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Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

• wetpaws 7y ago
  This is my personal nightmare as a android developer, and knowing google it's not a matter of "if" but rather "when". (Google did remove my app from store once for not providing a link to a privacy policy document, abruptly, with no warning and notifying me post-factum, reading other horror stories I consider myself lucky)
  • sundvor 7y ago
    Google has lost any connection to their once oh so brightly glowing halo. As a developer I am steering clear of Google Cloud partly because of all their crappy way of dealing with humans. AWS and Azure just make more sense down here in Melbourne as well.
• dollar 7y ago
  The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it. My company has a half dozen stories like this about Google in the last year alone. Know what Google is doing to its AdSense partners on a massive scale? They wait until your site has just under the earnings when they have to write you a check, then they terminate your AdSense account for “policy violations”. I’m taking about AdSense sites that have been running for years with very little traffic, accumulating a few pennies a day. They suspended a client of ours who was spending $40k a month on Google Ads with a two word explanation of “policy violations”, and steadfastly refused to explain any reason why. Our client was perfectly reputable, ran multi million dollar ad campaigns on television and radio, and was FDA approved. When what Google has been getting away with finally comes to light... well, let’s hope it does come to light and they pay the consequences.
  • techntoke 7y ago
    I would want any company that is abusing their power to face consequences. However, it wouldn't surprise me one bit to find out that some of these companies complaining about getting banned are legitimately doing something wrong and their only cards to play are hoping for a political reaction, rather than suing Google in court and being exposed for why they were actually banned.
    • jacquesm 7y ago
      Sure. But it wouldn't surprise me one bit either if there was an active policy on the part of Google that optimized for profits at the expense of the rest of the world either. See, if a company can do something for years then the least thing you can do is explain why they've been banned, 'policy violation' is such a great fig-leaf for a lot of trickery that it should be a requirement to spell out exactly what the violation was unless the account was only a few days old and did not have a history of good behavior right up to that point. If Google wants to hide behind the mantra that they do not wish to tell the world what rules they have to avoid giving spammers an edge then they should improve their enforcement; not to send away the bulk of the complainants without a way to improve or some kind of dialogue.
      • techntoke 7y ago
        It's possible that they banned someone by pure incompetence. I've definitely had my fair share of companies provide terrible service by probably just following some automated system as they are told. However, it is also very unlikely that there is a grand conspiracy on their part to ban people to simply maximize profits. They do provide a pretty lengthy legal contract and terms to developers, which are partially outlined in this article. I think they just realize that the ball is in their court, and if the company wants to sue them then that is when they present the evidence. I agree that it would be helpful for people that legitimately don't know and may have made some minor mistake to get more information to correct it, and prefer businesses be transparent when implementing their policies, but from a purely legal perspective it makes sense why Google doesn't do this.
      • ddalex 7y ago
  • geomark 7y ago
    I think Google's sh*tty ways came to light long ago. And they are still doing it. I'm one of the many, many people that got screwed by Google in a similar way with their Adsense program. A long time ago it was. Back then there were actually people who communicated with you about it, at least that was my experience. But it was still stupid. I was running Adsense on a website and got a message that I was not in compliance with their policies. I emailed and got a reply that it was because I need to make sure the ads are clearly separated from the content. I replied with a link to their own guide on how to "blend" ads, which I thought I had followed pretty closely. A person replied and said "That's not what we meant". WTF. Another time on a food blog I had an article with a title that included the words "Chocolate Fetish" and a photo of two fully clothed women pouring chocolate on each other. I got an email that I was in violation of their policies with a link to that page. I emailed back and asked why. A person replied and said it was adult content. Double WTF. So yeah, it's been stupid for a long time. And now days it's just all automated stupidity. It's pretty obvious - don't trust your business or anything else to Google.
    • aduitsis 7y ago
      Wow, the "chocolate fetish" case really kicks it out of the park. Half-serious question, did all those replies come from actual human beings? Reading the original blog post of this story and other comments here, including yours, I get a vague feeling that the communications on google's part are being done either by some kind of a machine, or by humans that can act like a machine, albeit of rather limited capabilities.
      • geomark 7y ago
        I am quite sure the email replies I received were from actual humans. It's been a while, about 10 years ago I think. If those were machine generated responses they were way more advanced than anything I thought existed at that time. I weaned myself off of Adsense so I am not close to it anymore. But from what I can tell now days you don't get any response at all. With that chocolate fetish thing my thought was that the people they were using for compliance monitoring must be teenage boys with overactive hormones who see adult content in just about everything. But maybe it was actually an algorithm that matched the word "fetish" with some skin tones in a photo (there were faces afterall) and flagged it. Who knows. Who cares.
  • _pmf_ 7y ago
    > how badly a company can treat its customers App developers are not customers; they're indentured peasants.
  • robk 7y ago
    Of course they wait until a payout to do a deeper analysis. Most sites that sign up are spam and fraud that never earn much. So a payout threshold is a natural way of gating the spending of resources to weed out fraud and junk.
    • foepys 7y ago
      Until then they are happy to get paid by advertisers to show ads on spam sites?
      • dx034 7y ago
        Payout thresholds for Adsense are quite low. But it's right, in these cases they'd have to reimburse the advertisers. They could keep their share for investigation and running the ads but at least the amount that was due to be paid out should be reimbursed.
    • pnw_hazor 7y ago
      Meanwhile they collect money from the advertisers. Does Google credit the advertisers when they cancel click-bait websites/apps? I know Google has a refund process that ad buyers can try to use if they have evidence of fraud. However, does Google pro-actively do refunds when they cancel fraud sites/apps?
      • kalleboo 7y ago
        The email they send when you're terminated claims they refund the advertisers
        • GeneralTspoon 7y ago
          Although if your app is removed from Google Play, they'll happily still display AdMob ads in your app while telling you that you can't collect the earnings because your app was removed from Google Play.
  • AmericanChopper 7y ago
    > The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it. I’m not saying your wrong in this case, but that’s not a very reliable measure. Companies that have the best product can treat their customers like shit. Companies that have the lowest prices can treat their customers like shit. Any company that has a strong competitive offering that’s not based on service can treat their customers like shit.
  • mtgx 7y ago
    Has your company filed a complaint in the current DOJ investigation of Google? All that it takes for the rise of evil is for good men to do nothing and all that.
  • iamsb 7y ago
    I never been to silicon valley, so my knowledge about it is extremely limited. But last couple of years, I am hearing so many stories from big tech companies - from google to facebook to snapchat to uber - that I wonder if there is a big culture issue in valley based companies.
    • scns 7y ago
      "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." Lord Acton source: https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/absolute-power-corrupts-absolutely.html https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/absolute-power-corrupts-...
    • forgottenpass 7y ago
      There absolutely is, but they don't want to see it so they never will. (And I mean actually want to see it, no matter where that introspection goes. Not just telling themselves they're the kind of people that would want to see it.) People that have worked in software at non-fashionable companies outside the region can usually see it, but when people move to the bubble (geographically or mentally) they often get assimilated. It's hard to talk about, except in person. Online they can swarm any conversation, and they're from the west coast which means they're experts at passive-aggressively tearing people apart.
    • WorldMaker 7y ago
      The way I've put it before, is that a culture issue (in something of a soup of them) is that "people" aren't an "interesting technology" that will, for instance, make HN headlines or provide interesting things for technologists to work on or brag about, so SV companies don't really invest in "people" to solve problems. SV companies under-value important labor roles like customer service, and instead over-value automation and algorithms. A common argument is that people don't "scale" quite like automation and algorithms do, but we have millennia in expertise in labor markets (humanity survived quite a while without algorithms pretending to be customer service) that we could do much better, if so much of SV wasn't about avoiding and/or entirely shirking labor costs for "shinier" technology solutions.
