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Our app was banned because the button says “Report User” and not just “Report”

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Re: Our app was banned because the button says “Report User” and not just “Report”

#81
After reading this, I think Signal is also violating this policy. I was not able to find a way to report messages or users. In comparison on WhatsApp I can report a user or group and the "most recent messages" will be forwarded to moderation.

I think it is kind of strange that even a private messenger needs to implement a report system for messages.

Re: Our app was banned because the button says “Report User” and not just “Report”

#82

The company I work for has forbidden the use of Google and their services such as GCP etc. due to how they treat their Play Store developers and other customer, in particular that there never seems to be any human being that you can talk to and find out what you need to do to fix the situation. We do not want the same to occur to our servers or if there is an overflow from Play Store ban to GCP etc. The business risk…

Another good example of an awful implementation can be seen in Google Workspace. Sometimes the crappy ML algorithms will generate a false positive and suspend an account for a suspicious login. Fine. I get it. It’s hard to do at scale and nothing’s perfect.

The thing I’d like to have Google explain to me is why they think it’s a good idea to bounce incoming mail for a user that’s been auto-suspended by an algorithm. In what scenario would I want that, especially when the account is locked at 3:00 AM local time?

That’s something that actually happened to me this weekend. For anyone at Google, NO ONE wants their incoming email bounced because of your crappy ML algorithms.

Re: Our app was banned because the button says “Report User” and not just “Report”

#83
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's already F-Droid and the Amazon App store.

f-droid doesn't have payments, Amazon is yet another faceless mega-corp that has had its fair share of sellers accusing them of various shady things. Creating a Play Store alternative is hard for many reasons: 1) finance: the more countries you operate in, the messier it becomes. International taxes are one hard mess, KYC/AML regulations differ between countries, and to top it off there is the whole "international sa…

> f-droid doesn't have payments

I'm just a normal F-Droid user, but couldn't you build In-App purchases or link accounts to your website?

So, register for a paid account on mygreatapp.com and use the login details in your app?

I think that's what Google and Apple specifically DON'T WANT for financial reasons, but how about F-Droid?

Re: Our app was banned because the button says “Report User” and not just “Report”

#84
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users, for the most part, don't want web apps and won't use them. It's an unrealistic stance.

Actually, users, for the most part, don't want to install apps.

Maybe HN users, but an increasingly overwhelming percentage of the general population prefers to download an app to do something instead of using a mobile website.

Re: Our app was banned because the button says “Report User” and not just “Report”

#85
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, users, for the most part, don't want to install apps.

Maybe HN users, but an increasingly overwhelming percentage of the general population prefers to download an app to do something instead of using a mobile website.

Various industry surveys, like the one from comscore in 2019 suggest otherwise. IIRC it found that most American phone owners install only 1-2 new apps per year. I think they would've gone to more new websites than that.

Re: Our app was banned because the button says “Report User” and not just “Report”

#86

The company I work for has forbidden the use of Google and their services such as GCP etc. due to how they treat their Play Store developers and other customer, in particular that there never seems to be any human being that you can talk to and find out what you need to do to fix the situation. We do not want the same to occur to our servers or if there is an overflow from Play Store ban to GCP etc. The business risk…

It's rife in the industry. The drama this week is that my wife can't log in to Facebook because their code generator just doesn't work. The number in the app shows up, she types it, but she can't log in because apparently it's just wrong.

Due to their marvelous design, you need a personal account to run an advertising account for your place of work. Luckily she hasn't been logged out on her work laptop yet or she couldn't do a large part of her job.

Business support? Yeah good luck, try googling and you'll get pages of dead links or suggestions to click something when you're already logged in.

Re: Our app was banned because the button says “Report User” and not just “Report”

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

f-droid doesn't have payments, Amazon is yet another faceless mega-corp that has had its fair share of sellers accusing them of various shady things. Creating a Play Store alternative is hard for many reasons: 1) finance: the more countries you operate in, the messier it becomes. International taxes are one hard mess, KYC/AML regulations differ between countries, and to top it off there is the whole "international sa…

> f-droid doesn't have payments I'm just a normal F-Droid user, but couldn't you build In-App purchases or link accounts to your website? So, register for a paid account on mygreatapp.com and use the login details in your app? I think that's what Google and Apple specifically DON'T WANT for financial reasons, but how about F-Droid?

Unfortunately, that's hard.

Developers like in-app payment methods because all they have to do is integrate an SDK for payment, and then they get a monthly payment on their bank account and a bill for accounting, that's it.

If you want to handle payments yourself, you'll have to:

1) implement user management to deal with storing what stuff a user has purchased, with all the GDPR and customer support (forgotten passwords, hacked accounts, lost MFA creds) headache that comes from that

2) find a payment processor that operates in all your target countries (no, Stripe and Paypal alone won't cut it), and integrate these (and hope they don't run into the same issue with Paypal, who are known for deciding on a whim to withhold funds)

3) Issue individual bills to customers, account for stuff like cross-border VAT, insanities like county/city sales taxes, deal with refund laws

4) deal with fraud attempts, angry parents, ...

5) Re-implement recurring payment schemes if your business model wants these

In the end, app stores (and ad SDKs) are a matter of convenience. Big shops like Epic, Spotify, Netflix can get away with running lots of this infrastructure on their own, but 99% of small devs don't have the time, knowledge and legal requirements to deal with that.

Re: Our app was banned because the button says “Report User” and not just “Report”

#88
post #45

For anyone unaware, the name of the app is a play on a swear word. "EskomSePush" is an intentional play on the phrase "Eskom Se Poes". Eskom being the power utility that provides electricity to South Africa, and has been woefully inadequate at doing so. See here for a meaning of the word Poes in Afrikaans. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/poes#Afrikaans Wonder if Google is aware of that and has been getting lots of "re…

So you dislike the devs because they added an optional feature?

There's not much more to expand on the core functionality of notifications & schedule visibility.

Re: Our app was banned because the button says “Report User” and not just “Report”

#89

This is the other side of the Play-store problem. The other side is the tax. Play store employee can ban your app = destroy your business at any time. The reason can be 'new policy', 'misunderstanding' or something more problematic, such as influence from your competitor to the employee. A 'power to destroy business', should not be a click away from some random employee.

On the plus side there are multiple app stores for the android and the ability to simply install your app directly to the device. So even if Google play store bans you outright you aren't dead in the water.

Now that being said. If you are dependent on google for revenues...

Re: Our app was banned because the button says “Report User” and not just “Report”

#90
post #59

For those not from South Africa, this app is primarily for people to be able to get notifications or look up when their area will be affected by a "planned power outage", or as Eskom (our state owned power utility) refers to it, "load shedding". "Load shedding" is enacted whenever they have a power production capacity issue where different areas take turns without power so as to not let the power grid collapse. This…

OMG. This is as bad or even worse than Texas or California...

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