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Google now requires and lists phone number in Play Store listings

android-developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Google now requires and lists phone number in Play Store listings

#61

Post by nucleardog »

adambatkin wrote: post #14
kyrra wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the product. If it's something you pay for, you can get a phone number. For example, GPay and Play store for billing issues has an accessible phone numbers. Any place where scaling customer support to the revenue vs number of users tends to lead to a lack of phone numbers. (Googler, opinions are my own)

Absolutely. As a paying Google Workspace customer (or whatever it's called this week) I have called support on a number of occasions. Zero times have they been able to help in any way (despite technical issues that they admitted were Google's responsibility), but I had a phone number.

Exact same experience contacting AdWords support when we were spending over a million a year.

You can get a hold of someone but they can’t really help you. When issues crossed over into any other area (engineering, other Google products, etc) the answer was basically “I can put an internal ticket in… but you probably want to find a workaround.”

We were only ever contacting them for bugs/issues with Google products or internal processes they had screwed us, not for “help me use the product” type support. Maybe they would have been more successful with that.

Re: Google now requires and lists phone number in Play Store listings

#62

Post by Dalewyn »

colanderman wrote: post #59
Dalewyn wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. As a customer, knowing I can call you goes a long way towards establishing your legitimacy in this day and age of overflowing junk devs and junkware. It's a way of demonstrating and establishing liability, FSVO liability. 2. If you don't want your personal phone number published, which is perfectly justifiable, provide your business phone number. Don't own a business? Go and register one at your local government o…

2 -- what? No. I'm not a business, I'm a hobbyist. I'm developing a thing I want to share for free with the world. I don't care if it's pseudonymous and I can't build a brand with it. But I want my network not to have to jump through hoops to install it.

A business is a legal entity, a way to separate certain liabilities from your personal name. If you don't want to sell something, that's fine, but that is tangent to owning a business or not.

What you want to do is publish your software without divulging your personal information. The proper way to do that is run your own business (eg: "Colanderman, LLC") and use that to satisfy public information requirements.

Note, if I'm misunderstanding you as to your desires then I do apologize. The overarching subject of discussion here is Google Play Store demanding phone numbers and other such information be publicly displayed, so I'm conversing with regards to how to satisfy that properly without divulging your own personal information.

Re: Google now requires and lists phone number in Play Store listings

#63

Post by [deleted] »

voakbasda wrote: post #43
nicolas_17 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where in the article (or the documentation[1]) does it say it will dox individual app developers? [1] https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

From the link you posted: Google will display your legal name, your country (as per your legal address), and developer email address on Google Play. If you decide to monetize on Google Play then Google will display your full address.

[deleted]

Re: Google now requires and lists phone number in Play Store listings

#64

Post by colanderman »

Dalewyn wrote: post #62
colanderman wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 -- what? No. I'm not a business, I'm a hobbyist. I'm developing a thing I want to share for free with the world. I don't care if it's pseudonymous and I can't build a brand with it. But I want my network not to have to jump through hoops to install it.

A business is a legal entity, a way to separate certain liabilities from your personal name. If you don't want to sell something, that's fine, but that is tangent to owning a business or not. What you want to do is publish your software without divulging your personal information. The proper way to do that is run your own business (eg: "Colanderman, LLC") and use that to satisfy public information requirements. Note,…

I publish all sorts of things without divulging personal information. I'm publishing text on this site right now.

I get that certain legal things require publicly associating a legal entity with them, but Google Play Store historically hasn't been, and it's entrenched itself as an effective gatekeeper for software deployed on most mobile phones. Changing their policy adds a frustrating and needless barrier for hobbyist developers.

(Remember that registering an LLC entails a yearly cost in many jurisdictions. It's not free, and I can't afford to pay it for something that's not a money maker.)

Re: Google now requires and lists phone number in Play Store listings

#65

Post by pokeb »

nicolas_17 wrote: post #24
efitz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The screen mock-ups for developer information for users show the phone number. It’s not clear from the blog post if the phone number display is a requirement.

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ... Individuals: "Google will display your legal name, your country (as per your legal address), and developer email address on Google Play. If you decide to monetize on Google Play then Google will display your full address." Organizations: "To help improve transparency and user safety on Google Play, Google will display your legal name, legal address, deve…

Google has the worst customer service ever and no phone number anywhere.

