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Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell

395 points by ajdude 5y ago

bryanrasmussen 5y ago
which one is more incompetent as a service company - Amazon, Google, Facebook, or Apple? I think my ranking would be Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, but that is not so much decided via any sort of logical evaluation but only due to my feeling on the matter.
- buscoquadnary 5y ago
  For all the problems Amazon has and causes I will say I've always found their support to be pretty excellent. From what I understand Amazon's foundibg philosophy is focused on just serving the customer at the cost of any other externality and that's where most of the conterversy surrounding them comes from is placing whatever is needed to please the customer above every other concern. But that means when working with them they are pretty great. Whereas it seems like Google and Facebook view you as a resource simply to have value extracted from and moved on. As for Apple, well there are no problems you're just holding the phone wrong.
  - _fat_santa 5y ago
    I've personally never contacted Facebook or Google support, seems like a futile effort. I do agree out of all the companies, Amazon seems to have support figured out the most, at least they make it easy for the customer. I had a package that was not delivered, actually pretty sure it was delivered but then stolen (apartment had a package locker so it was the delivery drivers fault). When I contacted Amazon I was expecting them to talk for a while to determine what happened but no, immediate no questions asked refund. Amazon I'm sure has issues around delivery, but as a customer I could care less if a package gets lost once in a while if the company is immediately going to correct the issue.
  - smallerfish 5y ago
    Amazon's FBA support on the other hand is horrendous, possibly betraying their more adversarial relationship with their sellers. I was so annoyed by repeated incompetence that not only did I stop doing FBA side projects, but I (mostly) cut out my Amazon shopping and am unlikely to recommend AWS as a first option to a client in future.
  - derbOac 5y ago
    Not everyone has the same experiences with Amazon. I guess I've had pretty good experiences with Amazon as a retail customer per se, in terms of delivery and returns, but beyond that it's an entirely different story. I had an experience very similar to the one in this article, for example: https://consumerist.com/2013/06/18/amazon-cancels-my-6000-order-because-it-doesnt-know-how-to-use-a-fax-machine/ https://consumerist.com/2013/06/18/amazon-cancels-my-6000-or...
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    > From what I understand Amazon's foundibg philosophy is focused on just serving the customer at the cost of any other externality and that's where most of the conterversy surrounding them comes from is placing whatever is needed to please the customer above every other concern. But that means when working with them they are pretty great. I have tried for years to report counterfeits on Amazon to their customer support to no avail. They don't want to collect that data, it seems, despite the severe effects their products can have on customers.
- bkav 5y ago
  Google is awful. I worked at a company in a now-legal business with a YouTube channel from the not-as-legal days… it has incredibly unprofessional and embarrassing branded footage and there was nothing we were able to do to pull the channel down. (No one currently working there has the login)
- faeyanpiraat 5y ago
  I think AWS is the best, but only because you can have a paid support plan, and real humans will reply to your support requests.
  - wvenable 5y ago
    I've used Amazon support proper for Fire TV stick issues and a human (via chat) was able to resolve my problem relatively quickly and painlessly.
  - jamesfinlayson 5y ago
    Agreed - I don't think AWS Support is cheap (but my company pays) but it is good.
- masklinn 5y ago
  Never interacted with facebook in any position, the rest is completely correct. Google is absolutely trash at support, Apple is quite bad (in store support used to be rather good, services was always shit), Amazon is competent at least.
  - thinkingemote 5y ago
    For the record I had a simple oauth problem flagged by Facebook and emailed with a number of humans there successfully. I'm a non enterprise/paying dev. It felt reasonably okay and quick, as if they read and listened to my responses.
  - disruptiveink 5y ago
    Amazon is also in the easiest position to offer support, since for the bulk of support queries, if all else fails, they can just absorb the cost and refund the customer. The customer is usually not any worse than when they started if they do this. The money spent on a purchase is fungible. There is no obvious monetary refund to give to someone who can't update their app, got their YouTube channel taken down or got their Instagram handle stolen.
VRay 5y ago
ugh, that's annoying.. At least you made it onto HackerNews, so your problem might get silently resolved in the shadows It really sucks that Google can't be bothered to provide 5 minutes of human support despite taking such an enormous cut of all revenue from these apps
- duhast 5y ago
  1. It wouldn’t be 5 minutes. This could easily take hours to resolve. 2. Even with human support, companies like this would continue to be incentivised not to share what exactly triggered the ban in order to protect their systems from spam and abuse. You can’t provide services to billions of people without automation. 3. Human reviews would be performed by humans. Have you ever met humans? You’re replacing an imperfect system with another imperfect system except now things are slower and cost more.
  - inetknght 5y ago
    > in order to protect their systems from spam and abuse Spam and abuse would fall afoul of the CFAA in the US and similar laws in the EU. Outside of the US? Well maybe those apps shouldn't even be available in the US or EU. Spam and abuse only happens because the criminals perpetuating it do it without real consequence.
  - pixl97 5y ago
    On number 2, why? If your program is abusive, have the abuser remove the function until it's no longer abusive. The entire we cant tell you does seem like crap.
  - lbriner 5y ago
    > not to share what exactly triggered the ban in order to protect their systems from spam and abuse That's kind of true but I think that a company the size of Google could afford to assign someone to look into providing more information in a scenario like, "you are using geo-location without asking permission". Since the need for permission is not a secret, telling the vendor this causes less friction and makes people hate you a bit less. Sure, you might also have a "secret" system that does something like "if failed 5 times in a row, blacklist them" but that is just security by obscurity and doesn't seem to stop that many people. Also, in the case where the vendor is an easily verifiable company selling, presumably, something that is fairly easy to view/check, it doesn't seem to be asking for much to either get a human or to get some automated messages. Apparently they employ 140K people! That is a lot of people to not provide any human support.
sourcecodeplz 5y ago
I’ve read the post, its just how it is with their policies being evaluated by automations and not humans. Nothing you can do but work around them sadly.
- onion2k 5y ago
  I’ve read the post, its just how it is with their policies being evaluated by automations and not humans. No, it's definitely a problem with the humans. It's just that the humans in question aren't customer support humans. It's Google's engineering humans that are to blame for shipping these poor quality experiences. They might be able to invert binary trees on whiteboards pretty well, but they suck at making an HTML page that explains why their system isn't working for you.
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    The engineers at Google Play really have got to feel embarrassed at how bad this situation has been over the years. How could they have a conversation with an Android developer that's had to deal with the lack of support?
  - marcus_holmes 5y ago
    I see this and think of all the millions of apps that the code controls. I don't know how many do fail validation, but it's clearly not a vast number, definitely under 1%. Given that they're also clearly training a model for this, based on a large number of inputs and rules, then this is pretty good. Their end goal is clearly to be able to remove humans from this process completely. Which is good - it's shitty work. From my point of view as an app customer, this is fine. I don't see apps that fail validation, and there are too many (shitty) apps anyway - more validation is good. From my point of view as an entrepreneur, I approve. Clearly they can live with a certain level of false negatives, and that makes sense from a business point of view as they save so much in the validation process. From my point of view as a developer, however, it's a dumpster fire and I'm not going anywhere near it.
    - onion2k 5y ago
nottorp 5y ago
And I thought I was joking when I kept saying that Google uses Machine Learning!(tm) for everything... Edit: on further thinking, the last problem about needing login info for an app that doesn't have accounts is probably due to some poor soul on minimum wage trying to make their review quota for the day.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dncornholio 5y ago
  Parsing text is not machine learning. It's the lack of machine learning thats causing the issues IMO. Because this system just flags everything with the word free in it.
cocoflunchy 5y ago