  • cbanek 7y ago
    This also makes me feel even more strongly that the FTC should really clamp down on these very strict app stores. https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/amicus_briefs/apple-inc-v-robert-pepper-et-al/17-204_apple_v_pepper_ac_pet.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/amicus_briefs/app... Both the App Store and Google Play stores I think are basically illegal monopolies. I should be able to install whatever app I want, without having to jailbreak my phone and deal with warranty nonsense from the manufacturer. Just like my computer, which I can also install whatever software I want on it. Both the mandatory fees, and the review policy are terrible. Both Apple and Google could just as easily "recommend" an app as "safe and following best practices" rather than banning them from the app store. And still, many apps get through the nonsense, which has been real joy for scammers and possibly illegal money laundering: https://medium.com/@johnnylin/how-to-make-80-000-per-month-on-the-apple-app-store-bdb943862e88 https://medium.com/@johnnylin/how-to-make-80-000-per-month-o... I get that they want to protect their brand, but really, I think that horse is out of the barn.
    • javert 7y ago
      Not this again. (pardon my sarcasm, no intent to offend.) There was a point in time when Microsoft was deeply embedding its really shitty and uber insecure Internet Explorer into Windows and causing all sorts of very severe problems problems. If that had continued, the world would have switched to free software. It was inevitable. But the government stepped in and forced Microsoft to make a just marginally better product, and thus free software never really had its day. If you want to have an open app store, just wait until Google and Apple become unbearable and people naturally start switching to a more open/free alternative. If you get the government to force Google and Apple to make better software, they will still have a duopoly in 10 or 20 years. Software companies making shitty stuff, left alone, will die naturally. Capitalism is creative destruction, and all that.
      • cbanek 7y ago
        It's true that Google, Apple, and Facebook are now getting the treatment that Microsoft got a long time ago. But I'm not sure I agree that everyone would go free software if it didn't happen. If anything, I think another company would just come along and build something slightly less crappy but no more open. These days you don't even own the software anymore, it's just a subscription or SaaS. > Software companies making shitty stuff, left alone, will die naturally. You could say the same of many industries, and I don't think it's any more correct for software than it is for cars, phone providers, banks, or any number of hated industries. People make shitty stuff all the time, and it sells.
  • paulcarroty 7y ago
    > They wait until your site has just under the earnings when they have to write you a check, then they terminate your AdSense account for “policy violations”. Absolutely the same story happened with me.
  • cateye 7y ago
    This happened more than 10 years ago to me too. Actually, my Adsense account is still in a strange way inaccessible while I'm using all other Google services like Gmail. I tried in all ways to get an explanation why my account was locked down and what I could do to resolve it: without any success. The whole situation is just depressing because there is literally no way to discuss it in a reasonable manner other than automated canned answers or being ignored. It was actually for me a mind changing event because it illustrated how the whole "internet is freedom" idea was a really stupid logical construct.
    • ldng 7y ago
      Yes there is! At least for Americans. I can not understand why these practices have not lead by now to a class action suit?
      • theandrewbailey 7y ago
        License agreements and terms of use forbid class action lawsuits.
        • Can_Not 7y ago
          At some point, if essentially everyone is forbidding class action and requiring arbitration clauses, do we just not have rights anymore? At some point a judge will have to recognize that the abuse has gone too far and decide it's unenforceable because companies should not have the power to unilaterally "license" our rights out of existence.
      • winkeltripel 7y ago
        You can't form a class, and you don't have grounds to get anywhere in a lawsuit. You agreed to seek binding arbitration for any disputes relating to adsense when you signed up.
    • conradfr 7y ago
      Same here. Still bitter about it.
  • tapland 7y ago
    Two of the admins in our new WoW-guild got banned by Discord for inviting guild applicants (who had submitted forms asking to be invited) to our server. After a few messages there is phone verification and then after continuing to send out the accounts were banned. Contacting support was just a big 'we confirm the terms of service breach and we so not reinstate accounts'. Those accounts were in some cases the sole admins of discord communities, and the ToS breach can't have been of anything specified in the ToS, but just falls under 'anything we decide in addition'. But there is no alternative service people want to use.
    • anewguy9000 7y ago
      exactly. people are noticing it with google but its all tech companies where your only point of contact is an email address. paypal, uber, facebook, steam, etc etc -- they all deny service to innocent people on a regular basis with no recourse for them. it reminds me of pre social justice movement. isnt it the business' right to deny service to anyone they want to? like all black people? actually, no.
      • non-entity 7y ago
        Recently, my Amazon payments account was banned from doing anything out of the blue. I called the customer service and they said they would forward my issue ot the correct people and I would receive a response on what was going on. A day later, I receive an automated email stating that they were "unable to confirm my account information" and that "I will not be able to transact in the future". I was given absolutely zero info on why they were unable to verify me or any corrective actions I could take to fix it.
        • egypturnash 7y ago
          Email Bezos, they have a secret support team of actual humans who can make decisions instead of working from a script, and this is how you access it.
      • de_watcher 7y ago
        Steam is actually good at supporting for now.
  • dahfizz 7y ago
    > The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it. The only way of identifying a monopoly is to see if they have (very close to) 100% market share. What you're talking about is a company with market power. Incidentally, this is also what the FTC regulates. Being a monopoly is 100% legal as long as you don't abuse your market position. And you can abuse your market position without being a monopoly. Maybe you think that's pedantic, but I think it's an important distinction. Google is not a monopoly - they have significant competition in every market they're in. But they are still very abusive in wielding their power.
    • Aeolun 7y ago
      I do not think a market share of 90% in most markets is ‘significant competition’, especially when the markup on any non-google phone can easily be 1000%
      • dahfizz 7y ago
        If you created a startup that grew to take 10% of a global market, would you consider your business to be insignificant? > especially when the markup on any non-google phone can easily be 1000%. I'm not really sure I understand. The newest Google pixel and iPhone are similarly priced. Unless by "Google phone" you mean Android, in which case yes apple lacks choice on the low end but 10x is still a bit of an exaggeration. iOS also has >20% market share globally, while we are arguing about numbers. This gets back to my "significant competition" remark. Are you arguing that Apple is insignificant?
        • Aeolun 7y ago
          I’m arguing that one competitor is not significant competition. This competitor is also in a completely different market segment. Is there anything but Google (for this purpose I count anything with Google Play) in the <$400 market?
          • trickstra 7y ago
  • HNcantBtrustd 7y ago
    I'm feeling this way about Amazon recently. They have become significantly anti customer.
  • eightysixfour 7y ago
    > Our client was perfectly reputable, ran multi million dollar ad campaigns on television and radio, and was FDA approved. I’m not trying to be a jerk here, but it sounds like your client is selling dietary supplements which Google has been (IMO rightfully) aggressively removing.
    • Justsignedup 7y ago
      I won't argue your point. I think Google should remove those. However it would be nice if Google at least made an attempt to explain to people why they are banking them. And an appeals process. Right now this is basically the wild west with if sherif says it, it is reality. We need more of a due process.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    • AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
      Yeah, that's what I got out of it too. As soon as I hit "FDA approved" I had to pause and consider that maybe Google isn't the bad guy here.
      • eganist 7y ago
        "FDA Approved" isn't a boogeyman term. It means the supplement was in fact reviewed/approved by the FDA, whereas dubious substances come with statements that their claims have not been FDA approved. Why the aversion to "FDA Approved"?
        • eightysixfour 7y ago
          The FDA approves that ingredients are “safe” to consume but the label is often used to imply the FDA has approved the ingredient for whatever health claim the manufacturer has attached to the supplement. It is a boogeyman term not because of what it actually means but how it is leveraged to say something it doesn’t mean.
  • specialist 7y ago
    Note the lack of appeal, opportunity for recourse. Fair and impartial courts is one of the prerequisites for open, efficient markets. -- Trust busting of Big Tech should focus on eliminating the self dealing, conflicts of interest, anti-competitive behavior, and fraud. I don't care if Google & YouTube are together or apart. Ditto Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. I do care that one entity controls an entire ad network, using it to better compete against their own customers, and to squelch competition.
  • dspillett 7y ago
    Is having 3rd party code on your pages really worth "a few pennies a day" to a lot of people? I'd rather keep a clean site.
    • ghaff 7y ago
      That's a question more people should probably ask themselves. I screwed around with various ads, affiliate links, and so forth at one point. I fairly quickly came to the conclusion that the small amount I was bringing in wasn't worth having the ads/code/etc. on my site. I might feel differently if it were a site focused on a particular topic, ads might be relevant to the audience, and the income were material. But, as it was, it just seemed better to keep it non-commercial.
