Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

blog.pushbullet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

561–570 of 811 posts

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#561

Post by pdonis »

unnouinceput wrote: post #548
jboydyhacker wrote: post #543

I think folks are drastically missing the forest for the trees here. This is just one minor example of the INSANE process that is now the Chrome Approval Process. I've seen extensions go for many months getting random rejections with no reason given. This forces developers to GUESS as to what is wrong. Want to try and develop according to a roadmap or timeline- forget about it. There is no "app store" approval proces…

After 2nd to 3rd rejection if it will require a human to intervene Google will have to hire half the earthlings to deal with crappy spammers that will simply spam google store with their extensions. The answer is not human interaction, the answer is automation tool to give more details as what was detected and didn't pass.

> the answer is automation tool to give more details as what was detected and didn't pass

And then Google will have to hire half the earthlings to write all the special-case code into the automation tool...

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#562

Post by dingo_bat »

SahAssar wrote: post #85
the_jeremy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who do you trust? Certainly not Chromium-Edge. That leaves "only browse the internet on a Mac with Safari" or browsers with such tiny market share that they'll never be tested against, and sites will routinely be broken for you. My company doesn't do any non-Chrome compatibility testing, so all our intranet sites require Chrome.

Why not firefox?

I have a very silly reason but it just irritates me so much that I cannot use Firefox. It does not support win10 precision gestures to zoom and go back/forward.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#563

Post by cryptonector »

geofft wrote: post #403

Uh, yikes: > As I looked at the permissions and what our extension actually needs to operate, I noticed a great opportunity to reduce our permissions requests. We do not need to request access to data on https://*/* and http://*/* . Instead, we can simply request data access for https://*.pushbullet.com/* , http://*.pushbullet.com/* , and http://localhost/* . This is a huge reduction in the private data our extension…

Like you, I suspect http://localhost/ is part of the issue, indeed. I wonder if Google could have a .localhost origin for this.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#564

Post by dingo_bat »

creato wrote: post #363
the_af wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The recent nerfing of ublock origin has already had me feeling iffy on things. What did they do to ublock origin? The single best Chrome extension ever . If it stops working and I must suffer YouTube ads again, it's bye bye Chrome.

If Youtube ads mean that much to you, why not just pay for it? I'm all for ad blocking (I use ublock too) but if I heavily use a site that offers me a way to pay a reasonable price, I think it's the right thing to do. Uploaders with monetized videos still get paid that way (and I don't want to bother with Patreon etc, that doesn't nearly scale to everyone I watch videos from).

I pay for youtube premium. But I still want fully powered ublock origin.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#565

Post by ajayyy »

I have made an extension and am getting the exact same complaint whenever I submit updates. Luckily, old versions are still up though.

Link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mnjggcdmjocbbbhaep...

It only has access to 2 domains, it doesn't have the tabs permission and it uses optional permissions for everything else.

I think it is just an automated issue due to covid-19, and I guess I might just have to wait until then.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#566

Post by TallGuyShort »

geofft wrote: post #494
JaggedJax wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you're completely ignoring the point that even without the all http(s) permission they will still be kicked off the store, so that has nothing do do with the issue at hand. If localhost is the issue, Google could literally respond exactly the way you did and the problem is gone, "why do you need http://localhost/?" This isn't about permissions at all. This is about communication and whether it's worth putting eff…

That's the thing I'm sympathetic to - having fixed the bug , it's frustrating that it's not clear what the next steps are. But given that they had the bug, Chrome was absolutely in the right to deny them the first time. And while I don't like Chrome's position that they're too busy to explain to everyone what they're doing wrong, if extensions that go "oh hey, we don't actually need access to literally every website,…

>> That's the thing I'm sympathetic to - having fixed the bug, it's frustrating that it's not clear what the next steps are.

Well therein lies the problem. We don't even know that's what they had a problem with in the first place. It's not clear that it IS "the bug".

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#567

Post by couchand »

solidasparagus wrote: post #527
calmchaos wrote: post #187

Those rejection emails are most likely sent by an AI. If you reply back and ask them to specify exactly what is wrong, you'll get the same generic email back. Ask again, and they'll send the same generic response without any details or comments written by a human. They simply can't specify the problem at all. That's how you know you are talking with an AI, not a human. The correct way to respond to those rejection em…

> when AI systems get more common, this will be a common nightmare for regular people I'm not sure. We've had automated phone customer service systems forever, but companies that in any way care about their customers still let you escalate to a human.

... and those phone systems are a common nightmare for regular people.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#568

Post by couchand »

arseniclifeform wrote: post #280
sudoit wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had the same problem when I made a fairly successful app in university. Whole account got deleted for a “3rd strike” meaning “3rd resubmission.” I’ve made a new account and their AI black box still doesn’t realize it’s me...

By whole account deleted do you mean your Chrome dev "account" or your Google account including Gmail, Gcal, and YouTube? The latter is my greatest fear.

Don't let them have you. Move to a different provider, you'll be much happier for it.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#569

Post by teruakohatu »

yellowapple wrote: post #456
extesy wrote: post #259

I'm in the same boat. My open source chrome extension[1] has just been taken down[2] after several years of no complaints because it apparently violated content policies related to nudity and pornography. Say what? Well, I guess you could view _any_ image using my extension, including nudes. Isn't that the problem with most other extensions which could be used on porn sites, like editing cookies, etc? I've submitted…

I mentioned this in the GitHub issue thread (howdy!), but I strongly suspect it has to do with specific references to pornographic sites in the extension's manifest. If only Google would mind its own business instead of playing mommy-knows-best and dictating its morality on grown adults.

It is also a fork of an extension that contained malware, so an automated code review tool trained on malware might be catching it.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#570

Post by nucleardog »

mythrwy wrote: post #349
nucleardog wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally trust the major cloud providers a bit more than the companies focused on acting as a domain registrar. The domain registrars are generally a race to the bottom and focused on "add-on" sales as most people are shopping on price and that's going to reflect in the overall quality of the things that most people don't really notice like, y'know, security and validation. You don't hear a lot of stories about Am…

So use Google or Microsoft to register your domain? Doesn't that bring us back to the same potential problem though?

No.

The main issue raised several comments up is portability. No provider locks you to only using their email offering/cloud offerings if you register their domain through them. Even if they did, transferring domains is trivial and well-supported everywhere.

As far as any other objections people usually raise around using hosted email and the like, a domain really has no comparable privacy implications in the real world (you're not handing Google or Microsoft a huge corpus on your life). It's also through their enterprise offerings where as long as your bill is paid they're generally not going to have some automated review suspend your account with no reason, and if they did they have actual support you can get in touch with.

This solves basically all of the problems with using an @gmail.com/@outlook.com/etc email address.

Post reply on HN