I have the same experience with the Google Play Store. For all the complaints people have about the Apple App Store, at least their reviewers are human and you can discuss things with them. And they block updates but don't remove the app without warning! My experience with the Google Play store: I get an email on a friday night after working hours stating that the app of my company was removed after a routine check and that I have to follow an appeal process to get it back. (The reason being that we had 2 apps in the store, one for production use and one for training). Only after pinging people I knew working at Google was I able to get my support case prioritized and the app unblocked. A second time we had our app deleted from the store because we used background geolocation and failed to comply in time with the new reporting requirements. Once again, no warning and no grace period except a generic "Google Play policy update" email 6 months earlier... I guess we're just lucky to have a B2B app that we can install via APK to our customers' phones if needed.
- buscoquadnary 5y ago
  The number of times I've heard of people only getting support from Google because they know someone on the inside is quite astonishing. If I were an Google employee looking to make a few extra bucks I'd definitely start offering to help "nudge" account issues for a few extra bucks under the table.
  - erhk 5y ago
    Dont worry, google is working hard to make sure that even employees are unable to do anything of that sort. Gather the world's information and make it uniformally unsupported.
    - alisonkisk 5y ago
      This is good. It will tie the fates of small time customers/users to the elites, so the situation gets fixed or the business collapses.
      - wongarsu 5y ago
perryizgr8 5y ago
> The reason Catima isn’t on alternative app stores isn’t because there is something wrong with them, it’s because there is something wrong with Google Play. I don't understand. Why are erroneous policy violations in google play preventing them from launching it on Huawei or Samsung?
- phdelightful 5y ago
  I agree, it's not clear. Maybe it's because the developer has sunk so much time into dealing with Google Play that she hasn't been able to release it on other platforms, or she's discouraged from trying to do so and getting hit with another round of insanity.
leros 5y ago
I went through a similar hell getting compliance to use a certain Google API after getting algorithmically flagged. Months of back and forth, with conflicting approvals and rejections. The same automated emails over and over sprinkled with emails from humans who kind of understood. I will never again use any Google service for business purposes if I can avoid it.
jeroenhd 5y ago
Getting boned because of the inability of the English language to distinguish between free and free, that's a new ring of machine learning hell.
- probably_wrong 5y ago
  But... Spanish does have a difference between "libre" and "gratis", and the translated title is using the correct one. I guess they are also trying to catch synonyms and doing a terrible job at it.
- sp332 5y ago
  It's not a machine learning issue. A human would make the same translation. The issue is that the match should be run in the original language, not translated to English at all.
tyingq 5y ago
Meanwhile, lots of other apps with 'Free' in the title, description, etc. https://play.google.com/store/search?q=free&c=apps https://play.google.com/store/search?q=free&c=apps Including some Google owned ones like YouTubeTV.
- billynomates 5y ago
  Yeah they only review when you make a new release, so maybe these apps just haven't been updated in a while
  - nguyenkien 5y ago
    Nah. Probably exclude app already in store.
    - toyg 5y ago
      Nah. Probably exclude any app under X downloads, and even then just pick a random sample every once in a while, and even then maybe the reviewer had better stuff to do that Monday and just waved everything through.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    "Text Free - Call and Text Now" Updated January 10, 2022 "Free Now" - Update January 11, 2022 Many other examples have recent updates too.
    - sdoering 5y ago
      I was always wondering how Free Now can stay in the Play Store with their name. Maybe it is a trademark thing (as this is a trademark). But yeah - the rules seem quite arbitrarily enforced. As said in other discussions about Google - I decided to untangle my life from Google further. Quite hard actually as I am a paying GSuite customer and a lot of stuff actually is tied to this account. :-(
      - 5y ago
jeffbee 5y ago
The play store review program is there to serve the installing users, not the app authors, so even a high rate of obvious false positives is probably considered acceptable.
- simion314 5y ago
  >The play store review program is there to serve the installing users, not the app authors, so even a high rate of obvious false positives is probably considered acceptable. This article should provove that Google incompetence exists and it works in both ways, it blocks good apps and there is no reason why bad apps would get away. I mean code like if(shity title translation constains an word from illegalWordsInEnglishList) proves there is no super clever AI here but at best a quick workaround , so if quick workaround or shity code is allowed why would you be convinced that the "security" scans are better? (we found that 100% Apple security scans are as bad so I won't be surprised if a Google dev also created a list of illegalAPUIs and does a naive search that clever developers can get around with a bit of clever reflection/dynaimc class or obfuscation) TL:DR I am not convinced that badly implemented policies and shiutty implemented security scans do not affect the users.
- Hizonner 5y ago
  So, how am I "served" by being denied actually useful apps, while I am still offered a vast array of malware and crap?
- pastrybanking 5y ago
  The implementation of the Play Stores policies for consumers is also fundamentally broken. In my country's version of the Play Store, the number two ranking app is currently rated at 2.6 with multiple complaints of users losing money to an alleged scam.
neoneye2 5y ago
I have a similar story about the App Store. I wanted to move my app to another owner, but Apple has detected it's a plagiarism of my original app. Now I have neither the original app on the App Store, and the new owners app is stuck. It seems to be automated rejection without a human taking an actual look at the problem. My app is open source https://github.com/triangledraw/TriangleDraw-iOS https://github.com/triangledraw/TriangleDraw-iOS
nopakos 5y ago
I once got a warning for sexual content. The offensive phrase was "Virgin Mary".
- raverbashing 5y ago
  So the right hand built machine translation and the left hand falls for naive Scunthorp problems like it's an intern writing a PHP app? (Or worse, a human with zero critical thinking) Why am I not surprised...
ComradePhil 5y ago
I'm genuinely interested in hearing from people who believe that Apple and Google should have a monopoly on deciding what apps people can run on their phones. In case of Google's Android, one can still install third party App Stores, even they take away auto-updates and such. Apple is a much worse offender. In either case, why does anyone think that they should have a monopoly there and why is nothing being done to fight it? Many years ago the EU forced Microsoft to release Windows versions without a default media player or a default browser. Yet, nothing has been done to Apple and Google. Why?
- duhast 5y ago
  How would you realistically solve this problem? Part of what makes these platforms so attractive to the end user is in fact app curation. Strict control over APIs and power usage, all sorts of minimum standards and mandatory integrations are contributing enormous value to these ecosystems.
  - foxfluff 5y ago
    I would allow fair competition and let the user choose. You don't need a monopoly to have curated storefronts. For example, GOG is curated and if I don't like their curation, I can look at Steam or a plethora of other stores. F-Droid has its own kind of curation, which I prefer to Google's curation; it gives me a decent guarantee that I'm looking at free software, and antifeatures are usually hilighted. However, I don't have to use F-Droid if I don't want to. So maybe another entity can provide better curation that Google does. And maybe another entity can offer an uncurated store; if users prefer that, it's their choice.
    - duhast 5y ago
      Users are consistently choosing locked down Apple ecosystem over more open Android. How are you going to explain this? You also need to realise that you’re not an average user. You’re in 0.0001% of the population when it comes to use of technology and your preferences might not reflect the average Joe. Most phones would quickly fill up with apps doing malware, phishing, spam, crypto mining and DDoS attacks.
_fat_santa 5y ago
Clearly this was a fuck-up with machine learning, and while it is worrying, what's more worrying is the consequences when this goes beyond just developer app reviews. I'm worried we will have another British Post Office Scandal[1] but on a much worse scale. Bad technology coupled with everyone in charge thinking the technology is infallible. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
javajosh 5y ago
This kind of incompetence makes me seriously doubt that Google is doing anything to more substantially review apps for deeper security issues, either statically or at runtime. The asymmetry of effort in this situation is profound: consider that you spend all your time and effort writing a, long, complex, thoughtful message by hand (the app), taking hundreds or thousands of hours, but then they respond with machine generated message that cost them 10ms of computer time. The solution, I think, is obvious: Google needs a "zone defense" with the play store, a much larger (and expensive) staff, to do in-depth app reviews and be a stable, stateful relationship with the developer over time. This person would, in fact, become a 3rd party "expert" on a small set of apks and their contents, with a "feel" for what is changing over time, with the core mission of protecting users from malice, but working with devs, as a human being.