  • burnte 7y ago
    > Know what Google is doing to its AdSense partners on a massive scale? They wait until your site has just under the earnings when they have to write you a check, then they terminate your AdSense account for “policy violations”. This happened to me about 15 years ago when I started using AdSense. I literally had JUST crossed the payment threshold and got canned. What pisses me off the most is that they cancel the whole account and don't pay any money at all, despite making it clear that they can detect the supposedly "fraudulent" clicks from real ones, but they'll punish you by cancelling ALL your payments, rather than just whatever supposed fraud there was. You know what my sin was? I looked at my site a few times. Didn't even click, just loaded it a few times to see how it looked with the ads. And yes, the "we don't have to tell you want you did wrong" bullshit is also infuriating.
  • ppod 7y ago
    I sort of understand why search is a near-monopoly: it's free, and there's somewhat of a network effect and a self-reinforcing credibility thing. But what are the barriers for competition to AdSense? Why isn't some other company offering an alternative, like the same thing at a higher price with better support?
    • dymk 7y ago
      The value is that they have so much search traffic and page views; aka surfaces to display those ads on.
  • tedivm 7y ago
    This adsense behavior isn't even new- they did this to me in 2005! My website had a trickle of ads, just enough to pay for my college books each year. When I went to cash out Google decided it was click fraud and stole my money, with absolutely no recourse. They're an awful company with horrible customer support. It's frustrating too, because my startup has investors who keep trying to get us to switch to GCP, but I don't think any responsible company would ever make themselves dependent on Google.
    • iforgotpassword 7y ago
      Same experience for me around 2004/5. Low traffic site, when it was enough to cash out they shut down the account.
    • 19ylram49 7y ago
      Whoa! I actually had pretty much the same experience about 11-ish years ago, in 2008. I completely forgot about that until seeing your comment here; wow, wow, wow!
    • Fjolsvith 7y ago
      And you have to wonder how Google makes their billions.
  • HillaryBriss 7y ago
    > The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it. +100 This has been my feeling ever since I first started using the android SDK. Google put the developer very low on the priority list, but, at the same time, the end user is also very low on the list. The only people high on the list appear to be Google shareholders and the Google employees who work on android.
  • tyri_kai_psomi 7y ago
    > The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it. My company has a half dozen stories like this about Google in the last year alone. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to apply to my local general contractors, painters, landscapers, electricians, etc.
  • arbuge 7y ago
    https://blogs.harvard.edu/bugeja/2018/09/16/the-strength-of-a-monopoly-can-be-guessed-at-by-the-quality-of-its-customer-support/ https://blogs.harvard.edu/bugeja/2018/09/16/the-strength-of-...
  • bb88 7y ago
    > The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers... Incorrect. The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to identify the number of competitors in that space. Google has at least one meaningful competitor to Android -- Apple -- so it can't be a monopoly. Anticompetitive behavior would be illegal, except this isn't anticompetitive, since there is a meaningful competitor, Apple, and Google isn't locking this developer into Google's platform -- in fact it's the opposite. This is just merely bad behavior -- also one that could be corrected by the markets. It's worth noting there was a time where Microsoft was the big bad monopolist, and everyone was clamoring for the government to break them up. In the end, it was deep competition from Apple and Google that knocked them off their throne, not some big FTC antitrust lawsuit.
    • bjowen 7y ago
      “Number of competitors in that space” is not unrelated to “and still get away with it.” If this (monopolistic) behaviour could be corrected by competition, why hasn’t competition with Apple corrected it?
      • bb88 7y ago
        You can't have it both ways. A monopoly cannot exist if there is meaningful competition. Last I checked, Apple was still the #1 smart phone manufacturer. Anti-competitive behavior would be if Google bought up all the manufacturers in China say. And kicking off a developer off the play store doesn't do anything to Apple as far as I can tell.
    • Can_Not 7y ago
      While you are technically right that it is not a monopoly, it is an oligopoly, a term which implies it is likely to have the same issues as a monopoly while still having an insufficient number of competitors. The problem compounds when Google and apple are both horizontal and vertical oligopolies. If I complain that adwords scammed me (in a court of law), they could retaliate by terminating my GCE instances and gmail accounts.
      • 7y ago
  • adamc 7y ago
    Maybe their new mission statement is "just be evil".
  • numismatex 7y ago
    Pewdepie (sp) and other shallow cunt youtubers can get away with ridiculous shit yet my 400 aggregated content sites that make me two dollars a month each got me banned. Fuck Google.
  • catacombs 7y ago
    Has this happened to more of your clients?
• techntoke 7y ago
  I don't really see any mention of it, but do you at least have some idea of what may have triggered this issue? I see that your open-source Android app is serving ads. I'm also curious why your app isn't on F-Droid?
  • icebraining 7y ago
    Seems it wasn't on F-Droid because it uses some Google Play Services (for maps, ads, location, etc), and nobody took the time to make a fork without those non-free dependencies. https://github.com/mtransitapps/mtransit-for-android/issues/2 https://github.com/mtransitapps/mtransit-for-android/issues/...
• jfim 7y ago
  Wow, I can't believe they suspended Mon transit! It's been a while since I lived in Montreal, but it was super helpful back then, showing the next bus times and the number of available public bike system bikes at nearby stations. Sorry to hear that, Mathieu, and best of luck!
• eps 7y ago
  Perhaps a sneaky competitor exploited some flaw in the app reporting process to knock the app off the store?
  • pnw_hazor 7y ago
    That explains Goog's two word explanation to shutting them down.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • jayd16 7y ago
    This makes sense to me. They got 4 policy violations and a multi-violation ban in the span of a day. A Facebook Audience Network policy ban is also listed in the timeline. That wouldn't be Google's policy, right?
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • mr_toad 7y ago
    The big transit apps these days have ‘partnerships’ with transit providers and municipalities.
• emmelaich 7y ago
  > 4 of my apps were reviewed and suspended on Friday .. What were the other three?
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• pnw_hazor 7y ago
  Shutup! I heard they pay well. /s Programmers here at HN could stop this behavior in a minute. They do not care about you.
  • pnw_hazor 7y ago
    Downvotes incoming! Other explanations from Google programmers: "the work is interesting"
    • dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
      Just because the company is doing shitty things doesn't mean that every engineer does. Plus, imagine how it could work in reality. You finally got your place at Google. You know what the company is doing. And at some point you are asked to work on one of these grey things. What do you say, that it's immoral? If so, where exactly do you draw the line? Who is to decide what's still acceptable and what not? You've known for years that Google is tracking everyone. Moreover, most of it is perfectly legal. In any company, whenever you say "no" to your manager you need to have a solid ground. I can't imagine anyone even starting such a conversation.
      • pnw_hazor 7y ago
        It is immoral. Perfectly legal or not. I know why they do it. They like the money. They like the perks. They like the feeling of being in a special elite group. Google does not have to be evil. It just is. The technical employees of Google could change it overnight if they cared.
        • Kiro 7y ago
          That's just your opinion. I don't think they are evil or that working there is immoral.
      • _AzMoo 7y ago
        > Who is to decide what's still acceptable and what not? You are. Don't they teach people ethics anymore?
• forcer 7y ago
  We were suspended once for serving deceptive ads. Yet the only ad network we use is Google Adsense. We had to remove Google Ads to be allowed back in.
  • i_feel_great 7y ago
    Ah, the ol' "Do as we say and not as we do" clause by Google, huh.
    • Macha 7y ago
      Pretty sure the latest iteration of mobile search result ads on google.com would get banned by google
  • mikojan 7y ago
    I love that.
  • username90 7y ago
    Note sure how that is possible? Was your app so ugly that everything looked like an ad, kinda like reverse camouflage?
    • AnssiH 7y ago
      Probably a deceptive ad (likely violating Google Ads rules) was shown via Google Ads during Google testing, automated or otherwise.
  • benologist 7y ago
    I had apps removed for not describing them as containing ads because Google at that time was busy undermining the definition by defining basically any link to anything as advertising.
