Best to ignore such messages. Call Google's bluff. I do, my apps keep paying out.
Just to note: your apps won't be installable on Android 13
Prisoners of Google Android development
161–170 of 318 posts
Re: Prisoners of Google Android development
#162I don't get the comments tearing into OP. Sure, he could have been more careful. He could have tested the login on the latest version of Android. But what if it wasn't a login crash? What if it worked on the latest version but not others? At what point do you draw the line?
At some point, you just have to say "OK this is a platform used by literally millions of apps and millions of developers, and mistakes will be made, and it should be easy to fix them by stopping your own rollout (without having to know tricks like doing a staged release) or immediately making an older, already approved version live again". It's such a basic design principle to make things revertible/recoverable, especially for something like an app store.
Re: Prisoners of Google Android development
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, you own the servers so you can rollback. You don't own a user's device. If you want to rollback after a full rollout, all you do is build your new/rollback release from your previously working commit and update your version number.
Right, but in this case, changing the target API is what broke the app. Since Google won't allow you to release an update with an old target API, you can't just revert the change and increase the build number.
Yeah, I was talking about general rollback for Android. In this specific case, they chose to rush and they didn't test (boo-hoo). It's like me complaining that the tools shouldn't have let my bug go to PRD even though I didn't test (and apparently didn't know much about Android as evidenced by not having a physical Android device).
Same thing if your site cert expires, or browsers start blocking specific functionality/code/tags. Seems like they just want to complain about the thing they aren't familiar with.
Re: Prisoners of Google Android development
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's amusing that you are certain that you know his customers better than he does. I believe that you are utterly wrong, and if not most than certainly many people who use public transport and smartphones have never or nearly never been using websites on their phones, many of them haven't been using websites on a computer two - this is very typical of the non-technical people, especially those who are members of the…
I guess that's why no one uses The Internet or Web Browsers. Pack it in, fellas, the web is a passing fad.
That's not what I said, I live half my life within browsers. But big chunk of the population that you are probably not thinking about is not like that. My mother in law is using browser to read on her computer, and will never do that on her phone - the screen is too small and the whole experience not something that fits someone at her age. On the other hand, my children use apps since they are two years old, and at the age of seven they still rarely if ever used browser.
Re: Prisoners of Google Android development
#165I am sorry, I have ZERO sympathy for the OP.
First of all, new versions means its covered by improved security & privacy functions. Everybody should always upgrade to highest possible version. Google has nagged devs about this for YEARS.
Also, if you never update your app and consider it "done", you are probably ignoring security erratas in your libraries
Finally, who maintains an Android app, makes a major upgrade but doesn't have an Android phone to test it before pushing the update??
Re: Prisoners of Google Android development
#166I had the same thing happening to a bunch of apps based upon a framework I built. The newer API version had problems with existing dependencies, really a shit ton of work to get back to exactly the same place I was already. I really respect Microsoft a lot more, where stuff from the 90's has less issues running on the latest Windows version that mobile apps I wrote four years ago on Android.
Unless the framework you used came from Google that is an unfair statement.
You don't blame Microsoft for Adobe Flash not working on Windows 11 store, do you?
Re: Prisoners of Google Android development
#167This is a no-win situation. MS expends an inordinate amount of effort on back compatibility, and much kudos to them. But it vastly increases their attack surface. Likewise many of the worst things about the unfairly maligned C++ come from a hardcore position on back compatibility: as much as possible, old code, and even old C code, should continue to compile and work as expected, even to the point of linking old bina…
There is no best win option, but you can also publish your app separately - these are Play Store requirements, not Android requirements.
It's far from trivial in many cases, and it'll never get anywhere near as much use as the Play Store version... but it is nice to have an escape hatch.
Re: Prisoners of Google Android development
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
On Android you have to pop open a menu and find the install option. That's not inherently discoverable as you need to know it's even possible, and most people don't. It would be trivial to present the user with a more proactive notification that a site can be installed as an app, or even include such a notice in their search results on Google, but they choose not to do so.
Actually nowadays it's not that bad anymore. Android browser itself offers installable PWA and there is an event called beforeinstallprompt event ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/befo... ), which can be used to perform PWA installation on user interaction. Of course it's not supported in every browser. iOS is more difficult since user needs to understand that "saving to home screen" is same a…
In iOS it’s also buried deep in the “share” menu which makes absolutely no sense as you are not sharing the website with anybody.
Re: Prisoners of Google Android development
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually nowadays it's not that bad anymore. Android browser itself offers installable PWA and there is an event called beforeinstallprompt event ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/befo... ), which can be used to perform PWA installation on user interaction. Of course it's not supported in every browser. iOS is more difficult since user needs to understand that "saving to home screen" is same a…
In iOS it’s also buried deep in the “share” menu which makes absolutely no sense as you are not sharing the website with anybody.
That menu does far more than share, such as opening the URL or document or whatever you are viewing in a different app or saving it somewhere.
Re: Prisoners of Google Android development
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
The middle ground that I think helps everyone is, change your api and break compilation. Let devs fix the compile errors and use the api correctly, etc. But don't change the behavior of existing functions with the same signatures. As an api provider, do your best to make compilation mean something.
This is exactly how Android works. But because API changes bring privacy and security improvements, scummy software used old compilation targets to abuse backwards compatibility to avoid complying with privacy and security practices. This is why Play slowly enforces apps to raise their compilation target and implement safer APIs. It's lagging for YEARS after API changes, so there's plenty of time to fix apps. The OP…
I'm the OP and wanted to clarify in case you missed some points - it is a legacy application which does not have any active dev teams on it and needs only developers attention when Google says so and as mentioned by multiple other commenters here the first time I got that e-mail from Google, was at 18th of August. I would not agree that I have been lazy, but instead trying to solve this problem in the time-constraints set by Google and failing to do so because of the inability to put a fix to production and/or pull back current release version. Of course I admit that there's always ways to improve quality assurance.
There has been zero communication towards me from Google until two weeks until deadline. Yes, maybe if I would have logged into Play Console then there might have been some notifications, but there have been no reason to do so until that e-mail (I'm usually not involved with Android projects, otherwise I might have noticed similar warnings via other projects early on).