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Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account
231–240 of 530 posts
Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The part I don't get is... where in Google leadership does this issue get lost on the company's priorities? Of all of the rational explanations I can come up with, it feels like someone looks at the data and either says "nah we don't lose much money from this" or "nah it's not a real problem". Is that actually true? Could it be something to do with company culture? Something like "if we solve a hard problem by assi…
Human-based support at Google-scale is also insanely expensive.
If they weren't taking mone from each of their app developers, that might be an argument. But when you are making Google scale profits, which are INSANELY high, than you can afford the humans to provide support.
And if you don't, than your monopoly should be broken by the government. And Apple's high end garden barely scratches Google's monopoly.
Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account
#233A few days ago there was a discussion about Google listing PWAs in the play store. I would hate if they were somehow able to exercise this level of control on webapps/webpages...
Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account
#234It sounds like the problem is with the outsourced developers responsible for the app. It's their account which has been banned - for multiple violations of the ToS. Now, perhaps this is just over-zealous enforcement on Google's part, but it's also possible that these developers have created shady apps before, or are adding shady code to apps developed for others. The OP doesn't seem to know for certain what code is i…
I'd love to see the source code of the uploaded app.
Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account
#235I don’t buy the guy’s analogy of crime and association. If you willingly lend the keys to your truck to someone else, and he or she commits a crime while using the vehicle, it might get impounded. Know the people whom you work with, or just do the work yourself.
That is a bit of a silly comparison. Even if you let a criminal borrow your car and they do something bad, there is some sort of legal apparatus to get your car back if it's clear that you were not involved in that criminal activity. The impound lot doesn't simply say "sorry, we saw your appeal, but we're gonna go ahead and keep the car forever."
There is no such apparatus. Any property used in comission of a crime is forfit, no matter of original owner. Stolen guns, cars and cert are all treated the same under the law.
On the other hand, I get great deals at police auctions and never lend out my keys.
Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account
#236I note from the mention of £25k that you're probably in the UK. If you don't mind burning fifty quid or so, you might find it satisfying to use the small claims process to issue for a sensible (not super-inflated) estimate of damages. The below is not legal advice, but is written from personal experience. Try to leave a clear paper trail of your reasonableness: send a clear notice before action with a reasonable time…
> Their costs will be substantial and the rules do not allow them to recover them from a non-vexatious claimant... Do the rules allow them to bring the question of whether the claimant is non-vexatious to litigation?
The first test in U.K. common law is whether or not the case has any merit; not a losing case, not mistaken, but without merit. The kind of case we’re typically talking about are either fraudulent, or completely bonkers, and that’s what this is meant to prevent. Second, the vexatious litigant is a serial offender, not just some fool who doesn’t understand how the courts are meant to work.
Someone claiming their livelihood was impinged on by termination of their accounts by Google, given said termination actually occurred and not in the context of a criminal enterprise won’t meet that standard. Not a chance. Now if you made dozens of accounts and sued over each one, or were a spammer, drug dealer, etc... that would probably annoy a judge.
Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's interesting to note that Google seems to come up much more often for Kafkaesque customer support problems. That's not a rigorous scientific statement, but it's fairly consistent with my own experience dealing with Google as a startup. Unless you have a back channel via an employee you know, it's next to impossible to get any non-automated, human judgement on your situation. The part I don't get is... whe…
I think what a lot of people forget or don't appreciate is the sheer scale of FAANG companies and what they deal with on a regular basis. People complain about how they can't talk to a human being about their one specific issue. These companies are not mom and pop stores dealing with a handful of suppliers, just sitting there waiting for their phone to ring - they're huge businesses operating in hundreds of countries…
The economies of scale say that the larger companies can better afford to hire representatives per client tahn the mom and pop stores can. If Google were to have as much staff - proportional to their amount of products [ie apps that they are making money off of] - as a mom and pop store did, we'd be fine.
In fact, if they had even a thousandth of that, we'd be fine.
Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account
#238I don’t buy the guy’s analogy of crime and association. If you willingly lend the keys to your truck to someone else, and he or she commits a crime while using the vehicle, it might get impounded. Know the people whom you work with, or just do the work yourself.
It’s more like you lend your truck to someone who committed a crime sometime in the past and now you’re banned from ever driving again.
Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account
#239Not commenting on the specific merits of this case (as I would want to hear both sides), but a few general thoughts:
a) Maybe it's just the nature of social media, but I think we're seeing a massive uptick in issues like this being brought to Hacker News and their ilk. Not just Developer Accounts, but DMCA fraud and Adwords account issues as well.
b) An incumbent like Google can be built entirely on automated algorithms for all they do (I think this is one of their core precepts), but at some point (like now) this breaks down. This sets the stage for a rapidly building snowball of first small/minor litigation (e.g. Small Claims) and then catches fire until much larger litigation starts happening.
c) As evidenced over and over in tech / large corporate history, often issues like this (that snowball), open up opportunities for new upstart players who come up with effective solutions to these problems, to displace the incumbents. (Cracks in the corporate armor.) As such, it wouldn't surprise me to see upstarts using this as an opportunity to chip away at Google's market share.
d) Small claims court can be a very effective way to get matters resolved, and I've found them to very much not be biased towards any party and to consider the merits of the case. With that said, there are some restrictions - including the amount of judgment, and the kinds of judgment that can be issued. One of the most interesting aspects here is that: "Unless a judge grants permission, Attorneys and paralegals are excluded from appearing or participating with the plaintiff or defendant in a small claims suit." This makes it really interesting when the defendant is a company like Google (or really any large entity).
e) I attribute some percentage of success to building a good cadre of attorneys who work for me, or with me. As much as I cringe when I think back to some of the invoices, it is my humble opinion that they've been worth every dollar paid out for their services, especially in cases just such as these.
Best of luck resolving your issue.
Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was also suspended. - Having friends inside google does not help (I suppose at some level they can, but L5/L6 engineers aren't enough) - Creating a new account with a different credit card does not help. Subsequent accounts they can link back to you will also be banned - I haven't found a solution yet, except for keeping all of my new projects outside of google (no google analytics, no google search console (which…
no gsuite is probably key - I'm thinking of terminating all my gsuite accounts simply due to no desire of having my business basically be terminated due to some stupid algorithms maintained by google's idiots.
Keep G Suite, but buy your own domain (whatever.com) so you are in total control. If they ban you, just change DNS records to point to zoho or some other provider.