• rock_artist 7y ago
  The nasty part with those sudden removal/bans from AppStore’s/ services is that they say: You’ve violated something. You’re blocked. You know why! Imagine going with that approach to a child... Without explaining or suggesting the rationale it’s closer to very dark dictatorship instead of providing something closer to a decent legal system where you can appeal and a system that should make justice. With those companies it’s more like a field trial.
  • _carl_jung 7y ago
    It reminds me of The Trial by Kafka.
    • erseveR 7y ago
      like a dog
    • reallydontask 7y ago
      Who would've thought that one day we'd be thinking about the likes of Apple and Google in the same way as Kafka, and one has to imagine many others, thought about the bureaucracy of the Dual Monarchy.
• nithi2023 7y ago
  All apps are still hosted here if any have interest: https://www.apkturbo.com/apps/montransit/org.mtransit.android/ https://www.apkturbo.com/apps/montransit/org.mtransit.androi...
  • speps 7y ago
    Or by the author himself at the end of TFA: https://mtransitapps.github.io/apk/ https://mtransitapps.github.io/apk/
• jedberg 7y ago
  Seems like a good time to bring it up again -- 18 years ago my Google ads account was locked for reasons unknown to me. I'm still waiting for an answer on my appeal. Yes, I was one of their first few thousand advertisers. Even back then they treated us like crap when they could have easily had a human review every decision.
• NKCSS 7y ago
  My game ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nkcss.shadesandhues_agameofcolorgradients https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nkcss.shad... ) was suspended because I did not have a link to my privacy policy in the app (required when you serve ads for some reason). My game only shows an ad every other time you abort a game or ask for a hint, if you just play without hints/aborting games, you'll never see an ad. It was up for about 6 months, ~1000 installs, then it was taken offline. I was busy for another 6-9 months, after digging into the reason why it was taken down, I created a privacy policy page, added a link in the app to the page and re-submitted it, then appealed/asked for another review on the play store and admob and after a few days, everything was restored again. It can be a pain to find out the exact reason, by in my case, after fixing what they wanted to have changed, it was all ok.
  • izacus 7y ago
    Meanwhile your ad network library was mining data in the background (they do that even if you don't show the ad) of users without telling them in privacy policy. You're not the victim in your case.
    • NKCSS 7y ago
      I checked the 'has ads' when publishing, show it shows that before you install. I just wasn't aware I had to have a policy linked in the app, that's what I'm trying to explain here and how it was resolved in the end...
    • codedokode 7y ago
      Would not it be better to make it difficult to collect data (e.g. show a popup asking access to those data every time) instead of just requiring a privacy policy that nobody reads?
      • izacus 7y ago
        Both is being done of course. However, I'd love to hear your solution on how to prevent data collection by the very app you're running on your pocket computer.
• abrookewood 7y ago
  Hey Google! Want to know why your cloud service is trailing behind AWS & Azure? This is why ... When you erode trust in your consumer and developer services, don't expect us to sign up for your enterprise services.
  • google_ceo 7y ago
    Oh, that's why. Thanks! Gonna fix tomorrow ASAP.
  • floydnoel 7y ago
    This is exactly it! Every time I get a sales email from GCP I bring up all the support issues I have with G in general, such as problems getting ReCaptcha to work. The response is always "sorry, we can't help you at all." Well then, stop trying to sell me your shit when you won't support it.
  • deepsun 7y ago
    Well, I did try to fix my Amazon packages being delivered to wrong address. There's simply no way to give that feedback, yet alone receive a response.
    • ertemplin 7y ago
      You can call customer service and talk to a person at Amazon
      • dmoy 7y ago
        Yea amazon support on the phone has always helped me out when there were shipping issues. Even when someone literally just ripped open a package and stole the contents, the lady on the phone at amazon was courteous and helped me out.
  • mleonhard 7y ago
    This is why I'm not hosting my new business on GCP.
• auslander 7y ago
  Was there Facebook Audience Network SDK in this open source app?
  • floatingatoll 7y ago
    It's on GitHub in case you'd like to answer that question by source inspection. I'm not familiar with Android so I can't do so for you, sorry: https://mtransitapps.github.io/ https://mtransitapps.github.io/
  • thinkingemote 7y ago
    looks like it? https://github.com/mtransitapps/mtransit-for-android/search?q=Facebook&unscoped_q=Facebook https://github.com/mtransitapps/mtransit-for-android/search?...
  • qwertox 7y ago
    Apparently yes. The gradle file of the project does include it. Why could this be related to this issue?
• StanAngeloff 7y ago
  We were banned from the Play Store for violation of their Impersonation policy in mid July after publishing an update. We just got reinstated last week. During the course of the lengthy appeal I had an unshakable feeling I was up against The System™. I still believe I was communicating with a bot and not an actual human being — I refuse to accept a rational human being will behave the way Bob from Google did. It's such a stark contrast to developing a web app which you can _freely_ publish. When did thing go so horribly wrong?
  • Havoc 7y ago
    >When did thing go so horribly wrong? When every company and their dog decided their content needs an app. Instead of using the nicely standardized thing called http and web browsers. That moved us from http straight to corporate technical fiefdoms with no control.
    • OkGoDoIt 7y ago
      I’ve been building apps for Windows for over a decade (we used to call them programs or software) and this isn’t exactly a problem there. The problem is strong centralized App Store control, not native app development.
      • Havoc 7y ago
        >I’ve been building apps for Windows for over a decade and this isn’t exactly a problem there. You 300% completely miss my point. Apps ARE the problem. Especially in the "for Windows" context. Now I need to install 30 different apps to access 20 different sites, and another 40 different apps on my other device that's in a different app eco system. ...versus standardized http and browsers. The entire app eco system in their specific walled incompatible gardens is top to bottom is toxic. And that's not me pulling a stallman. Every fuckin website and company on every device wants me to install their own app. It's tedious AF at best
    • philpem 7y ago
      Maybe the tyranny of the fiefdoms will drive us back towards HTTPS. Certainly I've heard the question "why don't we do an iOS app and an Android app?" in respect of conference schedules. Usually after people saw the Google IO schedule app. My response was, now we have HTTP push notifications, we can do everything we need on a website. Most people just want the now-and-next information. And as a bonus, hook an old PC up to a TV and we've got now-and-next on a conveniently located display (the lobby, main conference hall, etc). Not to mention the ease of maintenance.
• andrewfelix 7y ago
  "I don’t think my app is deceiving Google Play Store". I feel like there's more to this story.
  • mathw 7y ago
    If Google had provided details of what the violation was, he might be able to tell us about that part. One of the big problems is that they don't.
    • hnick 7y ago
      I wonder if the GDPR covers this under the right of explanation (if it happens to someone in the EU), or was the decision made against a non-human app who has no rights to violate?
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • jstanley 7y ago
    That strikes me more as the "100% literally correct" wording common of technical people, rather than the "just about honest enough that it's not fraudulent" wording that you seem to be suggesting. I think his app is genuinely not deceptive.
• Havoc 7y ago
  My money is on the gaming battery life thing triggering some automated test Sorry to hear mate. Seems quite unreasonable
  • pnw_hazor 7y ago
    That does not explain why Goog doesn't treat people like humans. If the app developer has been in good standing for years, and has a popular app, why not send them more information as to why they are in violation? And give them some time to fix it.
    • huffmsa 7y ago
      Because they're not using humans to do the reviews anymore. They're putting bots on the frontlines, then using humans to (maybe) handle appeals. But those humans are probably undertrained, underpaid and have zero context for each of their 1k cases, so they default to accepting the bots judgement. Which in turn feedback to the bot, justifying it's actions.
      • codedokode 7y ago
        It might depend on popularity and download count. I am sure if there are some issues with Facebook app, they won't have to talk to a bot and they won't be banned in 12 hours.
        • huffmsa 7y ago
          Well of course. But Facebook also has the resources and manpower to review and fix vague issues in a short timespan. And lawyers who'd be happy to bill thousands of hours making a scene.
      • segmondy 7y ago
        Does matter, even if they used bots, The bot would detect something. The bot would go through some rules to determine what it would flag. The bot should report on it. We detected something suspicious about your ads. We detected that you're abusing the battery life. We detected adult contect. Give them something! Even a clue!
