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There is a difference between supporting every customer (aka, the mass of people behind your average YouTube comment) and supporting developers that promote you

There is a difference between supporting every customer (aka, the mass of people behind your average YouTube comment) and supporting developers that promote your ecosystem. By failing to support this one person this one time, they've damaged a lot more people's experience, and the average developer is much more likely to be an influencer. This guy is influencing influencers because he couldn't get a 2 minute support query handled. And this is why Google's ecosystems suck. They don't put in the work. Podcasts say "going live this week" then never go live. They've completely fucked up their books store by making authors not be able to control discounts, which, combined with Amazon's price match, means that authors have to choose between randomly having their revenue fully cut or skipping the Google book marketplace altogether. Spoiler alert: they skip the Google marketplace. Heaven help me if my gmail address gets marked as a spammer account. I'll basically be completely fucked, but I don't trust anyone else as much with security.

metaphorm 10y ago
it's a tradeoff. having engaged support for every app developer would mean they would have to admit many fewer apps to the ecosystem. they have chosen to more freely admit apps but provide no support for them.
- pas 10y ago
  They could do both.
  - metaphorm 10y ago
    no, they couldn't. the budget to pay for a large amount of support on a very open app ecosystem is prohibitive, even for a company like google. the compromise position that they could do, but apparently haven't done, is to sell paid support packages for app developers that need/want more engaged support from google.
    - pas 10y ago
      No, I mean they could do a minimal support thing. Hire one people to respond to devs of these pretty popular extensions (so let's say above 10 000 installs). Make the number of emails the guy/gal has in the queue public, so devs can know how long they have to wait on average.
      - metaphorm 10y ago
        and then you get everyone arguing over what counts as "popular enough to get support attention". its an implementation detail and this is hypothetical, so it doesn't matter much. in any case its pretty clear how the Android app ecosystem actually works: no support for developers. The advantage you get from that is a more open app ecosystem with lower barriers to entry and lower fees from Google compared to their competitor Apple.
        pas 10y ago
        Why wouldn't that be better? Here we have a completely shadowy system. Canned responses, no accountability, no transparency, no rules, no communication. You probably have to sue them to pique their attention. Yeah, the Apple 100USD fee is just as laughable, and their review process just as mystical, no questions about that. And with Android you at least have the AOSP, and with Chrome there's Chromium, and you can always just distribute Chrome extensions yourself.
paulddraper 10y ago
It's true. They didn't help 1 person. They didn't help 24k people.

metaphorm 10y ago

it's a tradeoff. having engaged support for every app developer would mean they would have to admit many fewer apps to the ecosystem. they have chosen to more freely admit apps but provide no support for them.

pas 10y ago
They could do both.
- metaphorm 10y ago
  no, they couldn't. the budget to pay for a large amount of support on a very open app ecosystem is prohibitive, even for a company like google. the compromise position that they could do, but apparently haven't done, is to sell paid support packages for app developers that need/want more engaged support from google.
  - pas 10y ago
    No, I mean they could do a minimal support thing. Hire one people to respond to devs of these pretty popular extensions (so let's say above 10 000 installs). Make the number of emails the guy/gal has in the queue public, so devs can know how long they have to wait on average.
    - metaphorm 10y ago
      and then you get everyone arguing over what counts as "popular enough to get support attention". its an implementation detail and this is hypothetical, so it doesn't matter much. in any case its pretty clear how the Android app ecosystem actually works: no support for developers. The advantage you get from that is a more open app ecosystem with lower barriers to entry and lower fees from Google compared to their competitor Apple.
      - pas 10y ago
        Why wouldn't that be better? Here we have a completely shadowy system. Canned responses, no accountability, no transparency, no rules, no communication. You probably have to sue them to pique their attention. Yeah, the Apple 100USD fee is just as laughable, and their review process just as mystical, no questions about that. And with Android you at least have the AOSP, and with Chrome there's Chromium, and you can always just distribute Chrome extensions yourself.

paulddraper 10y ago

It's true. They didn't help 1 person. They didn't help 24k people.