I’ve also had horrible experiences with the Google Play people. Will never consider publishing on that platform again, huge waste of resources and personal time.
Fortunately PWAs are a thing.
Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
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Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#92>Title (en_US): "Catima - The Free Card Wallet"
>This proved my theory: Google was using Google Translate to translate the app titles instead of reviewing them with native speakers.
Why would they use Google translate on an en_US string?
Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#93I 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 mean my reading is that she and her translators hand translate the title, and then Google uses Google Translate to make sure it follows particular rules, and one of the rules it should not say it is free?
>And I would never assume that Google would sit and hand-translate app titles to every language.
maybe the assumption is that they would not autotranslate app titles for the target language of a particular app store. I mean you do understand that the app stores of different languages are obviously not in English? And that there is a very long and funny tradition of translating from one language to English and back to show how things get lost in translation?
At least if they used google translate they should have some sort of tool that allowed you to see if there were some suggested texts that would be less problematic so a reviewer (or bot in this case I suppose) could ask the developer. So that it could say you used the word vrij, which is most commonly understood as free, but there are these other usages which did you intend. Get a result and then run it past a human very quick for an ok / not ok decision. But no, Google translate is good enough.
>just not seeing it here.
I have a hard time seeing how it is not crystal clear.
on edit: fixed missing words.
Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#94My 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".
Google is specifically anti-support from their beginnings because they have this belief that everything can be solved algorithmically.
When you work for companies that make Google a lot of money. Google does all the work for you, so you do not even need to care about support in the first place.
Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 lan…
I understood it like you did. She--the author--even wrote that she had translators for all the languages supported by the app, hence the 50-to-30 chars kerfuffle.
Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#96The 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.
The implementation of the Play Stores policies for consumers is also fundamentally broken. In my country's version of the Play Store, the number two ranking app is currently rated at 2.6 with multiple complaints of users losing money to an alleged scam.
Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve read the post, its just how it is with their policies being evaluated by automations and not humans. No, it's definitely a problem with the humans. It's just that the humans in question aren't customer support humans. It's Google's engineering humans that are to blame for shipping these poor quality experiences. They might be able to invert binary trees on whiteboards pretty well, but they suck at making an HTML…
I find it interesting that people blame the engineers when they're the bottom of the hierarchy. It's their bosses that prioritize their work, decide whether their work is good enough, and decide whether to fix something that's broken. It's not the individual engineers who decide whether the company will have a culture of helping users and/or app developers, or treating them like resources to exploit. It's not the ind…
Google promotes engineers into leadership though. If you look through the board of Google, especially people who have titles like "Head of Customer Success"[1], you usually see they came up from engineering jobs. Google is not a company full of MBAs and pointy-haired bosses. These are decisions made by engineers (or at least former engineers I guess).
Also, it's decidedly unreasonable to assume the leadership at Google are clueless idiots ordering helpless engineers around. There are many layers of management and engineering, and all of them have to come together to get stuff done. At any point people at every level of the org could influence the direction of things like customer success around simple things like an error page. We're not talking about the long term strategy of the whole business that's decided at a board level here.
[1] Slightly unfair to link to someone, but here's an example: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/markpidgeon
Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#98I 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 number of times I've heard of people only getting support from Google because they know someone on the inside is quite astonishing. If I were an Google employee looking to make a few extra bucks I'd definitely start offering to help "nudge" account issues for a few extra bucks under the table.
That would almost certainly violate some contract you signed when you were hired.
Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#99Earlier 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.
> HM is a bubble with bias against Google.
It seems that way to you because the front pages of Reddit, HN and Twitter are Google's only support channels.
Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
The number of times I've heard of people only getting support from Google because they know someone on the inside is quite astonishing. If I were an Google employee looking to make a few extra bucks I'd definitely start offering to help "nudge" account issues for a few extra bucks under the table.
That would almost certainly violate some contract you signed when you were hired.
Most definitively, but at least people who do not have connections inside of google could stay in businesses. Which speaks to just how big of an issue all of this is.