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Two weeks of dealing with Google as a developer

danfitdegree.hashnode.dev

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Re: Two weeks of dealing with Google as a developer

#91

Post by johndhi »

As someone who writes policies like the one you're battling I also feel for the customer service agents you're haranguing.

There are a lot of reasons we're here today: -due to Google's massive success, whether or not you can add something to their marketplace basically makes or breaks your career. Crazy.

-because every regulator in the world constantly hounds Google their lawyers have instructed everyone to be conservative

-theyve also tried to write a policy that makes sense for a zillion use cases but failed.

Sucks. Sorry.

Re: Two weeks of dealing with Google as a developer

#92

Post by throwaway0x7E6 »

TylerE wrote: post #49
TheBrokenRail wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least on Android you can install alternate app stores like F-Droid. All you have to do is allow apps to be installed from unknown sources. If you use Apple, you're just out of luck unless you want to mess with whatever hacky workaround is popular this week.

I have never felt the need to do so on iOS. I cannot say the same about Android.

because you're an consumer and not a power user.

there's nothing wrong with that, but a very wide array of preferences different than yours does exist.

Re: Two weeks of dealing with Google as a developer

#93

Post by hgsgm »

supernova87a wrote: post #35

I want to guess the following and maybe knowledgeable people can chime in: 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 consis…

It's worse. The reviewers are explicitly forbidden from being helpful, as a protection against scammers "gaming" the reviews.

The store doesn't care about your app, unless you are a major company like Epic. They won't profit from your small apps' commissions enough to make paying for proper support worthwhile.

Re: Two weeks of dealing with Google as a developer

#94

Post by Julesman »

Labor costs and the primary purpose of call centers or bot chats: attrition. At a large scale a central focus of managing customer service is lowering labor costs. Less service. Automated call centers are literally designed to ensure that a certain percentage of people do not talk to a human, irrespective of whether their problem was resolved. Friction is added on purpose.

And of course, with AI playing an ever more prominent role, we can be certain that it's probably not a real person, soon enough even on the phone.

We can do better. :)

Re: Two weeks of dealing with Google as a developer

#95

Post by _jal »

ledauphin wrote: post #78

This is relatable. I have spent many hours attempting to get someone at the IRS to answer my questions, and the best part is that they have always ended up hanging up on me after putting me on hold, and there is no way to pick back up where you left off with them since it's all done verbally. I shall now go read The Metamorphosis.

They've been starved for labor. That is being fixed, but it will take a while.

Last time I had to actually talk to someone at the IRS was over a decade ago, but I recall it being an efficient conversation, and as pleasant as it could have been, given the topic.

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-irs-was-gutted

Re: Two weeks of dealing with Google as a developer

#96

Post by TimTheTinker »

koala_man wrote: post #3

HN is the only useful escalation mechanism at this point, so have an upvote.

I somewhat doubt Google responds effectively anymore to bad PR on HN, because (a) they're so large and each group is acting in its own best interest, and (b) Google has for so long had a cultural belief in the fiction that better automation™ or at least mechanical turk-style automation (low-cost, powerless, script-following, outsourced support agents) is always preferable to personally serving people.

In other words, the further they position themselves from the people they serve, the better and more "scalable" their business will be.

Re: Two weeks of dealing with Google as a developer

#97

Post by olooney »

This kind of moderation is broken across the board. No one knows how to scale it.

1. Amazon has completely lost the battle with fake reviews. Not only are they completely incapable of removing even a fraction of the huge swaths of obviously fake reviews, they also flag accounts more or less at random and permanently shut off their ability to post reviews. Escalating to support and they simply respond, "we've reviewed this and found it correct. This decision is final" with no indication that anything like common sense was used. It's clear that review moderation has been outsourced to an team who is incentivized to flag accounts and never unflag them and which acts without accountability or oversight and is taking random action in a vain attempt to be seen to be doing something rather than admitting they cannot cope.

2. Youtubers routinely complain about demonetization, content strikes, and spurious DCMA takedown. Even for Youtubers earning a living wage - and therefore presumably earning Google a high multiple of that in ad revenue - have huge amounts of trouble getting a reasonable human being on the other end. In the B2B space that level of spend would at least get you a named account person who you could contact to resolve issues. Heck, buying a burger at McDonalds gives you more access to a reasonable human you can escalate complaints to.

3. Sellers on Etsy or Ebay have little to no recourse when customers demand refunds. The only way to survive is to simply refund anyone who asks and roll it into your prices as a cost of doing business.

4. Both the Apple App Store and Google Play are awful to develop for because of all the intrusive demands they make and their seeming unwillingness to provide clear or consistent feedback. Despite this, both are stuffed to the gills with copyright infringing knock-offs designed to skirt gambling laws by selling addictive skinner boxes to children and actively fraudulent products that try to trick you into paying $1.99/month for the rest of time for a flashlight app, neither of which seeming have any trouble getting approved. What's the point of trying to pretend you have high quality standards while rubber-stamping garbage?

Re: Two weeks of dealing with Google as a developer

#98

Post by mod »

cle wrote: post #66
_yb2s wrote: post #8

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.

> Imagine if your car could only drive to locations approved as safe by the car manufacturer We're not very far away from that. Example: Tesla sells auto insurance based on real-time tracking of driving behavior, and explicitly lists "where you live" as a factor. So it's quite possible "real-time location safety" is already part of their model. So you may already be charged more for driving to your Grandma's house. G…

Location of the insured vehicle has been a factor since I started having insurance about 24 years ago (speaking for 20 years of Geico, and more recently Progressive).

Re: Two weeks of dealing with Google as a developer

#99

Post by thanhhaimai »

_yb2s wrote: post #8

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.

This already happens with Drone. you can only flight to locations approved as safe by the manufacturer, and they could ban a location without recourse.
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