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Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
131–140 of 197 posts
Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#132Getting boned because of the inability of the English language to distinguish between free and free, that's a new ring of machine learning hell.
It's not a machine learning issue. A human would make the same translation. The issue is that the match should be run in the original language, not translated to English at all.
Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#133Earlier 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.
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…
This is exactly the point I try to make but to no avail. I don't understand why it's so hard for most people to see that you can still have a curated app store even if there's an option buried in the menu to allow power users to subscribe to additional stores, or sideload, etc.
If there's any Apple people who think that would be bad, I'd love to hear about it. So far it's been nearly impossible to get an answer on that. At that point the argument usually changes to "just get an Android if that's what you want" or "nobody but you cares about that" or "if you want to sideload just pay the annual developer fee" or "Apple's curation is a lot better than Google's" (which is an entirely different argument I would point out).
Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#134This kind of incompetence makes me seriously doubt that Google is doing anything to more substantially review apps for deeper security issues, either statically or at runtime. The asymmetry of effort in this situation is profound: consider that you spend all your time and effort writing a, long, complex, thoughtful message by hand (the app), taking hundreds or thousands of hours, but then they respond with machine ge…
> This kind of incompetence makes me seriously doubt that Google is doing anything to more substantially review apps for deeper security issues, either statically or at runtime.
I actually know the team that does security vuln automation for Google Play. They've found millions of vulns in apps over the years. One of the challenges they face is precisely this sort of headline: how do you use static analysis to find vulns and ensure that you don't inundate users with false positives, forcing them down the admittedly limited support channels.
> The solution, I think, is obvious: Google needs a "zone defense" with the play store, a much larger (and expensive) staff, to do in-depth app reviews and be a stable, stateful relationship with the developer over time. This person would, in fact, become a 3rd party "expert" on a small set of apks and their contents, with a "feel" for what is changing over time, with the core mission of protecting users from malice, but working with devs, as a human being.
This sort of exists. Google pays external hackers who find vulns in popular apps via a rewards program. These don't need to be Google's apps. There may be other systems for top partners or specific kinds of apps (the org is big) but I'm not aware of anything personally.
Expanding beyond a small subset of apps is challenging. Not only are there millions of apps, each app contains tens, hundreds, or even thousands of individual apks. The staff needed to have a concierge for each app would be absolutely freaking enormous, perhaps even larger than the number of people on the planet who actually have deep security expertise on the Android platform.
Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is good . It will tie the fates of small time customers/users to the elites, so the situation gets fixed or the business collapses.
I agree. A process that's broken for everyone gets fixed. A process that can be worked around by everyone who has the power to get it changed can stay broken indefinitely.
> A process that's broken for everyone gets fixed. A process that can be worked around by everyone who has the power to get it changed can stay broken indefinitely.
OK, but the only processes that are broken for everyone are processes that are mandatory for everyone. Using a different process is a perfectly workable way to get around a broken process.
Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#136I went through similar hell recently. Google should just sell Google Play at this point.
Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#137We had a similar experience to the one here: https://dev.to/codenameone/google-play-kafkaesque-experience...
Google is worse than Apple in many regards.
Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#138Earlier 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.
Dont worry, google is working hard to make sure that even employees are unable to do anything of that sort. Gather the world's information and make it uniformally unsupported.
Just speculating, but another possibility may be a new kind of business popping up: Google App Store experts who can somehow prevent these problems and/or make them go away.
Similar to Google-SEO consultants, or college-admissions consultants who help rich kids get into universities they normally couldn't.
Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#139I 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.
There could be an app for that -- a clearing house that lets you submit an issue and have it taken up by an employee, with anonymity, for a fee. It could be the Uber for access to insider support.
Re: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
#140Regarding the update at the bottom of the article, I also just got the email about needing to provide login info so they can review my app. An offline game that has no login functionality...