31–40 of 340 posts
This whole app store thing with Apple/Google is BS. Imagine if your car could only drive to locations approved as safe by the car manufacturer, and they could auto-ban your Grandma's house with no recourse.
It's more like if you could only drive approved cars on the regular roads.. which is already the case but regulated by the government instead.
I know, I know, it isn't the same... Yet. But on desktop, most of my apps have become web apps: email, docs, videoconf, design, slides, chat, even a little development. Many people use laptops where the OS is a browser. I hope this trend continues to miniaturize.
It'd be great if google offered an option for a video call with a reviewer for $500/hr as an escalation option for businesses who are getting nowhere with the regular process. Ideally you'd get a refund if you turned out to be correct, but I'd be happy even without that.
Automated rules and policies are saving Google hundreds of millions of dollars an hour; they don't want to open the floodgates of spammers reverse-engineering ways to socially engineer the hapless app review humans.
I would guess that the people reviewing these are contractors, paid by the app they review, and with a certain set of criteria that they're supposed to apply, but they make mistakes. And the supervisors of these contractors (who themselves are contractors) don't have great ways of comparing the work of one person to another / enforcing consistency, except by the customer escalating it.
I would guess that this is approached by Google as a piecework customer service task for contractors (a pure cost center to review and QA app submissions) and not employees, so it means that even something so important as developer experience is being outsourced, and not being daily internalized or felt by Google's own engineering team or product managers (who have moved on to more year-end-review-favorable projects after setting the top-level guidelines).
They probably only review (and whose job is it full time?) error reports / QA / complaints about this process every week and all you are is a line on a sheet that says to them well, "not that many people are upset, so it's going ok, we don't need to worry / put someone on it full time".
Until you get to be a huge revenue developer and worthy of some employee's attention -- and even then only on the "interesting" aspect of your needs, not the day-to-day is it working well experience. You're in the hands of minimum wage contractors reviewing whether you've adhered to sometimes subjective rules, with only so much interest in resolving something they have to study to understand -- and who has the patience for that? They're not SWEs themselves, they have no idea what your description of the problem is really trying to convey (unless they're talented people, and if so they're probably out of there soon).
Until that changes, there will be really frustrating cases like this. Even if your livelihood has come to depend on the app you built.
Am I guessing wrong?
We are well past the point that any respectable developer should simply drop the Play Store and tell users to buy a better phone. As long as you're willing to give them business, this system is working as intended. It's not going to change .
Funny, given the author says that he usually expects problems like this from Apple.
I guess all respectable app developers require jail broken phones?
Heck, even feature flag it and disable it once the app gets in. Probably won't be flagged again in subsequent reviews.
This whole app store thing with Apple/Google is BS. Imagine if your car could only drive to locations approved as safe by the car manufacturer, and they could auto-ban your Grandma's house with no recourse.
If you use Apple, you're just out of luck unless you want to mess with whatever hacky workaround is popular this week.
Is there any large group representing App developers that could manage the large-scale negotiation and legal wrangling required to force Apple and Google to be more helpful when rejecting legitimate applications? When I worked in Google (Ads, then later in Recommendations for Play and youtube) people often said this was intention to avoid teaching spammers how to get around the rules. But it's clear there are enough…
I think it will be pretty hard to fight a class-action legal battle with Google over a contract since every Android phone will happily install arbitrary APK files for users without the play store, but serving an APK from the play store in the first place requires agreeing to the above contract in full.