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Google bans my events app for referencing Covid-19, or related terms

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Google bans my events app for referencing Covid-19, or related terms

#191

Post by ultrarunner »

kube-system wrote: post #144
jedberg wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Power users can use Android. I've tried Android, I don't like it. Apple has put a lot more thought into their UX. Also the Apple hardware is better. Telling someone to use Android because they want control of their iPhone is a ridiculous argument because they aren't substitutes for each other. > The problem with side loading us social engineering attacks. Exactly, which is why I said to make it hard to side load. R…

> Require you to run an app on a Mac laptop and write some code to make it work. Make it so that there are so many steps that only the most dedicated are interested. But just make it possible. Can't you do exactly that with xcode?

The seven day certificate expiration duration also makes this largely impractical.

Re: Google bans my events app for referencing Covid-19, or related terms

#192

Post by miedpo »

webartifex wrote: post #83
miedpo wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm... I'm pretty sure you can give an email multiple tags on Thunderbird. Although, you run into an issue because some email servers don't support tag sync, so that might be creating an issue here. Or so I think. In any case, best of luck with it!

On Gmail, I used their tags as what they appear on Gmail as, namely "virtual folders". Thunderbird's tags are a different concept from folders on IMAP.

Ah, that is true. Got what you were getting at now :)

Re: Google bans my events app for referencing Covid-19, or related terms

#193

Post by ta17711771 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #153
elsonrodriguez wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The why is that there was a huge solution/market gap. Finding software for Palm and Windows phones was often a trek through random forums and websites to download garbage that didn't work. There needed to be a central registry before smartphones would be adopted by the average person, and the registry needed some quality assurance so that the average person would have a good experience. Tucows wasn't going to cut it,…

> There needed to be a central registry before smartphones would be adopted by the average person This is revisionist. The iPod/iPhone originally didn't even have third party apps and it caught on anyway. Even now, 90% of the value of a smart phone is having a web browser in your pocket and most "apps" could have just as easily been web pages. I think the only apps on my phone that can actually justify being apps ins…

> 90% of the value of a smart phone is having a web browser in your pocket and most "apps" could have just as easily been web pages.

They will be very soon. PWA is spreading like wildfire.

Now we just need to teach people to use secure browsers. (Not just ones people think are private.)

Re: Google bans my events app for referencing Covid-19, or related terms

#194

Post by lytefm »

I've had a similar experience about two months ago. Our app is a simple health and fitness tracker. When corona broke out, we made some adjustments so that people could track their symptoms and export them as Excel file in order to share it with their physician or health authorities. We also adjusted our description accordingly and got banned immediately. We appealed to the ban, removed everything related to corona from the description (I guess the word „quarantine” is the offending word in your case) and got reinstated after a few days. Nowadays it's used by thousands of people participating in a COVID-19 longitudonal study and we haven't had any problems again. Takeaway: Unless you're the WHO, don't mention anything related to COVID-19 in your description. Ask your Chinese friends how to deal with censorship, in Finland they simply make „Kotona” („at home”) instead of „Corona” Videos on YouTube. https://www.millionfriends.de/coronatracker-suspended/

Re: Google bans my events app for referencing Covid-19, or related terms

#195

Post by rsj_hn »

macintux wrote: post #159
rsj_hn wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counting install base doesn't matter when you are comparing such different devices. There are more shoes than cars in the world, but that doesn't mean you are going to sell hood ornaments to people who only have shoes. The large number of cheap smartphones simply aren't going to be useful to run your office app, regardless of the size of the install base. And for the types of phones that will run your app well and gi…

Roughly half of lower-income Americans don’t own a PC[1], and we have some of the highest market share in the world. I don’t have numbers handy outside the U.S. but again, 1 billion PCs doesn’t cover much of the population. The trend has been obvious for years: more and more people do all of their computing on smartphones. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/07/digital-div...

89% of US households have a laptop or desktop. That doesn't mean each family member has their own, whereas it's more likely to have each family member have their own phone, say on a family plan. But in terms of revenue generating opportunity, if someone cannot afford a laptop or a desktop, they will not own an iPhone either, which accounts for 2/3 of mobile revenue, and they are not going to be running your complex smartphone app on their discount android device, so you haven't responded to my argument at all; you keep fixating on counting the number of devices rather than looking at actual addressable markets and the best way to generate revenue from people who can afford to pay for your product or that advertisers will pay to market to.

