers could still control their frontends and interface of their stores as they please... but to absolutely not allow certain apps from vendors altogether even if the user REALLY wants to install it on their device is a completely different thing (which is the case now as far as Apple is concerned).
Note: In the above examples when I am naming companies and organizations, I'm imagining a world where any of these companies can have hosting service for their own curated list of apps where developers would submit their apps for various platforms and users can add these as sources on their App Store. There could be a chain of trust for new app store source vendor, where a group of third party organizations decide who to give or take away these rights from.
Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#89I 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…
> And they block updates but don't remove the app without warning!
Epic would like a word.
Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#90I'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…
How would you realistically solve this problem? Part of what makes these platforms so attractive to the end user is in fact app curation. Strict control over APIs and power usage, all sorts of minimum standards and mandatory integrations are contributing enormous value to these ecosystems.
> Strict control over APIs and power usage
These are doable with technical measures. Modern OS kernels are multi-user, when implemented properly, their user isolation features are very hard to break. If an OS doesn’t want apps to have some APIs, it shouldn’t expose that API to apps. For instance, Linux doesn’t allow users to pretend they’re someone else, but that’s not enforces by curation, instead the APIs like setresuid() only work if the caller is a root.
Similarly, if the OS doesn’t like high resource usage of background services, it has technical tools to enforce various limits. An easy enforcement method is killing the offending process. For instance, in Windows Phone 7, background audio agents were limited to 15 MB RAM. If a background audio process exceeds that limit, the OS silently kills the process, audio stops playing.
When something is doable with technical measures or curation, technical measures are almost always better because the curation is fundamentally unreliable.