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Google terminated our start-up Google Play Publisher Account

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51–60 of 108 posts

Re: Google terminated our start-up Google Play Publisher Account

#51

>Do not attempt to register a new developer account. Any new accounts will be closed and your developer registration fee will not be refunded. We recommend that you use an alternative method for distributing your apps in the future. If this is a serous problem, why is there no other app store? There should be plenty of programmers who need another method to reach their customers. For starters, Amazon's app store shou…

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Re: Google terminated our start-up Google Play Publisher Account

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They charge to have access to the dev tools and the right to publish apps. There are real costs to doing this right and I believe most developers are happy to pay.

Other than the 30% fee they charge and ad revenue generated via the apps? Please. That fee is 100% an anti spam mechanism.

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Re: Google terminated our start-up Google Play Publisher Account

#53

Google, shutting down a service, replying with bots pretending to be humans, and a total lack of customer service? Say it ain’t so. The only Google services I rely on are email and search, and even in those cases I’m looking for alternatives.

Email is the most dangerous service for you to be relying on a company that you describe as having "a total lack of customer service". Email is the gateway to all your accounts across the entire Internet.

Re: Google terminated our start-up Google Play Publisher Account

#54

Google, shutting down a service, replying with bots pretending to be humans, and a total lack of customer service? Say it ain’t so. The only Google services I rely on are email and search, and even in those cases I’m looking for alternatives.

Relying on them for email isn’t a small dependency since that’s your online identity, being linked to all your other online accounts.

Pay for your own domain and if you can’t live without Gmail, at least go with GSuite.

Personally I think Gmail sucks for delivering email and I got off it based on technical limitations too.

Re: Google terminated our start-up Google Play Publisher Account

#55
post #12

Wow, I feel for that company. I was always skeptical of people raising alarm bells at everything "going chrome," but now I'm starting to get it - Google has the ability to just nuke a company from orbit on a whim, and I'm not sure anybody can do anything about it. Sure, that company developed a business around Google. But it still feels bad. The only problem is that I don't trust a large portion of American politicia…

Who is proposing a propagandic censorship machine? The example, as stupid as it was, was intended to highlight bias and ask the question of how big tech can be trusted to act without ideological or personal preference when it comes to censoring speech, deciding what apps are permissible, who can earn on their platforms etc. I don’t hear anyone who is championing regulation suggesting that the solution to censorship on the likes of google is more censorship only this time enforced by the government

Re: Google terminated our start-up Google Play Publisher Account

#56

>Do not attempt to register a new developer account. Any new accounts will be closed and your developer registration fee will not be refunded. We recommend that you use an alternative method for distributing your apps in the future. If this is a serous problem, why is there no other app store? There should be plenty of programmers who need another method to reach their customers. For starters, Amazon's app store shou…

"Other app stores" do exist, but Google went to great lengths to destroy them. Publishing clients for alternative stores in Google Play/Android Market have been prohibited by Google's ToS for years (don't know if it is still prohibited). The "allow alternative app sources" checkbox (unchecked by default!) has been deterring users from installing from non-Google sources till Android 8. It still exists, but Google have ruled, that third-party marketplace apps are better than malware-riddled piracy websites, so Android 8+ allows to whitelist specific marketplace apps while still keeping the checkbox unchecked. And let's not forget about Google's war to banish alternatives to their services from Android devices, while using their own Google Services packages as leverage.

Google's overall approach to building it's walled garden is not much different from Apple's. They give some fake "choice", because they know, that tech-illiterate consumers won't be able to make use of alternative options.

Re: Google terminated our start-up Google Play Publisher Account

#57
post #33
post #12

Wow, I feel for that company. I was always skeptical of people raising alarm bells at everything "going chrome," but now I'm starting to get it - Google has the ability to just nuke a company from orbit on a whim, and I'm not sure anybody can do anything about it. Sure, that company developed a business around Google. But it still feels bad. The only problem is that I don't trust a large portion of American politicia…

> Google has the ability to just nuke a company from orbit on a whim, and I'm not sure anybody can do anything about it. And that's why you don't build that critical point of failure into your product, even if it's harder and more expensive to do it another way. Which, sadly, means don't build your company around an Android app. They can do this to your personal Google account, too. What are the repercussions, to mos…

For me it's (just) a way to log in into YouTube, I have a coupple of lists there which are nice, and I also use it for the Play Store on my phone where I bought 2 apps which I use, so I guess those would be gone too.

Otherwise I don't think I use a google account for anything else.

Re: Google terminated our start-up Google Play Publisher Account

#58
Aaaand flagged of the front page, what just by score and would would probably still sit firmly at the #1 spot it shot to.

What's a valid reason to do that, rather than clicking "hide" and just ignore the story if you personally don't care about it? Sure, I'd also prefer an article, that maybe contains this and other things as examples. But the discussion can be in that spirit regardless -- and who who will that article, or have such a discussion, when stuff like this is actively being hidden from sight?

Once again it turns out that most people are way better than the manipulated results make it seem like. I think of that whenever someone says "the market decided that "$shitty_thing is okay".

edit: answer the 2 questions, and we'll see who's contributing and thinking, and who isn't.

Re: Google terminated our start-up Google Play Publisher Account

#59
post #44
post #3

Still not entirely sure what kind of apps this guy is making, are they legitimate? Otherwise, it looks like a reoccurring HN thing, where people plea for help while they're actually involved in some shady stuff. Not trying to accuse the author, of course. At the same time, it drives me nuts to see these kinds of flaws in the system. People get invested in a platform, and then one day that platform kicks you in the nu…

The showcase pieces in their portfolio are urban mobility apps. Doesn't get much less shady than that. But the ad and in-app revenue streams mentioned in the article suggest that they have also been active in other fields. In-app purchases that still go on after account termination might be a hint in the right direction though: would IAPs via Play still be going on? External ("untaxed") IAPs are the biggest sin from…

Nitpicking, there've been shady "urban mobility" apps before.

Remember that one which told you which platform your train at eg Penn Station was likely to come in on, so you could wait on your track instead of in the designated waiting area? To put it in clickbait terms, "station operators HATE this", because there are a variety of safety and efficiency problens with people waiting on the platform, even when it helped the user be the first on the train.

(I have no idea what is going on in this case.)

Re: Google terminated our start-up Google Play Publisher Account

#60

>Do not attempt to register a new developer account. Any new accounts will be closed and your developer registration fee will not be refunded. We recommend that you use an alternative method for distributing your apps in the future. If this is a serous problem, why is there no other app store? There should be plenty of programmers who need another method to reach their customers. For starters, Amazon's app store shou…

"Other app stores" do exist, but Google went to great lengths to destroy them. Publishing clients for alternative stores in Google Play/Android Market have been prohibited by Google's ToS for years (don't know if it is still prohibited). The "allow alternative app sources" checkbox (unchecked by default!) has been deterring users from installing from non-Google sources till Android 8. It still exists, but Google have…

If you can escape the "garden" just by checking a box, it's not much of a walled garden. The choice is very real, e.g. there's nothing like F-Droid on iOS devices. This makes Android devices a fairly sensible choice overall, although some devices are still more open than others (supporting e.g. alternative, Google-free OS's like LineageOS, and perhaps the future PostmarketOS).
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