• harrisonjackson 7y ago
  I'd suspect a competitor flagged your app somehow. This seems to be a trending dark pattern. Across a lot of competitive platforms - Amazon Sellers, App Store, Play Store - even social media people are flagging content as abusive to hurt competing brands. Since normal support channels don't work, maybe report this to a bug bounty - this would be considered a type of social hack, right? Someone or something convinced their app review system to flag your apps and eventually have them removed.
  • philpem 7y ago
    From my experience with bug bounties, if it's not on the OWASP TOP10, they'll kick, stamp, scream and fight -- even if you say "I don't want the bounty, I just want this bug fixed". (backstory: found a bug in Twitter which disclosed DMs. Reported it, Twitter engineer had a raging tantrum on Hackerone, H1 (I assume) mistook his messages for mine and banned me from the site. Found out a mutual was a Twitter engineer, sent him the POC. A few days later, fixed)
    • dannyw 7y ago
      I refuse to use H1 because of how hostile they are to security researchers.
      • Aeolun 7y ago
        That’s so counterproductive it would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
    • IggleSniggle 7y ago
      Please don’t abbreviate as H1. It messes up my pronunciation of the Hackerone program. Hackerone rhymes with macaroni.
      • zifnab06 7y ago
        Much like CoreOS rhymes with Oreos.
• sandos 7y ago
  I have a strong feeling that this will soon happen to my Play Store account. I did some very lax hobby development many years ago (my biggest app was also transit related!), and my account has basically been inactive with just a few apps. I guess its enough that 1 human somewhere reports my apps for anything and Im gone from the Play Store, which would be a bit sad. I still remember thinking it was so awesome that developing for android was so simple, and free! That seems to be disappearing.
• FairKing 7y ago
  F-Droid becomes more and more popular.
  • Fnoord 7y ago
    Came here to suggest publishing the app on F-Droid as it is FOSS. An alternative is make a PWA instead of an app. Those cannot be banned by an 'App Store' (read: walled garden with one lunatic dictator being the gardener).
    • omaranto 7y ago
      PWA = Progressive Web App ---"progressive" seems to mean it uses some relatively recent additions to browsers to make the app feel more like a native app. (In case others didn't know either.)
      • amyjess 7y ago
        "Progressive" in this case means it uses progressive enhancement: it'll work even if your browser doesn't have those additions (though QoL won't be as nice), and it also uses responsive design such that it's just as useful on desktop as on mobile. The new Twitter is a good example of a PWA.
        • jrochkind1 7y ago
          Viewing mostly on desktop, I hate the new twitter and wish the old one was back. It's a bunch of javascript moving things around instead of a plain old web page (how is twitter's content complex enough that it can't just be static html?), and due probably to some combination of privacy settings i have usually says "There has been an error try again" when i follow a link to a tweet, requiring me to hard-refresh the page (at which point it works). So if that's a good example...
• jokoon 7y ago
  I'm starting to wonder, is google play better for app security since it helps to authenticate apps? Microsoft can sign windows "apps" without an app store.
• tinus_hn 7y ago
  Surprisingly he never mentioned what the actual violation was, nor of him asking what it was.
  • Ensorceled 7y ago
    Did we read the same article? Can you clarify, because he quotes the notifications he received and his appeal?
    • tinus_hn 7y ago
      The notifications are that he violated the ‘deceptive behavior policy’. His appeal is that he is willing to change his behavior. A reasonable question would be how his app is violating the policy. But he does not ask that, his appeal is that he was not given the chance to clean up his act, so he just should get 1 strike. Which suggests that he is aware how the app is violating the policy.
  • bwooceli 7y ago
    Yeah, there's a bit of a fog around this. He sets it up very nicely and gets the sympathetic emotions going and kind of sneaks in "4 similar apps" were the cause of the account suspension. I have no doubts that MonTransit is above board, it looks great, but about those other "similar apps"... no detail provided
    • mda 7y ago
      He also doesn't mention where and how he gets the data from. But pitchforks are already out so who cares.
• kennydude 7y ago
  Looking at this app, it's an absolute hidden gem of how amazing Android is as well. The main app can have third party extensions provided just by installing more APKs. This is something I tried to explore quite a few years ago when I last had an Android phone, but seeing such a polished app which achieves it is nice.
• lpellis 7y ago
  Wow the same thing happened to me[1], luckily I was awake by chance and took action after the first email, scary to think that if I was just offline for a few days my whole account could have been banned with no recourse.. [1]My app https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lpellis.sensorlab https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lpellis.se... was on the store for several years at the time, it was called 'Android Sensors'. (Google had issue with the name, I had to rename it) @lladnar does your app maybe have 'Android' in the name? I believe that was the issue they had with mine, I dont even think humans are in the loop at all here to give feedback.
  • jrochkind1 7y ago
    If they told you what you had done to violate policies and what you had to do to be in compliance again, you were a huge step ahead of this guy!
• huffmsa 7y ago
  Seems to me that Google is turning on a lot of deep learning models in production which aren't production ready. Search has gone to shit recently. Image search is hot garbage for anything but images with well known people / places / things. You can't reliably filter or sort news results by date. YouTube is filtering pro LGBT content but allowing weird Eastern European pedo videos. The play store is apparently moderated by bots and doesn't have rules or policies in place about giving devs time to respond. Something has changed dramatically at the company in the last 5 years. Would be interesting to zero in on it.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • maehwasu 7y ago
    This sounds like exactly what you'd expect from a company that is bleeding talent and morale. Note: I do not have any information that that is what is happening in Google; I'm just saying what my guess would be if I were presented the situation as "these are the symptoms at Company X. What is the problem?"
    • huffmsa 7y ago
      And you're likely not far off. It's a pretty well tested principle that massive familial wealth usually disappears by the 3rd or 4th generation (because the descendents regress to the norm in terms of ability) and it looks like we're seeing the same at Google. They've got too little "real" work for the number of hands they need to keep busy, so unqualified people are going back and "improving" the work of the 1st and 2nd generation. But because of the company's size, it can't hire high risk shoot from the hip revolutionaries (not that they'd want to work at a buttoned up Corp anyway), so it's staffed with safe employees who don't really resemble the cowboys of the 1st and 2nd generations, and hence can't improve the systems any further. Happens to most companies beyond a certain size.
      • theandrewbailey 7y ago
        That doesn't line up with the fact that Google kills existing apps all the time, and look at this new Google communications platform.
• ajnin 7y ago
  I'm guessing some lawyer at the Montreal transit authority decided to report that app for violating some kind of intellectual property. And, due to Google's consistent cover-their-asses policy (of Youtube fame), they decided to shut down that app.
• euph0ria 7y ago
  The company I work for has banned the use of Google Cloud due to how they treat their Play Store developers, 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.
  • blunte 7y ago
    This is why I moved my clients off G-Suite and onto Zoho. And it's why where possible, I advise people to build clean web-based mobile apps which do not require a "store". Since we have no practical alternative to Play Store and Apple Store for native phone apps, we'll just have to settle for slightly fewer features and slightly less performance with non-native apps. (And no, sideloading isn't an option. Most users are barely able to install a native app via a link directly to their store.) For Google, it's simply not worth their time to maintain a staff of humans to prevent these false negatives. They are not committed to the app developers just as they are not committed to their non-government G-Suite clients. They are committed to their primary revenue streams. And the reason they can simply not care about some human losses (stories like TFA) is because they are a monopoly when it comes to Android apps. And while Amazon is not an admirable company at all (based on how it treats its sellers or low level employees), their cloud business seems to have more human oversight - or at least a less heavy-handed automated banning system. Google's behavior will continue to be profitable enough that they won't change it... for many years, or until the regulators come at them. Since the US regulators are now almost entirely corporate lobbyists themselves, we'll have to depend on the EU to fight it. (And since the EU is becoming corporatized as well, the window of opportunity is shrinking.)
• samcrawford 7y ago
  I'm developing a consumer facing service right now, and it's stories like this that steer me away from expending the effort to develop as an Android and iOS app. At least on the web we're not (entirely) beholden to a single company that can unilaterally remove you with no recourse.
