Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income
231–240 of 279 posts
Re: Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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. Google is not incapable of providing customer support. Netflix, Apple, and Amazon all manage to provide free, robust customer service. Google is simply unwilling.
Exactly. Additional this is not a free platform like YouTube or Gmail: creating a Google Play account costs money, and Google took a cut of every app sale. Saying that Google has too many free users to provide support doesn't make sense here...
Re: Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 nightm…
The "countless evidence" you mention mostly consists of stories just like this one, and they all add to the confirmation bias. I'm not saying Google is right in 100% of cases, but going by the prevailing opinion here you'd think it was impossible to have a Google account or publish an app without unwarranted banning, but hundreds of thousands of developers are doing just fine with no complaints. I'd like to be able t…
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Re: Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it broken to require a defendant to respond to a lawsuit?
Not that concept, just our specific implementation. If person A decides they don't like you, they can sue you over and over and cost you tens of thousands of dollars and never get that back. If you don't reply to each with a lawyer and spend time and money fighting, you lose even more money. There are some bandaids like having someone declared a vexatious litigant, but that also requires time and money. If you owned…
If person A decides they don't like you, they can sue you over and over and cost you tens of thousands of dollars and never get that back.
As an attorney, I’ve never even heard of that actually happening - other than prisoner litigation.
Moreover, a judge will order someone to stop filing cases if they are bringing frivolous claims, and can hold them in contempt if they do.
Re: Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income
#235Re: Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Play Store publishers pay Google $25 for access to the Play Store, and then pay them 15% to 30% of all revenue collected via the apps.
Is that a lot from Google's perspective? If apps follow some power law distribution it might only be worth providing human support to a very limited number of them.
Customer support is provided for sub $20 items from e commerce sites who don't have Google's market cap. Not to mention that a customer support agent's time isn't exactly worth hundreds of dollars an hour.
Re: Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
> curiously omits the details of why they were banned That's a difficult thing to accomplish when Google has not provided them the details of why they were banned.
The very email he posts clearly say "Prior violations ... as outlined in previous emails sent" It sounds like he has violated something multiple times and was told what was in violation but he is choosing not to share this part of the story
My Adsense was banned (many years ago) with similar wording and yet I was never given a real reason. The final termination email said the reason was outlined in earlier emails, but it was not actionable detail; the previous emails just said ‘click fraud’. We were getting millions of clicks a month from visitors to the content on our sites so there was nothing actionable we could do. Despite removing ads completely but that is not really a solution.
So it is not so clear if they received anything useful before or not. They did use ads and the ads team is quite trigger happy, which is interesting because competitors can indeed cancel your business by creating click fraud. The ‘AI’ can detect click fraud, but cannot filter it (wat?) so this happens a lot.
Re: Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe not, but it stretches credulity that they have absolutely no idea, not even a guess, as to the cause. The ban letter says they previously received other notices. Where are they? And what steps, if any, did they take to resolve then? They don't even describe their app, which ordinarily would seen like the first thing to do to establish the injustice of the affair. "My app just makes generative cat photos. What's…
> Maybe not, but it stretches credulity that they have absolutely no idea, not even a guess, as to the cause. It doesn't, actually. Everything I've read about Google indicates they're extremely opaque and will ban for bizarre reasons. Google itself might not even know. After all, machine learning isn't known for being able to explain itself. > The ban letter says they previously received other notices. Where are they…
> After all, machine learning isn't known for being able to explain itself.
Indeed; it is just multiple flagging by ML and that is it. Not much you or anyone can do.
Re: Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's certainly indicative of why building your entire revenue stream on the good graces of a company that can shut you down at any moment is a bad strategy.
You can’t really develop a mobile app at all without running this risk
Yes. I wouldn't recommend it as a revenue stream.
I've written two. They're available for free. If Google decides to can me tomorrow I'll put them on my personal site available for side-loading, maybe put them on the Amazon app store, and call it a day.
Don't tie critical revenue streams to the whim of a private corporation. It's high risk.
Re: Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income
#240I am going to bet these people were axed by the ads machine learning and not by the Google play team. Please make sure to not rely only on ad income; it ends badly as Google has the monopoly on those; other ads generally do not pay unless you can do media buys which are also dangerous as usually you don’t have that many actual different brands buying. As with anything, you need to diversify and make sure Adsense/admob is 33% or less of your income and that 66% is enough for you to survive.