- freedomben 5y ago
  That sounds awesome to me, but if they were going to do that the cost of submitting an Android app (or the % take by Google on sale) would have to sky rocket to make it worth it. As someone who rejoices in small developers, I would hate to see that. I think it's ok to do automated review for round 1, but I would like to see a human field appeals. Over time I would also think that will help find edge cases and cracks in the automation so that it can be further improved. Edit: Based on other comments here, it sounds like that may be what Google is starting to do
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  > This kind of incompetence makes me seriously doubt that Google is doing anything to more substantially review apps for deeper security issues, either statically or at runtime. I actually know the team that does security vuln automation for Google Play. They've found millions of vulns in apps over the years. One of the challenges they face is precisely this sort of headline: how do you use static analysis to find vulns and ensure that you don't inundate users with false positives, forcing them down the admittedly limited support channels. > The solution, I think, is obvious: Google needs a "zone defense" with the play store, a much larger (and expensive) staff, to do in-depth app reviews and be a stable, stateful relationship with the developer over time. This person would, in fact, become a 3rd party "expert" on a small set of apks and their contents, with a "feel" for what is changing over time, with the core mission of protecting users from malice, but working with devs, as a human being. This sort of exists. Google pays external hackers who find vulns in popular apps via a rewards program. These don't need to be Google's apps. There may be other systems for top partners or specific kinds of apps (the org is big) but I'm not aware of anything personally. Expanding beyond a small subset of apps is challenging. Not only are there millions of apps, each app contains tens, hundreds, or even thousands of individual apks. The staff needed to have a concierge for each app would be absolutely freaking enormous, perhaps even larger than the number of people on the planet who actually have deep security expertise on the Android platform.
buu700 5y ago
Obligatory reminder that a backdoor was added to the Play Store last summer: https://www.xda-developers.com/google-play-apk-replacement-pros-cons https://www.xda-developers.com/google-play-apk-replacement-p... I wouldn't be surprised in the least to find out that "Android App Bundles" were the ultimate result of a secret FISA ruling.
foxfluff 5y ago
Some Google engineer probably thought they were very clever when they applied "the algorithm" to translated titles. Pretty fucking draconian some of those rules, if you ask me. In games and works of art it's not uncommon to have a title longer than 30 characters. Nevermind when you have different editions or things that are related to the main title. So how does this actually work? Why is 'Life is Strange: Before the Storm' (33 characters) on Google Play? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.squareenix.lis.bts&hl=en&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.squareenix...
- f137 5y ago
  Until recently the limit was 35, and 50 earlier still. Google enforces new limits on app updates, so this game was not updated recently.
- bitwize 5y ago
  The rules can be and are waived for big-time publishers.
jsnell 5y ago
So, the relevant bit from the Play Store policy documents is probably: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/9898842 https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ... That policy seems very reasonable. Is the policy being misapplied here? Hard to say, since it's describing the spirit of the rules rather than an exhaustive list of specific violations. It doesn't seem that anything in the title would be misleading. But the original title is kind of irrelevant; whether the app is libre or not has no bearing on its functionality.
- xeromal 5y ago
  Yeah, once I caught gist of what was bothering them, I would've just nuked Libre from the title and all translations. Just call it the Card Wallet and be done with it.
  - sdoering 5y ago
    This would be practical - but what about companies like "Free Now" that are (at least currently) seemingly allowed to keep operating under that name in the Play store. Why delete something from the name that is actually transporting information for the user just because Google arbitrarily decides that for this rue the mistranslation comprises a rule break while other apps (with probably bigger marketing spend on Google) are allowed to keep "Free" in the name. Imho is not the rules per se. It is the mistranslation and also the arbitrary enforcement that reminds me personally of stories by Kafka (the author, not the tech).
    - xeromal 5y ago
      If your livelihood is tied to an app in the store being published, you gotta play ball. If you can survive with or without the app being published, then I'd definitely take a crack at trying to explain to Google what their problem is.
AtNightWeCode 5y ago
My experience of Google Play is that it is 100% corrupted. I worked with companies that tried to get their apps back onto Google Play for YEARS without success. How do you solve something like “this app is not compliant with program X” when the app was never registered for that program for just that reason? …and the "support".
- ugjka 5y ago
  Google is specifically anti-support from their beginnings because they have this belief that everything can be solved algorithmically.
  - AtNightWeCode 5y ago
    When you work for companies that make Google a lot of money. Google does all the work for you, so you do not even need to care about support in the first place.
UIUC_06 5y ago
I think you were lucky they told you anything. On Quora they just say "your answer was deleted for violating Quora policies. Click here to read our policies." This sort of "tell them nothing" approach seems pervasive in the online world. Blame the lawyers. Their lawyers must caution them "Don't give any details. That just opens us up to more questions & legal actions." The fact that it's completely self-serving and proves they don't give a shit about you is kinda irrelevant. Who are you, after all? There are millions just like you.
- freedomben 5y ago
  I despise the tell them nothing approach and I think it's despicable, but that said I think there is a more legitimate reason than the lawyers. If the person is a spammer or otherwise not legit and you tell them what they did wrong, it's a lot easier to hack around the problem and beat the automated moderation and get your malware into the store. I don't think that justifies the harm it does to regular people, but it is a lot less sinister than just CYA. I actually blame tech media who capitalize on every "malware in the Play Store!!!" story a lot more, and the Apple apologists who use any news of malware on Android (even if it only applies to people downloading pirated apps and sideloading them with root) to trumpet how insecure Android is. Personally I think that bad press is the primary driver behind the modern policies.
  - UIUC_06 5y ago
    Could be, actually. The press sucks: a bunch of untrained people too lazy to get off their laptops and talk to people. I don't think Quora falls into that "spammer" category, though. No one is seeking to make any serious money from it, AFAICT.
    - antifa 5y ago
      If your product/brand is an answer on every relevant question, that's probably worth a lot.
      - 5y ago
donarb 5y ago
It just amazes me that developers try to cram editorializing into the title of the app, when you're already given a search word field and a description field in which to tell the world about your app. IRL nobody searches for "Cheerios - Toasted Whole Grain Oat Cereal for the Whole Family".
- Brian_K_White 5y ago
  Why even have names then? Might as well just be a serial number that isn't displayed, and a bag of keyword fields that also aren't displayed but can be searched. A name has to convey some sort of meaning, otherwise everything will be a billion versions of Verizon. A toothbrush would be indistiguishable from a tax prep software by their names. And of course people search for every one of those words in that long cheerios name. You can't search for a thing by it's short unique meaningless name until after you find it by searching for what you want, like toasted oat cereal or wallet of freedom.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- phreack 5y ago
  It's sad but if you search for 'cereal', you're going to see the one with the awful title higher up in rankings.
  - stickfigure 5y ago
    I feel this just shows lack of imagination in the search algorithm. It seems pretty trivial to discourage this kind of thing - to start with, how about penalizing longer titles or longer lists of keywords? Let the publisher decide whether to rank low for lots of words, or high for a few.
- hbn 5y ago
  This is something Google does themselves. Their listing for Chrome is "Google Chrome: Fast & Secure", Keep is "Google Keep - Notes and Lists"
posmonerd 5y ago
I’ve also had horrible experiences with the Google Play people. Will never consider publishing on that platform again, huge waste of resources and personal time. Fortunately PWAs are a thing.
charcircuit 5y ago
>Title (en_US): "Catima - The Free Card Wallet" >This proved my theory: Google was using Google Translate to translate the app titles instead of reviewing them with native speakers. Why would they use Google translate on an en_US string?
bilalq 5y ago