• iicc 7y ago
  IMHO the title should say ad-supported instead of free.
• gonmad 7y ago
  Only 12 hours between an email and the account termination, with no real interaction and no way to change what seems not to be a serious problem. That would change the time gap during responsible disclosure, Alphabet/Google is changing its metrics. I mean why only small developers would have to be mistreated. If they play it that way, Android developers community can also report platform bugs to them - and go full disclosure (report the bug publicly) within 12 hours.
  • Aeolun 7y ago
    12:34 - I have found a security vulnerability 12:47 - I noticed you haven’t fixed it yet, if you don’t do it soon I’ll go public 14:13 - I noticed you still haven’t fixed it, please hurry, if you don’t do it soon I’ll go public 14:15 - I noticed you haven’t fixed the bug yet, if you don’t do it soon I’ll go public 16:55 - Since you still haven’t fixed this. I’ve made this public on my blog. Enjoy the consequences!
    • cube00 7y ago
      Based on the article even if Google replied you'd still be in line to disclose regardless, this poor developer's appeals were rejected, I'm not convinced a human ever read them on the way down.
  • otakucode 7y ago
    'Make game of that which makes as much of thee' is some ancient wisdom. This sort of behavior by Google certainly does justify providing no more than a 12 hour window to Google to fix problems under responsible disclosure. Many in the industry are unhappy with Google only giving companies 90 days with Project Zero as they feel that large corporations should be given preferential and deferential treatment (they are people after all), but when it comes to app developers 12 hours is acceptable? I think not. Those who wish to set the rules must be willing to play by the same.
• einpoklum 7y ago
  We should all make a concerted effort to get people to stop using Google Play. There are multiple websites which offer apps, including ones where search can be automated. The default "app management app" should be something which is based on multiple source, independent of each others and not Google controlled. I realize that might be very hard; and if you're logged into a Google account on your phone (which you really shouldn't be!) it's very tempting to use Google Play, so what I suggested requires either self-discipline or rooting devices to make them not default to Google Play. On the other hand, maybe the US sanctions against Huawei might actually make that a viable option? Time will tell. Personally, I use APKPure instead of Google Play; they have an app of their own. Not the best solution - and certainly doesn't solve the article author's problem - but at least I don't have worry about Google's heavy-handed tactics so much.
• DrScientist 7y ago
  What we have is a giant GAN - google's AI trying to spot the real bad actors from not, against the bad actors AI trying to fool the google AI. I suspect your experience is a sign that the bad actors are getting the upper hand and one of the problems in this space is human intervention can't really scale against machines. It could be a fight for survival for these companies whose huge market cap is based on the enormous scaling benefits of automation - however if it turns out that the automation processes can't successfully scale once automated fraud is taken into account then the only solution might be to descale the operation - making them vulnerable to traditional companies.
• jakeogh 7y ago
  Google: Where we dont just close our services.
• acd10j 7y ago
  Earlier after certain amount of backlash Google employee reading HN used to help. Now I think this is also banned/discouraged by Google. Google New policy: Let's just ignore these type of posts and let it disappear from front page in few hours. What option developers or user's have ? Shun Android or Google services. I think for vast majority of developers and Users this not an option.
• tommilukkarinen 7y ago
  We has a small niche product in Google Play, worked 100% offline, so quite secure for the user privacy and so on, had ratings of about 3.7. The service had generated about $30.000 and would have generated another $30.000 in it's lifetime, unless Google had, quite unjustly, taken it out spring 2019. When we tried to discuss about it, we got what we understood was a threat to close our account. Obviously we talked to some person, I wonder if he had been told to treat us like sh or if there was some other reason. Obviously, for the next apps, we are thinking furiously on how to not be dependent on app stores.
• tomohawk 7y ago
  Guilty until you prove yourself innocent. It's efficient, but unethical and immoral. Requiring large entities such as government or monopolies to consider you innocent until proven guilty in a 3rd party controlled system, such as a court, is a fundamentally important check on power.
• Gorgor 7y ago
  To be exact, Google did not “delete” the app. It cannot even do that. It removed the app from its own app store. The fundamental problem is that Google’s own app store is perceived by many users to be the only way to install Android apps. Are there any ideas about how to convince users to use other app stores?
• bamboozled 7y ago
  Our company had ~15 Google accounts shut down the other day due to apparently the content of our emails being flagged by some kind of automated curation system. This happened without any warning. The problem was rectified within 30 minutes of the incident occurring because we contacted support immediately. As soon as they looked over it, we were back online, so it can't have been too serious. It feels like Google take internal company policies and apply it to all their customers. Anyway, I'm glad I don't have my personal stuff hosted there anymore.
• tempodox 7y ago
  You ensure service by signing a mutual contract where breaking the contract hurts the party that broke it. Expecting the same from the one-sided agreement you sign with Google is like believing in the Easter Bunny.
• HeavyStorm 7y ago
  A very cool thing to reflect on: Valve held a tight leash on Steam for years. Games and apps had to be approved by Valve, and what they allowed was, at the very least, subjective. After a while it began to gradually let go of control. Nowadays, there are just a few things that might get blocked and I haven't heard any more stories about developers who got blocked. Funny thing is: Valve is privately owned, and Google is a public company. One should expect it to be the other way around.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• skinnyasianboi 7y ago
  Mobile developer myself and I'm scared that this will happen to me, too. I have a >600k downloads open source app on the Play Store and I got 2 warnings for other apps within the last 8 years on the store without any explanation or what so ever. The non existent communication from Google really stinks.
• fredgrott 7y ago
  both Google Play Store and Apple App Store use automated app review systems. Translation: ITs your fault for not keeping abreast of policy changes. Same is true for desktop app stores as well and browser plugins. devs and designers stop whining and being irresponsible the users come first not your feelings!
• anewguy9000 7y ago
  am i the only one skeptical here? the guy put 5000 hours and is paying for advertising but the app is totally free? he doesnt say anything about what could have been flagged as deceptive.
• blauditore 7y ago
  Everyone in this thread is bashing Google for their evil-ness, but I had the exact same experience with the iOS AppStore: Apple just claimed I broke some policy without further details, but I was pretty sure this was not the case. Upon asking for clarification, they basically sent the same paragraph again. I ended up sending an "update" with some random changes on things related to said policy (without actually changing functionality) and it somehow got approved. If you think about it, it's impossible to fully check an app for compliance. That's probably why the enforcement appears so aimless and fuzzy from the outside.
  • cube00 7y ago
    The enforcement may not appear so aimless and fuzzy if they could be bothered to put more effort into the justification then a canned RTFM reply.
  • cabaalis 7y ago
    You can't submit a non-update if your developer account has been completely banned.
• segmondy 7y ago
  Okay, what if I can bribe someone that works for Google reviewing apps to terminate a competing app? Folks were bribing T mobile employees to steal phone numbers so they can empty bank/crypto accounts. Folks were bribing employees that worked for background checking services to pull data so they can perform identity theft. I imagine folks that review apps for Google are not highly paid and since they rarely reply to you. Most app developers just quietly go away when such things happen.
• mirimir 7y ago
  The Google and Apple app stores and support services ought to be regulated as public utilities. Because they effectively constitute a duopoly regarding apps for mobile devices. That would prevent them from arbitrarily refusing to provide services and list apps in their stores. They could refuse, but only for permitted reasons, and with a clear appeal process. The Public Utility Commission of Texas has a pretty clear explanation.[0] The top DDG hit was an ancient law review.[1] It's probably outdated, but makes an interesting read. 0) https://www.puc.texas.gov/consumer/complaint/Rights.aspx https://www.puc.texas.gov/consumer/complaint/Rights.aspx 1) https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4595&context=law_lawreview https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl... Edit: I mean, whether you're a residential customer or a business, public utilities (electricity, water, sewer, garbage, police, ...) can't arbitrarily refuse service.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • badrequest 7y ago
    I don't know if I agree that mobile apps are on the same level as electricity and internet connectivity in terms of how crucial they are to be productive citizenry.
    • mirimir 7y ago
      For app developers, they certainly are.
      • AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
        This is why everything is made from corn in the US.
