Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app • Hacker News Board

Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

#161

Post by sundvor » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 10:47 AM UTC

wetpaws wrote: post #2

This is my personal nightmare as a android developer, and knowing google it's not a matter of "if" but rather "when". (Google did remove my app from store once for not providing a link to a privacy policy document, abruptly, with no warning and notifying me post-factum, reading other horror stories I consider myself lucky)

Google has lost any connection to their once oh so brightly glowing halo. As a developer I am steering clear of Google Cloud partly because of all their crappy way of dealing with humans. AWS and Azure just make more sense down here in Melbourne as well.

Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

#162

Post by londons_explore » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 10:47 AM UTC

master-litty wrote: post #153

londons_explore wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think you can solve it, come apply for a job at Google. This kind of thing is a seriously hard thing to police in a fair and reasonable way. Real spammers have become very sophisticated, and separating them from good users is very very difficult. Many bots steal real human accounts for their nefarious behaviour. Human review of accounts doesn't help much either - you simply can't allow a human to delve through…

I had an on-site with Google last year and didn't quite make it in. Since then I've noticed HN has an aggressively negative opinion on Google's general affairs, and most of it makes sense on the surface. It almost feels like I dodged a bullet. But comments like these shine a completely different perspective. The OP's story is extremely frustrating but it doesn't seem to stem from a lack of care, in your eyes. If some…

> If someone were really motivated to solve problems in that area, do you really feel they would be given the time to explore it?

Yes. Beware though - some parts of the issue might be more political rather than technical (eg. Team A wants user accounts banned for violating XYZ policy, while Team B has other data which shows those user accounts aren't bad, but can't share the data with Team A because that violates privacy terms).

For issues that are purely technical (for example, the automated spam detection system has a false positive on an obscure but legit library), any Google employee can send a pull request to fix it, and in general your pull request will be accepted and deployed.

Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

#163

Post by feanaro » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 10:52 AM UTC

ddalex wrote: post #156

feanaro wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] to withhold information that would expose secret filters that you use? It makes no sense to me that these filters are such a secret. Either you are doing something to deceive your users or you are not. Are you advising that we should just blindly trust an opaque set of rules that a giant corporation, whose interests are not aligned with our own, can use to ban anyone with no oversight at all?

Play Store developers are not users - they are customers for the Play Store product. Nobody is forcing them to develop for Play Store; or to use Ad Sense or any other Google product. When you're starting your relationship, it's very clear (in the ToS) that they can reject your apps or terminate the relationship however they choose. If they would start quitting developing for Play Store because of these opaque rules,…

When I said "users", I was referring to their rationale for killing off this developer's account and applications. One of the cited policies was Violation of Deceptive Behavior, which referred to users.

> So yes, I advise that, if you don't like the rules of Google, don't go play with them. It's the only thing that can change the rules of Google. (and FB, Amazon, etc).

If you don't like the rules (or their behaviour when supposedly applying them), you can also:

1. Criticize, explain why the behaviour is bad and spread the word about it. This is what we are doing now.

2. Regulate this kind of behaviour out of existence.

Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

#164

Post by google_ceo » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 10:59 AM UTC

abrookewood wrote: post #44

Hey Google! Want to know why your cloud service is trailing behind AWS & Azure? This is why ... When you erode trust in your consumer and developer services, don't expect us to sign up for your enterprise services.

Oh, that's why. Thanks!

Gonna fix tomorrow ASAP.

Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

#165

Post by JTenerife » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 11:01 AM UTC

jefftk wrote: post #152

pnw_hazor wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what everyone says about bad places. That's what they always say when asked to do terrible things. There will be people they could hire, but it wouldn't be anyone that would get invited to conferences, and so on. Nobody that would make Stanford proud. People who work at Google know they are working for a terrible company doing terrible things (there are plenty of those...) but those programmers, every single o…

> People who work at Google know they are working for a terrible company doing terrible things I work at Google, and I don't think it's terrible. Neither do most of my coworkers. There are things I wish were better, and things I'm working on improving, but overall I think Google's impact on the world is strongly positive.

> Google's impact on the world is strongly positive.

I couldn't disagree more. Google doesn't make bazillions of dollars because they provide us with live traffic on maps. Google has significantly enabled and actively driven the mindless consume-everything-all-the-time culture with all the horrible consequences for our mental-health and the environment.

The world would be a much better place without the ones like Google, Facebook and Amazon.

Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

#166

Post by geomark » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 11:04 AM UTC

aduitsis wrote: post #114

geomark wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Google's sh*tty ways came to light long ago. And they are still doing it. I'm one of the many, many people that got screwed by Google in a similar way with their Adsense program. A long time ago it was. Back then there were actually people who communicated with you about it, at least that was my experience. But it was still stupid. I was running Adsense on a website and got a message that I was not in complia…

Wow, the "chocolate fetish" case really kicks it out of the park. Half-serious question, did all those replies come from actual human beings? Reading the original blog post of this story and other comments here, including yours, I get a vague feeling that the communications on google's part are being done either by some kind of a machine, or by humans that can act like a machine, albeit of rather limited capabilities…

I am quite sure the email replies I received were from actual humans. It's been a while, about 10 years ago I think. If those were machine generated responses they were way more advanced than anything I thought existed at that time. I weaned myself off of Adsense so I am not close to it anymore. But from what I can tell now days you don't get any response at all.

With that chocolate fetish thing my thought was that the people they were using for compliance monitoring must be teenage boys with overactive hormones who see adult content in just about everything. But maybe it was actually an algorithm that matched the word "fetish" with some skin tones in a photo (there were faces afterall) and flagged it. Who knows. Who cares.

Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

#167

Post by huffmsa » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 11:04 AM UTC

maehwasu wrote: post #151

huffmsa wrote: post #119

Seems to me that Google is turning on a lot of deep learning models in production which aren't production ready. Search has gone to shit recently. Image search is hot garbage for anything but images with well known people / places / things. You can't reliably filter or sort news results by date. YouTube is filtering pro LGBT content but allowing weird Eastern European pedo videos. The play store is apparently moderat…

This sounds like exactly what you'd expect from a company that is bleeding talent and morale. Note: I do not have any information that that is what is happening in Google; I'm just saying what my guess would be if I were presented the situation as "these are the symptoms at Company X. What is the problem?"

And you're likely not far off.

It's a pretty well tested principle that massive familial wealth usually disappears by the 3rd or 4th generation (because the descendents regress to the norm in terms of ability) and it looks like we're seeing the same at Google.

They've got too little "real" work for the number of hands they need to keep busy, so unqualified people are going back and "improving" the work of the 1st and 2nd generation.

But because of the company's size, it can't hire high risk shoot from the hip revolutionaries (not that they'd want to work at a buttoned up Corp anyway), so it's staffed with safe employees who don't really resemble the cowboys of the 1st and 2nd generations, and hence can't improve the systems any further.

Happens to most companies beyond a certain size.

Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

#168

Post by master-litty » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 11:08 AM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #162

master-litty wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an on-site with Google last year and didn't quite make it in. Since then I've noticed HN has an aggressively negative opinion on Google's general affairs, and most of it makes sense on the surface. It almost feels like I dodged a bullet. But comments like these shine a completely different perspective. The OP's story is extremely frustrating but it doesn't seem to stem from a lack of care, in your eyes. If some…

> If someone were really motivated to solve problems in that area, do you really feel they would be given the time to explore it? Yes. Beware though - some parts of the issue might be more political rather than technical (eg. Team A wants user accounts banned for violating XYZ policy, while Team B has other data which shows those user accounts aren't bad, but can't share the data with Team A because that violates pri…

Could I ask you some more questions about day-to-day Google over email? It's wonderful to hear about.

Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

#169

Post by GeneralTspoon » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 11:10 AM UTC

kalleboo wrote: post #76

pnw_hazor wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile they collect money from the advertisers. Does Google credit the advertisers when they cancel click-bait websites/apps? I know Google has a refund process that ad buyers can try to use if they have evidence of fraud. However, does Google pro-actively do refunds when they cancel fraud sites/apps?

The email they send when you're terminated claims they refund the advertisers

Although if your app is removed from Google Play, they'll happily still display AdMob ads in your app while telling you that you can't collect the earnings because your app was removed from Google Play.

Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

#170

Post by input_sh » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 11:10 AM UTC

javert wrote: post #97

cbanek wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true that Google, Apple, and Facebook are now getting the treatment that Microsoft got a long time ago. But I'm not sure I agree that everyone would go free software if it didn't happen. If anything, I think another company would just come along and build something slightly less crappy but no more open. These days you don't even own the software anymore, it's just a subscription or SaaS. > Software companies mak…

Facebook is also a great example. That shit is so absolutely awful, and it's destroying people psychologically. People will eventually learn and get out of it. We will find a healthier alternative and adopt it organically. But chances are the government will force Facebook to be just slightly less destructive, so that people never abandon it en mass, and never find a healthier alternative. Facebook will kill itself i…

Facebook (as in, a social network) is already dead, it's just that nobody pulled the plug yet.

They have no people to expand to, no new opportunities to monetize the platform. All they can do is squeeze out every last penny they can from the existing user base.

What was the last memorable feature that was added? Stories in like 2015? Facebook (the company) has moved on (to Instagram and WhatsApp), users are less engaged, the content is slowly moving away. Nobody creates a new product and thinks "we gotta have a Facebook presence" anymore.