I've run into issues with both Google and Apple that were just ridiculous. One time, Google randomly ceased payment processing for our app. When I reached out to them, the support staff were not at all helpful and said an "account specialist" would be needed and that they would forward the case along. Afterwards, I got an email saying that they would respond in 24-48 hours. After days of waiting, they finally message me asking for passport photos. I send them over, get another "24-48 hour message", and then two days later they reply back saying they want the exact same documents again. Insane! I send it again and mention that I already sent these. They wait two days and reply back that they actually want my co-founder's passport now. I reply back with that. Then they send another "please wait 24-48 hours" message. At this point, I tried reaching out to friends at Google to see if they could escalate internally for me. A case got created, but two days later I get an email saying that this is something that the Google Pay team manages, not the Play Store team. Apparently, Google's org chart was my problem. After all this, a response comes back saying "Your account is currently suspended you submitted documents which cannot be used to verify your account details. Our team has responded to you with specifics about what needs to be submitted in order for them to complete our review." Except they hadn't. I responded back about how both my cofounder and I submitted every document they asked for multiple times and answered all their questions to no avail. I pleaded with them to please let me speak to a human about this. After yet another agonizing 96 hours, our case was resolved and payment processing was re-enabled. We were bleeding money at the time and had been paying thousands of dollars a month to their ridiculous 30% highway robbery tax on subscriptions. While not quite as bad, Apple blocked an app update because the current reviewer didn't like our subscription group separation. The only problem is that the app release in question had no such changes and the subscription group setup had already been approved in a previous release. The setup made sense and used common practices for A/B testing different prices, but the Apple agent we got on the phone with wouldn't have it. They insisted we release an update that would break existing subscribers to comply with their policies. Two bugfix updates were rejected for nonsensical reasons. We went through an escalation channel to get them out. When we submitted updates again, the reviewers magically had no more issues with things they'd already approved in the past. Forcing a 30% cut isn't even the worst offense of these app stores. There's literally no easy recourse when things go wrong.
kingofspain 5y ago
Oof. I’ve had the user account one before from Play for an app that had no user accounts. Apple isn’t much better though - currently trying to argue that asking for user location (when a user clicks ‘use my location’) for a real estate app is reasonable. They are insistent it’s not a valid feature and won’t accept it til it’s removed.
kmeisthax 5y ago
I'm somehow both appalled, surprised, and unsurprised at the same time. Tech companies have a weird habit of jumping into language markets they don't actually have the staffing to properly serve. However, I never expected to see Google just outright machine-translating titles to do compliance checks on. > After 4 full days of trying to teach Google staff how a dictionary worked Google's moderation policy is to treat any sort of complicated business situation as some kind of DDOS attack, as if you e-mailed your appeal buried deep within a ZIP bomb. They have strict computation quotas on wetware.
TrianguloY 5y ago
About the log-in requirement, happened to me too on an app with a textbox used for searching (no login required anywhere). I just filled the login form with a sample search and wrote a little explanation. They accepted it on the spot (although I doubt they will ever read it)
npteljes 5y ago
What OP unfortunately missed is a post like this: "Tell HN: You can't add “no ads” in your Play Store app's title" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29497680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29497680
- sschueller 5y ago
  Sadly the feature to filter out apps that have ads or in app purchases does not exist. Probably on purpose. There are many utility apps with thousand of similar apps, most are garbage filled with ads but then there are a few made without app upselling or ads but until you find those you send a lot of time.
  - npteljes 5y ago
    Yeah, I gave up on the Play Store very quickly, and so now it's just F-Droid and the occasional play store install with Aurora. I just feel like that if I need to spend energy either way, then I'm better off spending it in the FOSS ecosystem.
seba_dos1 5y ago
Once I had my app rejected from Google Play, because they decided it was plagiarizing another application... which was actually the very same application posted by me somewhere else. Took some effort to convince them that I'm me, even despite of my Google account being registered on a domain that's prominently displayed as the first thing after launching the app. Another time, they suddenly decided that "No information is gathered from users whatsoever." is not a valid privacy policy for a Free Software application that does not gather any information (it was a simple game that couldn't even store highscores locally).
WheatM 5y ago
mandeepj 5y ago
I went through similar hell recently. Google should just sell Google Play at this point. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29640436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29640436
invalidname 5y ago
We had a similar experience to the one here: https://dev.to/codenameone/google-play-kafkaesque-experience-mp3 https://dev.to/codenameone/google-play-kafkaesque-experience... Google is worse than Apple in many regards.
ChrisClark 5y ago
Regarding the update at the bottom of the article, I also just got the email about needing to provide login info so they can review my app. An offline game that has no login functionality...
mondo2000 5y ago
Maybe I missed something, but I don't see how Google's conduct relates to the other app stores, as mentioned near the beginning of the article. Did she leave that part out?
metalised 5y ago
It's the same with all of FAANG. It's now been almost two months since my facebook page of 56k users was hacked, and nobody at facebook seems to give a shit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29876423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29876423 I just gave up and made a new page now. Hopefully the hacker won't manage to claim that one too.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  There is a paid service to help you get these back.. O_O https://hacked.com/ https://hacked.com/ (I guess it is that common?)
  - metalised 5y ago
    $899 Holy c...!
digitalpacman 5y ago
My app has been removed from youtube oauth multiple times because we keep getting different verifiers. We've even had permission revoked after being approved. All we do is use a oauth to get their userid and read their livechat for a chatbot. They just can't get their shit together.
heavyset_go 5y ago
Maybe we shouldn't be relying on Google and Apple to decide what we can run on our phones and tablets. Maybe we shouldn't let Apple and Microsoft decide what we can run on our computers, either.
- MrDresden 5y ago
  I agree with the sentiment, however you are not forced to run Google's Android on your phone if you don't want to. It is just the most convenient OS to run (as it comes preloaded). For the PC's (yes, an Apple laptop/desktop is a personal computer) you can always install Linux. Try it, it's great!
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    Software freedom is not just about being able to run Linux. Being able to run Linux doesn't help the billions of people who will never use anything other than the stock OS that ships on their phones, tablets or computers. I bought a model of a phone that doesn't have LineageOS support because apparently it's a weird carrier model. The base model has AOSP support, though. Didn't realize that until a few months into ownership, and by then it was too late to return. I'm stuck with Google's Android. I've been running Linux for like 19 years now.
    - MrDresden 5y ago
      Ofcourse it doesn't serve the vast majority of users any good. If it would then Linux wouldn't be in minority use on desktops/laptops. However there is a clear difference between there being the possibility to run alternative OS's on a device vs there being a convenient method to switch to something else. Most Android devices do not force the user to use the stock OS. PC's do not care what OS they run. This runs contrary to your initial comment on users being dictated on what can and can not be run on the hardware. Since, for the mobile industry at least, the business model doesn't revolve around simply selling hardware (Apple as well as Google makes most of their mobile earnings through the stores and ads after all) I can fully understand that that flashing with other OS's isn't supplied as an easy one click selection by the manufacturer. Why should it? The fact that your new phone is only supported by some of the alternative software but not the one you want to use is no judgement on the manufacturer. Not every piece of hardware should be supported by every piece of software. Let it also be known I have run Linux for 18 years, along with various AOSP devices and other funky Linux mobiles over the last 10.
MrDresden 5y ago
I've been making Android applications professionally for a decade now, and I'm of the opinion that who ever manages the Play store, it's policies and developer relations should be fired on the spot along with at least the next two levels of management below. It is frankly a burning dumpster fire. I still don't see why the app is not on any of the other app stores that the author mentions though (only rages about Play and thus the app is only there?)
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  To be fair, he would be fired if people didn't develop against this environment. People have warned repeatedly that developers make themselves dependent. Money is good of course...

