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Without knowing more about the "sophisticated anti-piracy system" employed by the app author, it's hard to determine if Google's claim of malicious behaviour is
by ziggity 7y ago
Without knowing more about the "sophisticated anti-piracy system" employed by the app author, it's hard to determine if Google's claim of malicious behaviour is valid.
This could be something as simple as bytecode obfuscation, or something as complex as scraping every bit of personal information available through possibly-questionable means and sending to an insecure server. Copy protection schemes are notoriously user-hostile.
- kace91 7y agoRegardless of the reason, the fact that you can have your livelihood taken away without an explanation or human contact is pretty worrying.
- kevingadd 7y agoDoesn't have to be taken away by Google either. They're extremely bad at processing DMCA notices, so a competitor or malicious teen can take you off the store for weeks. No recourse.
- the_trapper 7y agoFor this reason I would never trust my livelihood with the Play Store. Beer money, yes, paying my bills, hell no.
- sneak 7y agoHis livelihood was not taken away; he is still free to program for a trade or to sell his apps directly to users.
- HillaryBriss 7y agoI guess you can say that. So ... maybe his investment of time and money in the android ecosystem has been taken away. And this should give pause to other such investors.
- ggggtez 7y agoWhat if the reason is they were scraping all your private data against the Terms of Service, and hiding it in obfuscated dynamic bytecode loading... if that was the case, you think it's still bad that they can be kicked off the app store? I mean, we only have the developer's word that they weren't shipping malware in these bytecode files, unless someone reverse engineers it (unlikely), or Google publicly explains the reason for the banning (which they never do).
- timmytokyo 7y agoIf that is the reason they were kicked off, why can't google just say so?
- UncleMeat 7y agoHaving a system that tells malware authors precisely what behavior triggered an alarm is also not great. There is no solution.
- baroffoos 7y ago"Your app has been removed because it was found to be malware. Please reply to this message if you believe this to be a mistake." Doesn't help malware authors at all.
- bcrosby95 7y agoApparently he had zero trouble with antivirus apps fixing his situation. But I guess Google is so special it can't accomplish what companies with a fraction of Google's budget or manpower can do.
- kace91 7y agoThat doesn't seem to be a problem in any other field of security in the world. If you steal a shirt from a shop you'll get told whether they hace security footage of you stealing, an alarm went off or a security guard saw you. It might be more convenient for google to not say, but it's pretty disrespectful towards clients that choose their platform to make a living and might get caught as a false positive.
- fauigerzigerk 7y agoThere is a very simple solution. Have a competetent reviewer look at the code and decide whether the intent is malicious or not. If the intent is clearly not malicious and no rules were broken, the reviewer should file a bug report to fix the virus scanner and reinstate the developer account. No further explanation required. If rules were breached but it may have been done in good faith, issue a warning to the developer and explain in general terms how to fix the problem. Charge a review fee high enough to deter any abuse of the review system.