  • zaroth 7y ago
    The Google and Apple App Stores generate ~$100 billion in annual revenue combined, and growing at about 25% per year. The App Stores are the greatest software distribution and monetization platforms ever created, second perhaps only to “The Internet” as a whole. Regulating the App Stores as some sort of utility sounds like the perfect way to stifle growth and make it more difficult and expensive to publish on the App Store, which would hit small developers in particular. Every percentage point reduction in the growth of these stores at this point is basically $1 billion taken out of developers’ pockets.
• Naga 7y ago
  For what it's worth, I use this app on a daily basis and haven't found any deceptive behaviour. It's pretty annoying that now I have to download the APK from his website instead of the Play Store, so thanks for that Google.
• blazespin 7y ago
  Yeah, there's definitely a headache to running a marketplace like these.
• rogerdoger123 7y ago
  I have a very similar story. I had an AdMod ad running on my free app, and all of a sudden the account was deleted in a few hours just before it was time to get my earnings. Google had no responses and were unreachable and I just gave up. After this I found this has happened to 1000s of people and I realize how massively powerful this company is and they're using AI/bots to make decisions. I've now moved away from Google as much as I can and I warn others of their monopolistic practices and lack of care toward customers.
• hotgeart 7y ago
  That's why i'm full for PWA. I never had a ban, but I got apps disabled too.
• giancarlostoro 7y ago
  > Sun, Aug 25, 05:21 PM EDT: Google Play Team > After reviewing your appeal, we have confirmed our initial decision and will not be able to reinstate your developer account. I think I might of missed it but, did they even appeal? The hell is Google doing saying they did if they didn't? I would sure hope this is some sort of grounds of defamation or some related law, claiming someone said something they didn't even say is pretty awful. I wish people would start suing the hell out of Google for their obviously ridiculous hostile behavior, looks like we have dozens upon dozens of companies that could band together too.
• fouric 7y ago
  I propose a new heuristic called "The HN PR Law" or something to that effect: no response from a company on a negative PR incident should be taken seriously after an article on said incident hits the front page of HN. Given Google's track record and the ranking of this post, they'll probably reinstate the app within a few hours, and I propose that we act as if they had not - only acting on issues after they have been exposed to a massive audience signals a desire for public positive perception without any actual care for users, and users shouldn't have to go to social media to get their problems solved. Edit: a bit late, but I called it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20829484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20829484 Edit^2: technically, Google hasn't reinstated the app yet, but I think that the idea still stands
  • OnlyRepliesToBS 7y ago
    lol
  • povertyworld 7y ago
    I like Apple's approach. When some scammy dev ran to the press with a sob story, Apple would expose all the shady shit the dev was doing. Sorry, but 99% of these whiney stories are the developer's fault. Don't violate the terms of service, and don't be shady. It's not that hard.
    • GFischer 7y ago
      Maybe Google can´t do that because they are the ones doing the scummy thing. I personally know 2 cases of people banned from Google, in one case they were actually infringement (they made an app using copyrighted characters), and in the other it was the same case stated elsewhere - grandmother clicked repeatedly on the ads thinking she was helping her grandson, and he got banned from AdSense forever.
• jeremydeanlakey 7y ago
  It looks like @GooglePlayDev responded on Twitter 4h ago. https://twitter.com/GooglePlayDev/status/1166999937156100096 https://twitter.com/GooglePlayDev/status/1166999937156100096 Good luck to the developer!
• soyiuz 7y ago
  We need something like "tenant rights" for online marketplaces in addition to legal protections similar to what happens with evictions. This will not be solved voluntarily by the "landlords."
• S_A_P 7y ago
  While I'm sure that buried in the TOS you can be banned at any time for any reason, and the sheer volume of apps they referee makes things difficult to have humans manage. The "right" thing to do here would be to at least provide some sort of substantiation of your assertion that it violates policy. -App is asking for more permissions than it needs -App is violating privacy -App is direct copy of/ mimicking Core OS functionality -App is using non opensource code etc. They obfuscation of the reasons for the ban seem to me to be one of the following 1) laziness 2) malice 3) fear that it would somehow expose the methodology for finding the policy violations and create a cat and mouse game. It seems like mobile development is becoming less and less an attractive platform to spend my cycles. There are basically 2 markets with millions of apps that already implement your idea in some form or fashion that are free or cheap. Meanwhile being a Luddite and writing enterprise code for business has consistently paid more each year I've done it.
• aurbano 7y ago
  I ran a website that I first coded when I was 14-15, then kept improving over the years. It was for amateur electronic music producers to upload their tracks and after a few years there were several thousand active users, generating ~$400/month in AdSense. One day a relatively famous DJ tweeted a link to a song on the website, and that day alone generated close to $300, so 19 year old me thought he was about to earn his first $1000 in one month from a website! But Google decided to block the account because I guess that spike in traffic was too much, even though it all came from Twitter... So suddenly I was left with this website I had invested hundreds of hours in, and no way to monetise it. I tried a few other ad networks but they all seemed really dodgy and in the end decided to leave it with no ads. There really needs to be more regulation in this space.
  • smt88 7y ago
    Honestly my big problems with Google as a user are the same as yours: they try to automate their customer service, and the software just isn't even close to being a human equivalent. It's an absolute nightmare.
    • cube00 7y ago
      I understand trying to automate customer service but when you have an alleged human reply with the following after an email chain with nothing more then RTFM, something is broken. Phrases such as "I made sure to include all the information available to me" just make you feel even more worthless. > Wed, Aug 28, 9:28 AM EDT: Google Play team > I’m not able to provide any more information or a better answer to your question. In our previous email, I made sure to include all the information available to me. Update: It looks like they didn't actually include all the information available to them, there's another level of escalation, apparently only accessible after public attention https://twitter.com/GooglePlayDev/status/1166999937156100096 https://twitter.com/GooglePlayDev/status/1166999937156100096
  • fencepost 7y ago
    Sponsorships possibly through Patreon? User sponsorships in the $1-5 range get a little "I'm a sponsor" bling, companies (or individuals) can sponsor higher perhaps with levels for on-site only ("listen to my new release!") or off-site ads (software, instruments, mics, etc.)
• dragonwriter 7y ago
  Low friction and no support ejection from app markets seems to be a necessary cost of the low-cost, low-friction entry that they allow, and the fact that action against app developers to recover costs due to abuses isn't easy. If we had more upfront costs (both directly to market operators and in surety bond) it would be practical to have a lot friendlier process in the event of apparent violation. But then, we'd have a lot fewer devs even able to get into app stores, and the vast majority of non-abusive developers would experience this as a pure burden. The few that get caught up incorrectly in policy violation scans would benefit (assuming they weren't kept off the market in the first place), and it would be more abstractly fair, but I'm not sure it would be a win for consumers or developers on the whole Which isn't to say it shouldn't be done: fairness is important, too. But there is a cost.
  • cube00 7y ago
    I'd be more then happy to pay a fee if it means an actual human, who actually had access to all the case information, would actually review the appeal and provide a detailed personalized account of my crimes. As a bonus, if my appeal is found to be genuine and my account reinstated I'd like that fee refunded.
    • zaroth 7y ago
      That’s an interesting approach - not only do you not want to pay if you get the best possible result, you want to financially incentivize them to find something wrong!
      • dragonwriter 7y ago
        Yeah, the perverse incentives of it is “pay if you want to challenge a violation” that get even worse if it is “get a refund if we agree with your challenge” are why it pretty much had to be “pay up front to get into the store”. Even were the store owner perfectly honorable in performing initial and appeal reviews, the perverse incentives would lead to a perception of unfairness.
• seanwilson 7y ago
  I run a paid Google Chrome extension - I'm terrified there's going to be similar stories for Chrome extensions since this year Google introduced a review process.
• jshowa3 7y ago
  It honestly amazes me that people didn't think this wouldn't happen. When you have a company own a market, they simply dictate on a whim who gets access to it. It's the same with Steam. The more you move to the cloud, the more you give companies control over your goods and services. Phones should've remained open the day they were made. You should never been banned from administrative control of your device.