395 points by ajdude 5y ago

which one is more incompetent as a service company - Amazon, Google, Facebook, or Apple? I think my ranking would be Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, but that is not so much decided via any sort of logical evaluation but only due to my feeling on the matter.

buscoquadnary 5y ago
For all the problems Amazon has and causes I will say I've always found their support to be pretty excellent. From what I understand Amazon's foundibg philosophy is focused on just serving the customer at the cost of any other externality and that's where most of the conterversy surrounding them comes from is placing whatever is needed to please the customer above every other concern. But that means when working with them they are pretty great. Whereas it seems like Google and Facebook view you as a resource simply to have value extracted from and moved on. As for Apple, well there are no problems you're just holding the phone wrong.
- _fat_santa 5y ago
  I've personally never contacted Facebook or Google support, seems like a futile effort. I do agree out of all the companies, Amazon seems to have support figured out the most, at least they make it easy for the customer. I had a package that was not delivered, actually pretty sure it was delivered but then stolen (apartment had a package locker so it was the delivery drivers fault). When I contacted Amazon I was expecting them to talk for a while to determine what happened but no, immediate no questions asked refund. Amazon I'm sure has issues around delivery, but as a customer I could care less if a package gets lost once in a while if the company is immediately going to correct the issue.
- smallerfish 5y ago
  Amazon's FBA support on the other hand is horrendous, possibly betraying their more adversarial relationship with their sellers. I was so annoyed by repeated incompetence that not only did I stop doing FBA side projects, but I (mostly) cut out my Amazon shopping and am unlikely to recommend AWS as a first option to a client in future.
- derbOac 5y ago
  Not everyone has the same experiences with Amazon. I guess I've had pretty good experiences with Amazon as a retail customer per se, in terms of delivery and returns, but beyond that it's an entirely different story. I had an experience very similar to the one in this article, for example: https://consumerist.com/2013/06/18/amazon-cancels-my-6000-order-because-it-doesnt-know-how-to-use-a-fax-machine/ https://consumerist.com/2013/06/18/amazon-cancels-my-6000-or...
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  > From what I understand Amazon's foundibg philosophy is focused on just serving the customer at the cost of any other externality and that's where most of the conterversy surrounding them comes from is placing whatever is needed to please the customer above every other concern. But that means when working with them they are pretty great. I have tried for years to report counterfeits on Amazon to their customer support to no avail. They don't want to collect that data, it seems, despite the severe effects their products can have on customers.
bkav 5y ago
Google is awful. I worked at a company in a now-legal business with a YouTube channel from the not-as-legal days… it has incredibly unprofessional and embarrassing branded footage and there was nothing we were able to do to pull the channel down. (No one currently working there has the login)
faeyanpiraat 5y ago
I think AWS is the best, but only because you can have a paid support plan, and real humans will reply to your support requests.
- wvenable 5y ago
  I've used Amazon support proper for Fire TV stick issues and a human (via chat) was able to resolve my problem relatively quickly and painlessly.
- jamesfinlayson 5y ago
  Agreed - I don't think AWS Support is cheap (but my company pays) but it is good.
masklinn 5y ago
Never interacted with facebook in any position, the rest is completely correct. Google is absolutely trash at support, Apple is quite bad (in store support used to be rather good, services was always shit), Amazon is competent at least.
- thinkingemote 5y ago
  For the record I had a simple oauth problem flagged by Facebook and emailed with a number of humans there successfully. I'm a non enterprise/paying dev. It felt reasonably okay and quick, as if they read and listened to my responses.
- disruptiveink 5y ago
  Amazon is also in the easiest position to offer support, since for the bulk of support queries, if all else fails, they can just absorb the cost and refund the customer. The customer is usually not any worse than when they started if they do this. The money spent on a purchase is fungible. There is no obvious monetary refund to give to someone who can't update their app, got their YouTube channel taken down or got their Instagram handle stolen.

