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“Fewer Users” Warning Hurting Specialized and New Apps

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

#151

Post by fsckboy »

chinathrow wrote: post #127
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,…

Apple sent the exact same thing out to a just-working-fine app I maintain in the App Store.

well, now you can update it to include links to things customers can buy outside the Apple ecosystem

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

#152

Post by fsckboy »

r0m4n0 wrote: post #129
redeux wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s about optics. They don’t want their App Store to appear stagnant.

I don't know if it's just optics. As a user, I personally don't want to see or download apps that are broken, neglected, or completely left for dead. Maintained apps are usually the best ones right?

>Maintained apps are usually the best ones right?

microsoft windows has been maintained thru to the present, but has become increasingly unusable since Win 7. so, no, false.

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

#153

Post by p_ing »

saghm wrote: post #69
p_ing wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand.... https://chromewebstore.google.com/search/ublock As a user who suddenly knows nothing about uBlock the ad blocker, are you going to trust an addin with 2k installs and 4.3 stars, or an addin with 30m installs and 4.7 stars? Install base can be informative when choosing.... anything, really. In many people's minds something that is used more is better in some metric, be it performance, reliability…

It sounds like showing those numbers already conveys the information you find useful; the question isn't whether the number of users is informative, but whether it's reasonable for Google to bucket apps into groups of competitors and then choose a threshold of minimum number of users to avoid actively discouraging additional users. I'm not opposed to the idea of owners of app marketplaces taking a more active step in…

You're going off the premise that I'm an average user who would otherwise stare blankly at a zsh terminal.

Those warnings in the Store aren't meant for you or I.

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

#154

Post by iggldiggl »

duskwuff wrote: post #130
mschuster91 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They now require a DUNS number to submit an app These things are easy to get, the idea is to at least slow down the deluge of scam apps and barely working "vibe coding" apps. > You now need 10-15 people to "QA" your app before submitting Again, enforcing at least a baseline of testing isn't bad. Both Apple's and Google's stores suffer from a massive problem with low quality apps and it's honestly more than time tha…

> These things are easy to get, the idea is to at least slow down the deluge of scam apps and barely working "vibe coding" apps. When you add bureaucratic hurdles to a process to try to slow down abuse, you often find that abusive users are more willing to navigate that process than legitimate ones. (We've seen this with email spam already - spammers are perfectly willing to set up DKIM and DMARC, and have stronger i…

The main goal of SP, DKIM and DMARC wasn't to slow down spammers by setting up "bureaucratic hurdles", it was to prevent domain spoofing, though, and arguably it's succeeded at that.

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

#156

Post by TuringNYC »

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".

New business idea:

AUaaS - App Update as a Service

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

#157

Post by mschuster91 »

duskwuff wrote: post #130
mschuster91 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They now require a DUNS number to submit an app These things are easy to get, the idea is to at least slow down the deluge of scam apps and barely working "vibe coding" apps. > You now need 10-15 people to "QA" your app before submitting Again, enforcing at least a baseline of testing isn't bad. Both Apple's and Google's stores suffer from a massive problem with low quality apps and it's honestly more than time tha…

> These things are easy to get, the idea is to at least slow down the deluge of scam apps and barely working "vibe coding" apps. When you add bureaucratic hurdles to a process to try to slow down abuse, you often find that abusive users are more willing to navigate that process than legitimate ones. (We've seen this with email spam already - spammers are perfectly willing to set up DKIM and DMARC, and have stronger i…

> When you add bureaucratic hurdles to a process to try to slow down abuse, you often find that abusive users are more willing to navigate that process than legitimate ones.

In this case, it's not just a bureaucratic hurdle, it's adding a real external cost - app authors now have to go and deal with their government to get something DUNS accepts as a certification of entrepreneurship.

For single developers and legitimate startups, that cost is practically irrelevant and they're going to have to do it anyway to file taxes - but scammers run into the issue that they'll have to either use their own identity or have to clone someone else's which carries significantly more risk when the cops come investigating.

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

#160

Post by PeeMcGee »

balder1991 wrote: post #137
alterom wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're ahead of you. They're already using AI slop to come up with these rules in the first place, to verify compliance, and to respond to your complaints. It's AI slop all the way down. And the shittier things are, the more raise they get for successfully moving the needle of utilization of AI in the business model.

Now I’m envisioning a future where nothing works and everything is halted endlessly because it is being handled by LLMs talking to LLMs, which summarize things so that other LLMs make a decision that gets expanded to a huge text with inconsistencies that in the end don’t make sense anymore.

The singularity but stupid
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