“Fewer Users” Warning Hurting Specialized and New Apps

Post by fluidcruft » Fri, May 02, 2025, 11:39 PM UTC

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…

Post by Marsymars » Fri, May 02, 2025, 11:42 PM UTC

BlimpSpike wrote: post #143

owlbite wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that's worked so well for PCs?

PCs don't have sandboxing or permissions.

Post by fluidcruft » Fri, May 02, 2025, 11:58 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #114

notatoad wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Post by alterom » Sat, May 03, 2025, 12:18 AM UTC

brianwawok wrote: post #177

balder1991 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whose LLM wins. Yours or Googles?

Post by aeve890 » Sat, May 03, 2025, 1:04 AM UTC

vineyardmike wrote: post #77

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…

> we don't need any new apps that do similar things to existing apps" I’m not a “Googler who may be responsible”, but my understanding is that Apple does this too… and Google App Store has a reputation for being lower quality. I assume it’s because unoriginal apps at some point are just “polluting” the market and making it harder to find higher quality products. Which is generally what users want. Some things are red…