Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

“Fewer Users” Warning Hurting Specialized and New Apps

support.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 259 posts

Re: “Fewer Users” Warning Hurting Specialized and New Apps

#111

Post by ipaddr »

duxup wrote: post #3

This almost smells like a google throwing their hands up and saying "Well maybe it's a harmful app and they should use something else ... I dunno, put a warning on it." I see similar-ish warnings on Amazon about "frequently returned item", but I've no idea if it is true or why. Maybe an underlying vendor for the same item is bad? Amazon (who doesn't care about bad vendors as far as I can tell) just slaps a label on i…

Amazon does something similiar so google copied. Before you get a buy now button you need 25 reviews which you get by sending free products to volunteers.

Re: “Fewer Users” Warning Hurting Specialized and New Apps

#112

Post by szszrk »

Groxx wrote: post #108
szszrk wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check for vulnerabilities in dependencies and do the same thing they described in this post, just with... meaningful feedback. I'm more an infra guy, and such scans are actually absolutely awesome. I see everything in my k8s clusters, all java/python dependencies that need attention. I'm more surprised how anyone can run an app for more than 2 weeks with no high severity vulnerabilities. I guess mobile doesn't have t…

Mobile has unbelievably smaller attack vectors due to the hefty sandboxing, as long as you're doing normal things and not including a bunch of janky ad libraries. You're largely just contacting APIs you control and not running arbitrary code, and there's no outside connections coming in at all - lots of extremely bad CVEs are completely irrelevant in that context. Sure, you can bend your scope to make them relevant..…

You are right, but those "janky ad libraries" are the very reason most of the apps on google play were created.

Re: “Fewer Users” Warning Hurting Specialized and New Apps

#113

Post by llm_nerd »

anilakar wrote: post #57

Our company just got a warning that we have sixty days to release something on Play or have our developer console account closed. The email made it pretty clear that Google wants developers to continuously push new versions to customers. We have no new features nor bug fixes in backlog. There is nothing to update. The only purpose of our software is to control hardware that our company makes. Nobody uses it for fun,…

I've had a Google developer console/play account for a decade+. Recently had to send some proof of identity stuff in their anti-spam thing -- which I did because who knows one day I might care about the account -- but I haven't released anything there in eight years. No threats of closing my account.

Did they instead just warn that they would unpublish the app? Google does have minimum API levels that they slowly move forward, and they will unpublish your app if you don't periodically rebuild and resubmit.

Re: “Fewer Users” Warning Hurting Specialized and New Apps

#114

Post by shadowgovt »

notatoad wrote: post #51
suddenexample wrote: post #34

A question for Googlers who may be responsible/adjacent - what is the intended function of this warning? It seems to be attempting to filter out low quality apps, but instead seems to be killing any attempt to change the status quo. If the app has fewer users than competing apps, the message Google is sending is "we don't need any new apps that do similar things to existing apps" and "if you're a small app, don't eve…

i'm guessing it's intended to warn that you're about to download one of the 500 apps that look like the ChatGPT app, but aren't actually the ChatGPT app.

Correct. Google's incentive is not to maximize players in the space. Their user isn't the developer; it's the person who downloads things onto an Android phone. If those users get burned too often because it's too hard to tell legitimate apps from knock-offs, they'll stop trusting the whole Play store and probably the whole phone platform (in favor of Apple instead).

Google has the numbers to know that "buyer [or in this case, downloader] beware" isn't good enough because people aren't smart enough. It sucks, but at scale it's a pattern we see over and over and over again (see also "Why does Windows force updates," "Why is Apple so paranoid about side-loading," "Why is it so hard to get an app on Apple's App Store in the first place," and "Why does Facebook log a big warning in the browser console to not paste any code in there and hit enter").

