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Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated”

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Re: Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated”

#441

Post by ipaddr »

mitchdoogle wrote: post #372
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my case, I moved to Fastmail... and yeah, the hilarious thing is people remember moving from AOL to Gmail over a decade ago, and think Gmail is still so much better than everything else. Gmail is worst-in-class at this point. It's slow, it's bloated, it's bad at spam filtering compared to the alternatives. They've been riding on people remembering email before Gmail, but not really actually stayed competitive with…

I admit I don't have a lot to compare between, but my company switched from Rackspace mail a couple years ago because of the unrelenting spam and seemingly no way to stop it. I suggested Google because I hardly ever see any spam there in my personal account, so we made the switch. The difference is night and day. I can look in the spam folder for my work email now and there are hundreds of spam messages there for the…

It's the ones that never come through you need to worry about.

Re: Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated”

#442

Post by jibcage »

scgtrp wrote: post #412
Qub3d wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obsidian is a self-hosted repository that ultimately stores everything as plaintext markdown (.md). It is 100% portable and by default owned by you. Protip: you can easily sync obsidian by sharing the top-level vault directory with syncthing. Its entirely transparent, you just start obsidian and open the vault, and changes you make on one system automatically appear on others. As for protonmail, its better than googl…

I think you mean IMAP. Protonmail supports SMTP (the mail-sending protocol; it needs to to interoperate with other mail servers) but not IMAP (the client side mail-reading protocol). SNMP is something entirely unrelated, afaik.

ProtonMail offers an “IMAP Bridge” application that keeps a local IMAP server running on your machine, while still decrypting your messages on-device.

Re: Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated”

#443

Post by betwixthewires »

8note wrote: post #370
kmeisthax wrote: post #59

Everyone here is commenting about overautomation, but this isn't an overautomation problem. It's a secondary sanctions problem. The developer isn't being banned for breaking Google's rules, he's being banned for having hired someone else who later broke those rules; and then that ban was transitively applied to their personal account as well. This is beyond the pale. Google should not have the power to decide who you…

Google has freedom of association. If they don't want to work with you based on your employees, that's their prerogative. That's not controlling who you can hire. Really, it's a monopoly problem. You shouldn't be affected by whether google wants to work with you or not

I'm not buying this line of reasoning entirely.

The problem isn't that you don't have options with regard to hosting, email, etc (with the notable exception of google play store), the problem is that once you've picked your option it's hard to migrate out, and as a customer you have a right IMO, whether in the terms or not, to a good faith effort on the part of the service vendor to sort our any problems you encounter with the service. If a robot just shuts you down no notice and there's nobody to reach to sort it out that's a negligent business practice and I believe any vendor of any service that operates this way is liable.

If they want to offer migration tooling, notice and access to your data I can see it being alright. A pain in the ass, but at least not the end of your business one morning while making coffee.

As far as google play goes, I think there's the monopoly aspect to work on and hopefully legislation brings a resolution to this problem, like offering independent repositories as a default option or something like that, til that time though, do not rely on it entirely. If you have to open source it and put it on f-droid, maintain an aptoide repo, apk download on your site and market that heavier than your google play account, whatever you have to do, just do not rely primarily on the play store because you're basically giving google the keys to your kingdom.

Re: Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated”

#444

Post by TuringNYC »

nabeards wrote: post #350
TuringNYC wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a scare last year where Google supposedly gave me 30 days before they would shut off my Google account of 20yrs. Family photos, youtube videos, 20yrs of email, not to mention the treasure trove of personal documents on GDrive. It took two weeks to duplicate the content and back it up elsewhere. This is a paid tier Google account and I've yet to get an explanation on why this happened. It appears to be because o…

Did you actually leave Google then? It’s not clear from your story, and it would be a shame that you decided to stay on such a hostile platform.

For my personal accounts, I've stayed but now I have backups of everything elsewhere. I'm also now double-replicating everything across other providers. The value add having everything so beautifully in my Google account is enticing, so I continue to have that as my primary personal account.

For my corporate accounts there is NO WAY i'd use GCP. I have the privilege of MSAs with all three major cloud providers and we're doing most things with AWS. So on the corporate front, I didn't leave because I just didn't enter in the first place.