VRay 5y ago

ugh, that's annoying.. At least you made it onto HackerNews, so your problem might get silently resolved in the shadows It really sucks that Google can't be bothered to provide 5 minutes of human support despite taking such an enormous cut of all revenue from these apps

duhast 5y ago
1. It wouldn’t be 5 minutes. This could easily take hours to resolve. 2. Even with human support, companies like this would continue to be incentivised not to share what exactly triggered the ban in order to protect their systems from spam and abuse. You can’t provide services to billions of people without automation. 3. Human reviews would be performed by humans. Have you ever met humans? You’re replacing an imperfect system with another imperfect system except now things are slower and cost more.
- inetknght 5y ago
  > in order to protect their systems from spam and abuse Spam and abuse would fall afoul of the CFAA in the US and similar laws in the EU. Outside of the US? Well maybe those apps shouldn't even be available in the US or EU. Spam and abuse only happens because the criminals perpetuating it do it without real consequence.
- pixl97 5y ago
  On number 2, why? If your program is abusive, have the abuser remove the function until it's no longer abusive. The entire we cant tell you does seem like crap.
- lbriner 5y ago
  > not to share what exactly triggered the ban in order to protect their systems from spam and abuse That's kind of true but I think that a company the size of Google could afford to assign someone to look into providing more information in a scenario like, "you are using geo-location without asking permission". Since the need for permission is not a secret, telling the vendor this causes less friction and makes people hate you a bit less. Sure, you might also have a "secret" system that does something like "if failed 5 times in a row, blacklist them" but that is just security by obscurity and doesn't seem to stop that many people. Also, in the case where the vendor is an easily verifiable company selling, presumably, something that is fairly easy to view/check, it doesn't seem to be asking for much to either get a human or to get some automated messages. Apparently they employ 140K people! That is a lot of people to not provide any human support.

sourcecodeplz 5y ago

I’ve read the post, its just how it is with their policies being evaluated by automations and not humans. Nothing you can do but work around them sadly.

onion2k 5y ago
I’ve read the post, its just how it is with their policies being evaluated by automations and not humans. No, it's definitely a problem with the humans. It's just that the humans in question aren't customer support humans. It's Google's engineering humans that are to blame for shipping these poor quality experiences. They might be able to invert binary trees on whiteboards pretty well, but they suck at making an HTML page that explains why their system isn't working for you.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  The engineers at Google Play really have got to feel embarrassed at how bad this situation has been over the years. How could they have a conversation with an Android developer that's had to deal with the lack of support?
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  I see this and think of all the millions of apps that the code controls. I don't know how many do fail validation, but it's clearly not a vast number, definitely under 1%. Given that they're also clearly training a model for this, based on a large number of inputs and rules, then this is pretty good. Their end goal is clearly to be able to remove humans from this process completely. Which is good - it's shitty work. From my point of view as an app customer, this is fine. I don't see apps that fail validation, and there are too many (shitty) apps anyway - more validation is good. From my point of view as an entrepreneur, I approve. Clearly they can live with a certain level of false negatives, and that makes sense from a business point of view as they save so much in the validation process. From my point of view as a developer, however, it's a dumpster fire and I'm not going anywhere near it.
  - onion2k 5y ago

nottorp 5y ago

And I thought I was joking when I kept saying that Google uses Machine Learning!(tm) for everything... Edit: on further thinking, the last problem about needing login info for an app that doesn't have accounts is probably due to some poor soul on minimum wage trying to make their review quota for the day.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dncornholio 5y ago
Parsing text is not machine learning. It's the lack of machine learning thats causing the issues IMO. Because this system just flags everything with the word free in it.

cocoflunchy 5y ago

I have the same experience with the Google Play Store. For all the complaints people have about the Apple App Store, at least their reviewers are human and you can discuss things with them. And they block updates but don't remove the app without warning! My experience with the Google Play store: I get an email on a friday night after working hours stating that the app of my company was removed after a routine check and that I have to follow an appeal process to get it back. (The reason being that we had 2 apps in the store, one for production use and one for training). Only after pinging people I knew working at Google was I able to get my support case prioritized and the app unblocked. A second time we had our app deleted from the store because we used background geolocation and failed to comply in time with the new reporting requirements. Once again, no warning and no grace period except a generic "Google Play policy update" email 6 months earlier... I guess we're just lucky to have a B2B app that we can install via APK to our customers' phones if needed.

buscoquadnary 5y ago
The number of times I've heard of people only getting support from Google because they know someone on the inside is quite astonishing. If I were an Google employee looking to make a few extra bucks I'd definitely start offering to help "nudge" account issues for a few extra bucks under the table.
- erhk 5y ago
  Dont worry, google is working hard to make sure that even employees are unable to do anything of that sort. Gather the world's information and make it uniformally unsupported.
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
    This is good. It will tie the fates of small time customers/users to the elites, so the situation gets fixed or the business collapses.
    - wongarsu 5y ago

perryizgr8 5y ago

> The reason Catima isn’t on alternative app stores isn’t because there is something wrong with them, it’s because there is something wrong with Google Play. I don't understand. Why are erroneous policy violations in google play preventing them from launching it on Huawei or Samsung?

phdelightful 5y ago
I agree, it's not clear. Maybe it's because the developer has sunk so much time into dealing with Google Play that she hasn't been able to release it on other platforms, or she's discouraged from trying to do so and getting hit with another round of insanity.

leros 5y ago

I went through a similar hell getting compliance to use a certain Google API after getting algorithmically flagged. Months of back and forth, with conflicting approvals and rejections. The same automated emails over and over sprinkled with emails from humans who kind of understood. I will never again use any Google service for business purposes if I can avoid it.

jeroenhd 5y ago

Getting boned because of the inability of the English language to distinguish between free and free, that's a new ring of machine learning hell.

probably_wrong 5y ago
But... Spanish does have a difference between "libre" and "gratis", and the translated title is using the correct one. I guess they are also trying to catch synonyms and doing a terrible job at it.
sp332 5y ago
It's not a machine learning issue. A human would make the same translation. The issue is that the match should be run in the original language, not translated to English at all.

tyingq 5y ago

Meanwhile, lots of other apps with 'Free' in the title, description, etc. https://play.google.com/store/search?q=free&c=apps https://play.google.com/store/search?q=free&c=apps Including some Google owned ones like YouTubeTV.

billynomates 5y ago
Yeah they only review when you make a new release, so maybe these apps just haven't been updated in a while
- nguyenkien 5y ago
  Nah. Probably exclude app already in store.
  - toyg 5y ago
    Nah. Probably exclude any app under X downloads, and even then just pick a random sample every once in a while, and even then maybe the reviewer had better stuff to do that Monday and just waved everything through.
- tyingq 5y ago
  "Text Free - Call and Text Now" Updated January 10, 2022 "Free Now" - Update January 11, 2022 Many other examples have recent updates too.
  - sdoering 5y ago
    I was always wondering how Free Now can stay in the Play Store with their name. Maybe it is a trademark thing (as this is a trademark). But yeah - the rules seem quite arbitrarily enforced. As said in other discussions about Google - I decided to untangle my life from Google further. Quite hard actually as I am a paying GSuite customer and a lot of stuff actually is tied to this account. :-(
    - 5y ago

jeffbee 5y ago

The play store review program is there to serve the installing users, not the app authors, so even a high rate of obvious false positives is probably considered acceptable.

simion314 5y ago
>The play store review program is there to serve the installing users, not the app authors, so even a high rate of obvious false positives is probably considered acceptable. This article should provove that Google incompetence exists and it works in both ways, it blocks good apps and there is no reason why bad apps would get away. I mean code like if(shity title translation constains an word from illegalWordsInEnglishList) proves there is no super clever AI here but at best a quick workaround , so if quick workaround or shity code is allowed why would you be convinced that the "security" scans are better? (we found that 100% Apple security scans are as bad so I won't be surprised if a Google dev also created a list of illegalAPUIs and does a naive search that clever developers can get around with a bit of clever reflection/dynaimc class or obfuscation) TL:DR I am not convinced that badly implemented policies and shiutty implemented security scans do not affect the users.
Hizonner 5y ago
So, how am I "served" by being denied actually useful apps, while I am still offered a vast array of malware and crap?
pastrybanking 5y ago
The implementation of the Play Stores policies for consumers is also fundamentally broken. In my country's version of the Play Store, the number two ranking app is currently rated at 2.6 with multiple complaints of users losing money to an alleged scam.

neoneye2 5y ago

I have a similar story about the App Store. I wanted to move my app to another owner, but Apple has detected it's a plagiarism of my original app. Now I have neither the original app on the App Store, and the new owners app is stuck. It seems to be automated rejection without a human taking an actual look at the problem. My app is open source https://github.com/triangledraw/TriangleDraw-iOS https://github.com/triangledraw/TriangleDraw-iOS

nopakos 5y ago

I once got a warning for sexual content. The offensive phrase was "Virgin Mary".

raverbashing 5y ago
So the right hand built machine translation and the left hand falls for naive Scunthorp problems like it's an intern writing a PHP app? (Or worse, a human with zero critical thinking) Why am I not surprised...