• ChrisArchitect 7y ago
  good pitch post, nice to see google dev account responding on twitter and maybe some escalation, but reading the post -- did you even consider what the deceptive behaviour might be even if barely a case for it? Mimicing functionality from other apps? Does STM or whatever transit in Montreal have an official app? While it's good to have competition and variety in the market for transit apps etc, seems like a lot of municipalities would tend to have an 'official' app these days or recommend preferred ones, so maybe there's a push as far as app store etc to go towards the official ones and maybe the STM reported you or someone downloaded and was mad it wasn't the real one etc etc. Sorry I didn't see your app before it got taken down/am not familiar with it but reading your post and started to wonder. No offense. Transit apps and public service sort of space for apps is a tricky space in modern day
  • jerf 7y ago
    The real problem isn't that Google may have an opinion that the app is deceptive or not, one that we may even share if we knew all the details. The real problem is that the app developer doesn't even know, and had what appears to have been roughly a two-hour window to nominally fix the problem before being booted off the service.
• Paul-ish 7y ago
  Perhaps there is room for new companies that provide quasi-legal services that vet apps before they are sent to the play store, to make sure their customers apps are in compliance. Ideally their experience seeing many apps would help them understand what gets removed and what doesn't. In cases like this, where the developer gets a notification about non-compliance, they would also take the app down ASAP so the developer can work things out before Google removes them from the store.
• paulcole 7y ago
  Wonder what's going to happen to this blog post when Medium goes out of business?
• totaldude87 7y ago
  The problem is multi fold, its completely ridiculous on them banning this app and letting thousands of piracy apps (free movies, live streaming ) etc etc.. Guess there is a genuine bias from AI to scrap out the actual apps that actually helps people legally than the illegal ones..
  • r3drock 7y ago
    I think, they are already banning many of the malicious apps. As nobody cares about those apps, these removals don't make any news and therefore it seems google is not punishing malicious apps.
• HillaryBriss 7y ago
  This kind of story makes me favor a blend of the policy proposals of Andrew Yang and Elizabeth Warren. We recognize that the current automated economy has hurt the little person (Yang), but, at the same time, recognize that a few super large corporations have created this situation (Warren). So, I propose that all US residents receive $1000 a month directly from Google.
• dreamcompiler 7y ago
  Google's App Store is failing miserably with both Type 1 (false negative) and Type 2 (false positive) errors. As a result, malware gets allowed in while reputable developers get kicked off. And there's apparently no (real) appeal process. Once the robot decides it doesn't like you, you can't change its mind and it won't tell you why. These problems are eminently fixable. But Google's app store desperately needs competition, some antitrust investigations, and probably some hefty class action judgments. Without those, Google has absolutely no motivation to fix the mess. With those motivations, Google could fix this overnight.
  • xtacy 7y ago
    I think you meant to say -- Type 1 is a false positive, and type 2 is a false negative.
    • dreamcompiler 7y ago
      Yes. Thanks.
• smsm42 7y ago
  That's why I don't want to even go into mobile development - pretty much the whole market is gated by two oligopolists who have random capricious policies and can - and do! - destroy thousands of hours of your work without even properly stating a reason and without any recourse. You work for years, you put your thought and love into something, you release it, people are happy to use it - and then some (probably severely underpaid and overworked) anonymous, or ever worse, a mindless misconfigured ML routine, pushes a button and poof! - it's all gone. That's an insane world to live in.
• ineedasername 7y ago
  Someone at google must have really liked their Kafka, but accidentally took it as a guide rather than a warning. Oops!
• deepsun 7y ago
  As far as I understand, author's account was blocked, but not necessarily related to app in question. Author said that there were other apps, one "not being in production", and didn't mention what those apps did.
• shawkinaw 7y ago
  These "Google suspended my account" stories are all similar in that Google always refuses to provide any details about the supposed violation. Is there a good reason for this reticence, or are they intentionally vague just so you have no way to defend yourself?
• vzaliva 7y ago
  I have a very similar problem with Google's Chrome store. I have a small open-source extension. Recently they started to send me notices that it is in violation of their policies. All my attempts to figure out what exactly I am doing wrong failed. I emailed multiple times. Finally, they just removed it from the store.
• e12e 7y ago
  So, with the US tradewar on China, the big Chinese companies are forced to roll out an os and app store. They cater to a large internal market augmented by a large market in India. The sanctions could potentially kill Android, I'm thinking. At least with how Alphabet is "curating" it.
• on_and_off 7y ago
  The timing is pretty brutal and outrageous but other than that, unless there are indeed no violations of the policies, I have no issues with an app getting kicked out. It is hard to have any opinion on the accuracy of these strikes though, since almost all the times devs believe that whatever they do is legit.
  • ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
    It's pretty easy for the developer to believe "whatever they do is legit" when they aren't shown an example of how they violated the policy. Could you imagine a world where a traffic cop pulled you over, issued you a ticket, and when you asked what you did wrong they said "You violated the policies regarding safe driving and expected behaviors". Your license is now revoked. All the information required has been provided to you. So maybe you are a terrible driver who deserves to lose a license, or maybe you just did something like parking in front of a mail box, a behavior you would adjust if you realized it was against the rules. No one should be expected to have a perfect mental map of the extremely long terms and conditions agreements and how they map to every real word situation.
    • on_and_off 7y ago
      I agree that they should do a better job at explaining issues. My understanding is that at first the number of apps where the violation is unclear was so low that it was not worth it. IIRC Google has announced that they are going to provide more info in the future on what the issues are. however the link in the article is pretty clear : https://play.google.com/about/privacy-security-deception/deceptive-behavior/#!?zippy_activeEl=dishonest-behavior#dishonest-behavior https://play.google.com/about/privacy-security-deception/dec... (even though it does not mention which part of the app exactly violates these rules) And I disagree on the fact that the TOS are unreadable : https://play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy/#!?modal_active=none https://play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy/#!?mo... Google could improve devs relationships for sure, but these are pretty clear. FWIW, I had several strikes as well, because of a permission used by an unpublished app on a beta channel :/. The whole process of getting the account reinstated was pretty easy in that case. I am kinda curious to scrape the op app and look at what might have got them in trouble, I might give it a go if I have enough time.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• vinceguidry 7y ago
  Automated ban-bots are probably unavoidable. What's evil is automated appeals, they almost invariably deny them. On Quora anybody can report anyone for harassment. And anyone does. You get a BNBR notification (Be Nice, Be respectful) and a little link to appeal. Recently someone posted pretty clear proof of Quora employing an automated appeal denial process when they got denied an appeal for a comment praising another user. I don't know what the answer is here. I'm sure the EU or California will take the lead on the issue when it finally hits their Overton window.
• nvahalik 7y ago
  I know there are several people in this discussion advocating for regulation... but surely there are legal remedies for this? Why not just find a way to make them liable for this?
• arh68 7y ago
  So where does this stuff place Google in the moral spectrum? Obviously Good stuff: Firefighting, EMTs.. working on cancer research, Doctors without Borders.. NASA, Nat'l Park Service.. EFF, Mozilla.. the electric company $genericStartup, $genericFortune500 drone programs Google (?) telemarketing patent trolling being Chapo's IT guy (voluntarily) running phone scams targeting old folks Obviously Bad stuff: running ransomware on hospitals I mean, it's a big company, but stories like these are hardly unusual. I feel like bad customer service is maybe a feature by design.
• BogdanPetre 7y ago
  In a few weeks, an app offering the exact service as the removed one of yours will appear on Google Play, except now there will be a fee
• mmathieum 7y ago
  Hi all, I'm the developer of the app in question. I have regained access to the Google Play Console. Working on publishing the new apps. More details in updated Medium article. Thanks
  • hasseio 7y ago
    Can you give us more details? Which icon was hidden? And how?
  • egorfine 7y ago
    "your apps hide icon after installation" Why?
• jaakl 7y ago
  One golden rule of businesses (or any investments) is that you should not put your eggs to single basket. With development of mobile apps you just do it, you are totally in mercy of a couple of gatekeepers, like it or not. I would rather focus on recognising and mitigating these risks, and make sure that you do have alternatives. Do not buy into some corporation's promises of not to be evil. They all are. Sorry you had to learn it in hard way, but better late than never.