Google have declared Droidscript is malware

I can't find it now, but I read a story that's been repeatedly posted here about someone who got an idea, dropped everything, built an MVP, showed it to potential customers who loved it... and was told "I definitely need this, but I wouldn't pay for it." And then the person realized that the customer was right (the worst kind of right), and that the idea was both awesome and unmonetizable.

In the same vein... question.

Google is absolutely terrible at customer support and handling these kinds of issues. I once read in a comment posted here that they apparently don't even regard issues as valid signal unless 10,000 users are affected. (I've personally always instinctively shied away from app/site feedback buttons myself, and now I know why.) I'm guessing it's because con$i$tent ridiculou$ adverti$ing revenue ("we can do no wrong") has caused the death/deselection of normal customer support feedback loops.

Sooo... could a startup, or startups, fill the absolutely massive vacuum that is being created here?

For every story that trends on HN, how many more false negatives of people being bankrupted are there that never see the light of day? :(

I can only think that this number is probably remarkably high given that stories have to trend on social media and/or popular websites, for multiple days, before a connection is made and the problem can be fixed.

Once again, the more I look at this, the more I get the impression that this is a huge hole that could be filled to great benefit.

But thinking about it, I don't think it would be monetisable:

- It would ultimately be a company taking people's money to leverage a few private contacts. It doesn't take much squinting to see this as extortion and gatekeeping, which happens everywhere but would legally be very interesting to defend (especially against a company the size of Google). :/

- The contact issues only exist because of process and organizational failure, so even if private contacts were successfully established, the signal/noise ratio was ideal, and this company did perfect triage, it wouldn't take long for manglement to hear of the situation and decree that no Google employee were allowed to interact with the company professionally

- The whole thing would have to operate under the radar to operate at all... and maybe such operations exist and are successful, we've just never heard of them. Problem.

Running the whole thing as a volunteer operation maybe sounds like it could work though.

And if issues don't get fixed until >10,000 people "notice" maybe such an operation could have noticeable presence before being acknowledged.

Just thinking out loud. What think?

Was it used to publish malware? Given that it's a general purpose scripting tool I can imagine that some people would abuse it and use it as some sort of backdoor to get clueless users to run malware without having to publish it on the app store.

If that's the argument I can sort of see Google's point here. The Play Store is supposed to be curated and the application should follow certain guidelines. This tool as I understand it effectively provides a loophole that lets people run non-curated code without jailbreak. I know that Apple removed apps for similar reasons in the past.

TFA is a bit misleading, the whole "AD FRAUD" angle is frankly irrelevant, it's just that since Google considers that the app violates the guidelines it can't be eligible for the ad program.

It's seriously time to re-embrace the idea of ownership and control of our devices, and reject Android and iOS altogether. Developing for those platforms has become worse and more restrictive over the years, and this kind of crap is now just everyday news.

How good are Pinephones[1]? Are there better alternatives?

[1] https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/

> Add to that that it's a closed source IDE for an open platform, and my intuition sides with Google here.

If I can't ship my closed source IDE on the platform is the platform really open?

> My guess is that when details come out it will turn out that at-least-plausibly harmful Droidscript garbage was being pushed to users and Google decided to kill it.

Of course they will say it was because x, y, and z were done to protect the users. But is it really for the users' benefit or just about control over their walled garden?

> If I can't ship my closed source IDE on the platform is the platform really open?

For clarity: the Play Store is not an open platform. The Android API being exposed by Droidscript very much is.