Wtf is this “do better” bs?

Re: Google now requires and lists phone number in Play Store listings

#66

Post by MBCook »

jprete wrote: post #36
MrZander wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you view the "Full Policy" link, it does seem to state that it must be shown. "where applicable" is vague though... Before you submit your app, you must: Accurately provide your developer account information, including the following details: * Legal name and address * D-U-N-S number, if registering as an organization * Contact email address and phone number * Developer email address and phone number shown on Googl…

I have no special knowledge of this, but I think the natural interpretation is that “developer email and phone number” means contact info for a business publishing the app.

I agree, my worry is what if I don’t have a company? Then do they consider me the company and decide to post my information?

Surely not. But it needs clarification.

Re: Google now requires and lists phone number in Play Store listings

#67

Post by a1o »

kccqzy wrote: post #42
MBCook wrote: post #10

The page isn’t clear on if the info has to be shown or can be shown. I get doing more to verify developers (ignoring what I think of DUNS). But acting as an individual developer if I were to think of creating an app for Android and saw that I had to publicly post my phone number that would be an absolute dead stop to development.

Just create a virtual phone number (say Google Voice) and put that up.

Google Voice is dead, isn't it?

Re: Google now requires and lists phone number in Play Store listings

#68

Post by MBCook »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #32
MBCook wrote: post #10

The page isn’t clear on if the info has to be shown or can be shown. I get doing more to verify developers (ignoring what I think of DUNS). But acting as an individual developer if I were to think of creating an app for Android and saw that I had to publicly post my phone number that would be an absolute dead stop to development.

Minimally, for one who wants to keep a personal number private, this will raise the barrier to entry with an ongoing cost for a separate number. Still, it’s a win for less technical users -- who ostensibly have never installed an alternative store -- considering they’ll be less likely to recognize scammy apps like the flashlights of old.

But Google can confirm that stuff without display it to the end user. That’s the role the intermediary should play.

Re: Google now requires and lists phone number in Play Store listings

#69

Post by MBCook »

kccqzy wrote: post #42
MBCook wrote: post #10

The page isn’t clear on if the info has to be shown or can be shown. I get doing more to verify developers (ignoring what I think of DUNS). But acting as an individual developer if I were to think of creating an app for Android and saw that I had to publicly post my phone number that would be an absolute dead stop to development.

Just create a virtual phone number (say Google Voice) and put that up.

So just to list list an app I need to sign up for an additional phone number.

Why? So people can call me? For what? Tech support? To ask if I exist?

I’m not answering that phone number. Im not signing up for it.

People in Hacker News complain left and right about all of Apple‘s policies and the hoops they make you jump through and how you have to pay $100 a year.

I have an app on the App Store. I don’t have to post my phone number and I don’t have to pay for a second one to ignore.

Re: Google now requires and lists phone number in Play Store listings

#70

Post by westurner »

charcircuit wrote: post #30
westurner wrote: post #7

What percentage of existing app developers on the Play Store do not have a DUNS number? Do they need to incorporate an LLC in order to get a DUNS number for their open source project? Google decided to take the first 15% of app developers' first $1M in revenue instead of 30% in 2021. Google decided to take a 30% cut from all Play Store app and in-app revenue, and you may only use Google Payments in your app (just lik…

The platform fee of 30% is completely independent from the cost of running the store. The value of the Play store is the reach it provides app developers.

Are there estimates of Play Store cost models and profit margins?

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28382186 :

>> JOSS (Journal of Open Source Software) has managed to get articles indexed by Google Scholar [rescience_gscholar]. They publish their costs [joss_costs]: $275 Crossref membership, DOIs: $1/paper:

>> Assuming a publication rate of 200 papers per year this works out at ~$4.75 per paper

> [joss_costs]: https://joss.theoj.org/about#costs

But that's for ScholarlyArticles without automated peer review.

(And then they need somewhere else to host their datasets, because journals aren't CDNs. And then they need someone else to host repo2docker container instances or repo2jupyterlite in WASM.)

When I loan my money to a bank, they go invest it and give me like a 1% interest rate.

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