Just to throw some numbers out there, as of 2018:

iOS revenue: 47 B. (global, all sources, software, ads, etc) [1]

Google play: 25 B (global, all sources, software, ads, etc) [1]

Global software revenue: ~450 B (global) [2]

Total software revenue (US only): ~260 B. [3]

You are right about the 90% and 10%, but it's not pointing in the direction you think. So you can keep counting devices with very different characteristics and insisting that one number is higher than the other, or you can start counting dollars.

[1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/app-revenues/

[2] https://www.statista.com/markets/418/topic/484/software/

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184124/estimated-revenue...

Re: Google bans my events app for referencing Covid-19, or related terms

#196

Post by runawaybottle »

koheripbal wrote: post #66
Kye wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219427

Can someone remind me why there is an "app store" that is run by the phone OS maker? Aside from the anti-trust/monopoly type issue, should there be a more market healthy de-coupling between the place I buy my apps and the OS maker? Monopolies are almost always bad for consumers. I kind of chuckle when I think about how Microsoft had such a huge battle over IE being integrated into Windows, and now we sort of accept a…

I suppose that was(is) the dream of the mobile web. Where web technology is good enough to deliver an app experience via a website.

No approval process, no banned from App Store.

Re: Google bans my events app for referencing Covid-19, or related terms

#197

Post by slavik81 »

scarface74 wrote: post #174
leppr wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's any relationship except an inverse one between user choice and app sandboxing. QubesOS, Snaps, Firejail, Sandboxie, browser tabs to some extent, restrict user-freedom in only the most technical way, with no bundled choice traps. On the contrary, a good sandbox allows users to forego human curation/proprietary malware detection services and execute any code they want.

But once you have a sandbox, you limit what the app can do. Would the outspoken users on Android be happy if the sandbox for side loaded apps restricted functionality they wanted?

That depends on who controls the sandbox. I certainly would like to limit what apps can do. The sandbox should give me control of the software on my device.

Re: Google bans my events app for referencing Covid-19, or related terms

#198

Post by [deleted] »

scarface74 wrote: post #174
leppr wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's any relationship except an inverse one between user choice and app sandboxing. QubesOS, Snaps, Firejail, Sandboxie, browser tabs to some extent, restrict user-freedom in only the most technical way, with no bundled choice traps. On the contrary, a good sandbox allows users to forego human curation/proprietary malware detection services and execute any code they want.

But once you have a sandbox, you limit what the app can do. Would the outspoken users on Android be happy if the sandbox for side loaded apps restricted functionality they wanted?

[deleted]

Re: Google bans my events app for referencing Covid-19, or related terms

#199

Post by efreak »

RealStickman_ wrote: post #147
phh wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays there is Aurora Droid that solves the curation question: Aurora Droid supports F-Droid-like repo s , you can have multiple selected, and they may include proprietary applications. All usual issues with Android's security getting in the way still applies though. Overall Aurora Droid is still miles away from a "proper" store, because there is no payment, there is no user feedback (so apps are still ordered by…

Another F-Droid based store app is G-Droid. It is possible to write comments and apps are rated with a mix of user ratings, update intervals and github ratings.

From my understanding, most developers never see this it even know it's there.

Re: Google bans my events app for referencing Covid-19, or related terms

#200

Post by raverbashing »

mcv wrote: post #151
mediaman wrote: post #100

Slightly different topic, but Google also suspended our company's adwords account, I believe for using keywords related to COVID-19. The business is an American manufacturer that added capacity to manufacture PPE to make up for the lack of Chinese supply. Since we were supplying direct to the market, the prices of the PPE were in-market from before COVID times, or cheaper. We weren't out to make a killing, just to fi…

> "Google actively tried to stop distribution of American-made PPE during the pandemic." This sounds like a great headline to shine some light on Google's banning practices. Some bad PR may help them reconsider their lack of customer service.

Writing a letter about this to some representatives in Washington might resonate well
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