ComradePhil 5y ago

I'm genuinely interested in hearing from people who believe that Apple and Google should have a monopoly on deciding what apps people can run on their phones. In case of Google's Android, one can still install third party App Stores, even they take away auto-updates and such. Apple is a much worse offender. In either case, why does anyone think that they should have a monopoly there and why is nothing being done to fight it? Many years ago the EU forced Microsoft to release Windows versions without a default media player or a default browser. Yet, nothing has been done to Apple and Google. Why?

duhast 5y ago
How would you realistically solve this problem? Part of what makes these platforms so attractive to the end user is in fact app curation. Strict control over APIs and power usage, all sorts of minimum standards and mandatory integrations are contributing enormous value to these ecosystems.
- foxfluff 5y ago
  I would allow fair competition and let the user choose. You don't need a monopoly to have curated storefronts. For example, GOG is curated and if I don't like their curation, I can look at Steam or a plethora of other stores. F-Droid has its own kind of curation, which I prefer to Google's curation; it gives me a decent guarantee that I'm looking at free software, and antifeatures are usually hilighted. However, I don't have to use F-Droid if I don't want to. So maybe another entity can provide better curation that Google does. And maybe another entity can offer an uncurated store; if users prefer that, it's their choice.
  - duhast 5y ago
    Users are consistently choosing locked down Apple ecosystem over more open Android. How are you going to explain this? You also need to realise that you’re not an average user. You’re in 0.0001% of the population when it comes to use of technology and your preferences might not reflect the average Joe. Most phones would quickly fill up with apps doing malware, phishing, spam, crypto mining and DDoS attacks.

_fat_santa 5y ago

Clearly this was a fuck-up with machine learning, and while it is worrying, what's more worrying is the consequences when this goes beyond just developer app reviews. I'm worried we will have another British Post Office Scandal[1] but on a much worse scale. Bad technology coupled with everyone in charge thinking the technology is infallible. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

javajosh 5y ago

This kind of incompetence makes me seriously doubt that Google is doing anything to more substantially review apps for deeper security issues, either statically or at runtime. The asymmetry of effort in this situation is profound: consider that you spend all your time and effort writing a, long, complex, thoughtful message by hand (the app), taking hundreds or thousands of hours, but then they respond with machine generated message that cost them 10ms of computer time. The solution, I think, is obvious: Google needs a "zone defense" with the play store, a much larger (and expensive) staff, to do in-depth app reviews and be a stable, stateful relationship with the developer over time. This person would, in fact, become a 3rd party "expert" on a small set of apks and their contents, with a "feel" for what is changing over time, with the core mission of protecting users from malice, but working with devs, as a human being.

freedomben 5y ago
That sounds awesome to me, but if they were going to do that the cost of submitting an Android app (or the % take by Google on sale) would have to sky rocket to make it worth it. As someone who rejoices in small developers, I would hate to see that. I think it's ok to do automated review for round 1, but I would like to see a human field appeals. Over time I would also think that will help find edge cases and cracks in the automation so that it can be further improved. Edit: Based on other comments here, it sounds like that may be what Google is starting to do
UncleMeat 5y ago
> This kind of incompetence makes me seriously doubt that Google is doing anything to more substantially review apps for deeper security issues, either statically or at runtime. I actually know the team that does security vuln automation for Google Play. They've found millions of vulns in apps over the years. One of the challenges they face is precisely this sort of headline: how do you use static analysis to find vulns and ensure that you don't inundate users with false positives, forcing them down the admittedly limited support channels. > The solution, I think, is obvious: Google needs a "zone defense" with the play store, a much larger (and expensive) staff, to do in-depth app reviews and be a stable, stateful relationship with the developer over time. This person would, in fact, become a 3rd party "expert" on a small set of apks and their contents, with a "feel" for what is changing over time, with the core mission of protecting users from malice, but working with devs, as a human being. This sort of exists. Google pays external hackers who find vulns in popular apps via a rewards program. These don't need to be Google's apps. There may be other systems for top partners or specific kinds of apps (the org is big) but I'm not aware of anything personally. Expanding beyond a small subset of apps is challenging. Not only are there millions of apps, each app contains tens, hundreds, or even thousands of individual apks. The staff needed to have a concierge for each app would be absolutely freaking enormous, perhaps even larger than the number of people on the planet who actually have deep security expertise on the Android platform.

buu700 5y ago

Obligatory reminder that a backdoor was added to the Play Store last summer: https://www.xda-developers.com/google-play-apk-replacement-pros-cons https://www.xda-developers.com/google-play-apk-replacement-p... I wouldn't be surprised in the least to find out that "Android App Bundles" were the ultimate result of a secret FISA ruling.

foxfluff 5y ago

Some Google engineer probably thought they were very clever when they applied "the algorithm" to translated titles. Pretty fucking draconian some of those rules, if you ask me. In games and works of art it's not uncommon to have a title longer than 30 characters. Nevermind when you have different editions or things that are related to the main title. So how does this actually work? Why is 'Life is Strange: Before the Storm' (33 characters) on Google Play? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.squareenix.lis.bts&hl=en&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.squareenix...

f137 5y ago
Until recently the limit was 35, and 50 earlier still. Google enforces new limits on app updates, so this game was not updated recently.
bitwize 5y ago
The rules can be and are waived for big-time publishers.

jsnell 5y ago

So, the relevant bit from the Play Store policy documents is probably: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/9898842 https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ... That policy seems very reasonable. Is the policy being misapplied here? Hard to say, since it's describing the spirit of the rules rather than an exhaustive list of specific violations. It doesn't seem that anything in the title would be misleading. But the original title is kind of irrelevant; whether the app is libre or not has no bearing on its functionality.

xeromal 5y ago
Yeah, once I caught gist of what was bothering them, I would've just nuked Libre from the title and all translations. Just call it the Card Wallet and be done with it.
- sdoering 5y ago
  This would be practical - but what about companies like "Free Now" that are (at least currently) seemingly allowed to keep operating under that name in the Play store. Why delete something from the name that is actually transporting information for the user just because Google arbitrarily decides that for this rue the mistranslation comprises a rule break while other apps (with probably bigger marketing spend on Google) are allowed to keep "Free" in the name. Imho is not the rules per se. It is the mistranslation and also the arbitrary enforcement that reminds me personally of stories by Kafka (the author, not the tech).
  - xeromal 5y ago
    If your livelihood is tied to an app in the store being published, you gotta play ball. If you can survive with or without the app being published, then I'd definitely take a crack at trying to explain to Google what their problem is.