Re: “Fewer Users” Warning Hurting Specialized and New Apps

#116

Post by serial_dev »

nout wrote: post #64
anilakar wrote: post #57

Our company just got a warning that we have sixty days to release something on Play or have our developer console account closed. The email made it pretty clear that Google wants developers to continuously push new versions to customers. We have no new features nor bug fixes in backlog. There is nothing to update. The only purpose of our software is to control hardware that our company makes. Nobody uses it for fun,…

You can update the version number and re-release. I think this may grant also adding the update note "Updated version number. Nothing else. Thank you Google".

My new startup idea: “upload the same release with a different version and build number about once a month till the end of times" as a service.

Re: “Fewer Users” Warning Hurting Specialized and New Apps

#117

Post by Groxx »

szszrk wrote: post #112
Groxx wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mobile has unbelievably smaller attack vectors due to the hefty sandboxing, as long as you're doing normal things and not including a bunch of janky ad libraries. You're largely just contacting APIs you control and not running arbitrary code, and there's no outside connections coming in at all - lots of extremely bad CVEs are completely irrelevant in that context. Sure, you can bend your scope to make them relevant..…

You are right, but those "janky ad libraries" are the very reason most of the apps on google play were created.

If you're not an app that's intentionally risking your users' safety though, you probably have some reason to trust the ad vendor to do their part. It's calculated risk for most non-malicious apps, and the major vendors are broadly fine in that respect. Ignoring privacy anyway.

And we can ignore the shovelware, which probably is actually a majority of apps. Those won't care about security patches, and will probably go out of their way to hide them so they don't appear vulnerable and don't have to do maintenance releases. They wouldn't be affected by forced updates.

Re: “Fewer Users” Warning Hurting Specialized and New Apps

#118

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

anilakar wrote: post #57

Our company just got a warning that we have sixty days to release something on Play or have our developer console account closed. The email made it pretty clear that Google wants developers to continuously push new versions to customers. We have no new features nor bug fixes in backlog. There is nothing to update. The only purpose of our software is to control hardware that our company makes. Nobody uses it for fun,…

"The email made it pretty clear that Google wants developers to continuously push new versions to customers."

Why. It is not Google's software. Shouldn't that decision be left to the software author.

Re: “Fewer Users” Warning Hurting Specialized and New Apps

#119

Post by ignoramous »

nout wrote: post #64
anilakar wrote: post #57

Our company just got a warning that we have sixty days to release something on Play or have our developer console account closed. The email made it pretty clear that Google wants developers to continuously push new versions to customers. We have no new features nor bug fixes in backlog. There is nothing to update. The only purpose of our software is to control hardware that our company makes. Nobody uses it for fun,…

You can update the version number and re-release. I think this may grant also adding the update note "Updated version number. Nothing else. Thank you Google".

> You can update the version number and re-release.

You kid, but Google makes substantial security and privacy SDK / API changes from one Android version to the next (reactively in response to abuse by 3p apps) & maintains backwards compatibility for a limited time period, post which incompatible apps are not visible to latest Androids on the Play Store. This means, developers have to continually update their "targetSdkVersion", if nothing else.

https://developer.android.com/guide/app-compatibility / https://developer.android.com/google/play/requirements/targe...

Re: “Fewer Users” Warning Hurting Specialized and New Apps

#120

Post by mig39 »

godelski wrote: post #100
anilakar wrote: post #57

Our company just got a warning that we have sixty days to release something on Play or have our developer console account closed. The email made it pretty clear that Google wants developers to continuously push new versions to customers. We have no new features nor bug fixes in backlog. There is nothing to update. The only purpose of our software is to control hardware that our company makes. Nobody uses it for fun,…

Imagine if we talked about other computers like we talked about phones. It's just so weird - you can only install programs from our approved package manager - if you make any transactions through your program, we'll take a 30% cut - you can't be access those files, you're not root - you got root?! We're going to fucking sue you (yeah, I know about the PS3...) - you can't change these settings - you can't access that…

It sounds like game consoles :-(
Post reply on HN