Re: Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated”

#445

Post by tempnow987 »

bryans wrote: post #406
tempnow987 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is dealing with a very real problem. There are bad actors, particularly internationally, who systematically and at scale try to subvert / cheat. This includes multiple accounts, and businesses that hire folks who try to cheat the system. Google almost certainly has statistics supporting the increased risk of working with developers / businesses that hire folks who break various rules. Certainly there are false…

Even if Google were paying support engineers $100/hr, in what universe is the average developer going to need 50 hours of support per year? In reality, it's at most averaging to 2 hours, and typically only in situations where Google messed up and should really be fixing it for free anyway, because it was their mistake. So, at most, it would be a labor cost of $300/yr including benefits and taxes, and more realistical…

They charge a one time fee of $25 to get a developer account. They provide full SDK / tooling and other resources for that $25 fee.

I don't know what universe android app developers are living in, this is basically "free" for most significant businesses.

For that $25, you are NOT going to get white glove support / treatment. Not happening.

Re: Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated”

#446

Post by ipaddr »

betwixthewires wrote: post #443
8note wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has freedom of association. If they don't want to work with you based on your employees, that's their prerogative. That's not controlling who you can hire. Really, it's a monopoly problem. You shouldn't be affected by whether google wants to work with you or not

I'm not buying this line of reasoning entirely. The problem isn't that you don't have options with regard to hosting, email, etc (with the notable exception of google play store), the problem is that once you've picked your option it's hard to migrate out, and as a customer you have a right IMO, whether in the terms or not, to a good faith effort on the part of the service vendor to sort our any problems you encounte…

Pick a provider with that option. Building a business on top of a business that can shut you without recourse is risky.

Re: Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated”

#447

Post by LWIRVoltage »

ridgered4 wrote: post #418
LWIRVoltage wrote: post #84

This is the issue with data being tied and connected.... Not long ago, someone here raised similar concerns with Microsoft 's ecosystem It stemmed from their current underway process to force all Minecraft accounts to Microsoft accounts, and the current Microsoft account process, if you don't add a phone number during account creation, locks and bans the account automatically after a week with they only recovery opti…

Do you have the source information on the minecraft accounts? I'm about to fall on this grenade myself. Needless to say I've avoided an MS account like the plague but of course that didn't do much good in the end. Can you play at all once banned?

I have done some poking around and digging into the microsoft account lock out thing, out of curiousity- only to find it appears to be true, as i've had a LOT of test accounts banned in the past 2 months. I was trying things like setting up alternate emails, and TOTP...

I suspect burner phones are the only way to not give one's phone number, or to gamble with the microsoft authentication app, which theoretically ever since recent versions of android should not be able to pull your phone number from the hardware - theoretically. I have not tested that out yet.

There's quite a bit about this out there Here's one such thread where a lot are trying to figure out why they are being forced to give up their number https://github.com/MultiMC/Launcher/issues/4093

to my understanding, since they fully linked it- once your MS account auto locks- you can't do anything, since it's linked to Minecraft- as well as other stuff. You'd think they'd allow one to still play Minecraft- but i guess if you can't log into the account, you're out of luck

Re: Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated”

#448

Post by ornel »

triyambakam wrote: post #331
brightball wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m happy with Proton right now too. Really just need a mobile app for the calendar and I’ll be all set.

There is a mobile Proton calendar app.

I use it, but the requirement to be online in order to add or update entries is quite annoying

Re: Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated”

#449

Post by betwixthewires »

Suppose you were to make an f-droid like client without a source code requirement. A way for people to host their own proprietary applications, and a client app that can manage repositories the way f-droid does. How would you:

- make applications/repositories discoverable without running a service,

- allow developers to handle billing for paid apps themselves, again, no service,

- have client side malware protection without playing a cat and mouse game,

- prevent discoverability of pirate repositories without running a service?

If these problems can be solved (or others I didn't think of, maybe you did?) you can basically get rid of monopoly curation of available applications on android (or anywhere for that matter).

Re: Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated”

#450

Post by iamacyborg »

Macha wrote: post #322
skrtskrt wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the editor for Google Docs is the one really good thing I can't get elsewhere, but I don't do that much important stuff in it - just like planning vacations, etc. Once I'm done editing something, if I want to back it up I can just export it elsewhere

I've really pared down my Google usage with the end of grandfathered GAFYD accounts as the last straw, so down to Sheets, YouTube, and Android as my last google usage. YouTube has no alternative, Android has too much sunk cost, Sheets I'm probably going to go back to Syncthing + Libreoffice I guess. Office 365 is the equivalent alternative, but not sure I feel much better about MS's consumer products than I do about…

What’s the sunk cost with Android? Apps? It’s very easy to switch to iPhone, I did it a year ago.
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