I de-Googled my life over this type of event.
I have not, and I'll end up with a black eye for procrastinating on that.
Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income
211–220 of 279 posts
Re: Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income
#212Google recently flagged downloads of my app as a malware for no reason whatsoever. It's a B2B software used in companies worldwide since 2005, digitally signed, virus checked, not a freeware with some stange business model. Nothing even remotely shady. As good as it gets when we're talking about downloadable stuff. When download gets flagged Chrome will block the download, but that's not all - Firefox is using Google…
This also happens with websites that distribute application downloads. If one system flags your application download as malware and puts it on a list, those lists are shared to, and aggregated by, organizations that exist up and down the software and network stack. At no point does anyone actually verify if what is on those lists is actually malware.
So have a pool of separate domains for downloads?
Re: Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income
#213Unfortunately, anytime you depend on a third party whether it be Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc., this is the exact risk you take. Don’t feed the dragon.
What's the alternative? Google essentially has a monopoly on distributing Android apps.
You can downloaded an apk from a web browser and install it.
Re: Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income
#214The only app I could find seems to be an app that transmits radio stations from South America.
https://steprimo.com/iphone/ph/app/1459155539/Radios-cumbia-...
Re: Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income
#215I feel for the family. There should be an appeals process. Since google is reluctant to create a process, I would go as far as having the people that bring the appeal pay the costs if they lose. By having the loser pay the cost it would reduce the frivolous ones to a minimum. The app market places have become too important to have big tech dominate every aspect of it.
Re: Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income
#216Another day, another termination by Google Play. The reason? None. Just a generic response sent to the developers on Christmas Day. Might have been the grinch himself issuing those automated responses to others. This company and its services (including, YouTube) are run by bots and they are the ones doing the moderation and not even the humans running them care at all. Unless something completely fundamental happens,…
Not to really defend Google here, but how else would you do it? The amount of data on these platforms is enormous and having people review the videos/apps/whatever would be simply prohibitively expensive. I think they need to balance how strict their abuse detection is. Making it too strict will kick out legitimate users without mercy. Making it less strict will allow potentially harmful (for business) content to spr…
> The amount of data on these platforms is enormous and having people review the videos/apps/whatever would be simply prohibitively expensive.
For free accounts, maybe. But it wouldn't be very expensive to provide basic service to accounts with significant money flow where google is taking a cut. Or accounts that are directly paying every month.
Re: Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income
#217It’s no better on the consumer side. When I end up closing my GSuite account, apparently Google has no way for Play content to be shifted to a new account, and that means that three people will be losing content, apps, and possibly photos. I don’t care that much for my own (it’s $60 of apps for a platform I don’t use), but two people on the GSuite account have committed to Android (against advice) and used their workspace accounts.
I’m a little more than pissed off.
Twitter rant about this: https://twitter.com/halostatue/status/1508157896797958149
Re: Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income
#218The fact that this guy didn't even say the name of his apps or what they do makes me pretty suspicious of the whole thing. There are enough developers who don't add any value but instead rely on spam, malware or piracy/copyright infringement to get big. I have zero sympathy in those cases, and support Google and Apple taking action against them.
The assumption that the engineer who was banned did something wrong is a bit misguided when there's no evidence for it, but there are countless examples of Google banning users who did nothing wrong. There are even some of those engineers in this thread posting their experiences of being banned by Google.
The opaque and capricious nature of Google's ban hammer, and the special type of an ML-driven bureaucratic nightmare they inflict upon users, affects many people that did nothing wrong at all. Real people and their livelihoods are affected by Google's policies, and that problem exists even if we choose to assume, without evidence, that the OP was a spammer.
Re: Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the government allowed to shut them down without a court order? If not, why should you be able to? Do you feel you can do a better job? There's something to be said for not shutting down someone unless they break a law. I do acknowledge the court would need to be much faster and easier to access for these kinds of things though, you don't want to burden a provider with enormous legal bills just to deal with this k…
Platforms can have any arbitrary rule. If I host a service for manchester city fans, why would I not be able to ban annoying united fans? Who cares if what they do is legal. What if I post NSFW content here on hn. It's not illegal so it's okay? Just this month content creators from Russia or belarus have been banned from dozen of services, they did not violate any law. It's ridiculous to think that yout platform isn'…
That's not the same question though, that's basically a strawman.
We're talking about platforms that are not so restrictive in their topics.
Re: Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
My advice - just rip the bandaid off and do it. I had anticipated taking a whole weekend to update the email address on all my accounts, but it was a lot less painful than I had anticipated. Changing over ~50 accounts took me about 3 hours all told. Most services allowed me to change my email even if it used email as the “username.” Using a password manager made this much easier, as I could easily keep track of which…
Mind sharing why you choose Fastmail over alternatives?
Been using them for, I think, 16+ years at this point. Their support is great. Their product is great. The price is great. For a techie like me, it's perfect. I don't know if I would put Grandma on it, though, but perhaps I would.