AtNightWeCode 5y ago

My experience of Google Play is that it is 100% corrupted. I worked with companies that tried to get their apps back onto Google Play for YEARS without success. How do you solve something like “this app is not compliant with program X” when the app was never registered for that program for just that reason? …and the "support".

ugjka 5y ago
Google is specifically anti-support from their beginnings because they have this belief that everything can be solved algorithmically.
- AtNightWeCode 5y ago
  When you work for companies that make Google a lot of money. Google does all the work for you, so you do not even need to care about support in the first place.

UIUC_06 5y ago

I think you were lucky they told you anything. On Quora they just say "your answer was deleted for violating Quora policies. Click here to read our policies." This sort of "tell them nothing" approach seems pervasive in the online world. Blame the lawyers. Their lawyers must caution them "Don't give any details. That just opens us up to more questions & legal actions." The fact that it's completely self-serving and proves they don't give a shit about you is kinda irrelevant. Who are you, after all? There are millions just like you.

freedomben 5y ago
I despise the tell them nothing approach and I think it's despicable, but that said I think there is a more legitimate reason than the lawyers. If the person is a spammer or otherwise not legit and you tell them what they did wrong, it's a lot easier to hack around the problem and beat the automated moderation and get your malware into the store. I don't think that justifies the harm it does to regular people, but it is a lot less sinister than just CYA. I actually blame tech media who capitalize on every "malware in the Play Store!!!" story a lot more, and the Apple apologists who use any news of malware on Android (even if it only applies to people downloading pirated apps and sideloading them with root) to trumpet how insecure Android is. Personally I think that bad press is the primary driver behind the modern policies.
- UIUC_06 5y ago
  Could be, actually. The press sucks: a bunch of untrained people too lazy to get off their laptops and talk to people. I don't think Quora falls into that "spammer" category, though. No one is seeking to make any serious money from it, AFAICT.
  - antifa 5y ago
    If your product/brand is an answer on every relevant question, that's probably worth a lot.
    - 5y ago

donarb 5y ago

It just amazes me that developers try to cram editorializing into the title of the app, when you're already given a search word field and a description field in which to tell the world about your app. IRL nobody searches for "Cheerios - Toasted Whole Grain Oat Cereal for the Whole Family".

Brian_K_White 5y ago
Why even have names then? Might as well just be a serial number that isn't displayed, and a bag of keyword fields that also aren't displayed but can be searched. A name has to convey some sort of meaning, otherwise everything will be a billion versions of Verizon. A toothbrush would be indistiguishable from a tax prep software by their names. And of course people search for every one of those words in that long cheerios name. You can't search for a thing by it's short unique meaningless name until after you find it by searching for what you want, like toasted oat cereal or wallet of freedom.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
phreack 5y ago
It's sad but if you search for 'cereal', you're going to see the one with the awful title higher up in rankings.
- stickfigure 5y ago
  I feel this just shows lack of imagination in the search algorithm. It seems pretty trivial to discourage this kind of thing - to start with, how about penalizing longer titles or longer lists of keywords? Let the publisher decide whether to rank low for lots of words, or high for a few.
hbn 5y ago
This is something Google does themselves. Their listing for Chrome is "Google Chrome: Fast & Secure", Keep is "Google Keep - Notes and Lists"

posmonerd 5y ago

I’ve also had horrible experiences with the Google Play people. Will never consider publishing on that platform again, huge waste of resources and personal time. Fortunately PWAs are a thing.

charcircuit 5y ago

>Title (en_US): "Catima - The Free Card Wallet" >This proved my theory: Google was using Google Translate to translate the app titles instead of reviewing them with native speakers. Why would they use Google translate on an en_US string?

bilalq 5y ago

I've run into issues with both Google and Apple that were just ridiculous. One time, Google randomly ceased payment processing for our app. When I reached out to them, the support staff were not at all helpful and said an "account specialist" would be needed and that they would forward the case along. Afterwards, I got an email saying that they would respond in 24-48 hours. After days of waiting, they finally message me asking for passport photos. I send them over, get another "24-48 hour message", and then two days later they reply back saying they want the exact same documents again. Insane! I send it again and mention that I already sent these. They wait two days and reply back that they actually want my co-founder's passport now. I reply back with that. Then they send another "please wait 24-48 hours" message. At this point, I tried reaching out to friends at Google to see if they could escalate internally for me. A case got created, but two days later I get an email saying that this is something that the Google Pay team manages, not the Play Store team. Apparently, Google's org chart was my problem. After all this, a response comes back saying "Your account is currently suspended you submitted documents which cannot be used to verify your account details. Our team has responded to you with specifics about what needs to be submitted in order for them to complete our review." Except they hadn't. I responded back about how both my cofounder and I submitted every document they asked for multiple times and answered all their questions to no avail. I pleaded with them to please let me speak to a human about this. After yet another agonizing 96 hours, our case was resolved and payment processing was re-enabled. We were bleeding money at the time and had been paying thousands of dollars a month to their ridiculous 30% highway robbery tax on subscriptions. While not quite as bad, Apple blocked an app update because the current reviewer didn't like our subscription group separation. The only problem is that the app release in question had no such changes and the subscription group setup had already been approved in a previous release. The setup made sense and used common practices for A/B testing different prices, but the Apple agent we got on the phone with wouldn't have it. They insisted we release an update that would break existing subscribers to comply with their policies. Two bugfix updates were rejected for nonsensical reasons. We went through an escalation channel to get them out. When we submitted updates again, the reviewers magically had no more issues with things they'd already approved in the past. Forcing a 30% cut isn't even the worst offense of these app stores. There's literally no easy recourse when things go wrong.

kingofspain 5y ago

Oof. I’ve had the user account one before from Play for an app that had no user accounts. Apple isn’t much better though - currently trying to argue that asking for user location (when a user clicks ‘use my location’) for a real estate app is reasonable. They are insistent it’s not a valid feature and won’t accept it til it’s removed.

kmeisthax 5y ago

I'm somehow both appalled, surprised, and unsurprised at the same time. Tech companies have a weird habit of jumping into language markets they don't actually have the staffing to properly serve. However, I never expected to see Google just outright machine-translating titles to do compliance checks on. > After 4 full days of trying to teach Google staff how a dictionary worked Google's moderation policy is to treat any sort of complicated business situation as some kind of DDOS attack, as if you e-mailed your appeal buried deep within a ZIP bomb. They have strict computation quotas on wetware.

TrianguloY 5y ago

About the log-in requirement, happened to me too on an app with a textbox used for searching (no login required anywhere). I just filled the login form with a sample search and wrote a little explanation. They accepted it on the spot (although I doubt they will ever read it)

npteljes 5y ago

What OP unfortunately missed is a post like this: "Tell HN: You can't add “no ads” in your Play Store app's title" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29497680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29497680

sschueller 5y ago
Sadly the feature to filter out apps that have ads or in app purchases does not exist. Probably on purpose. There are many utility apps with thousand of similar apps, most are garbage filled with ads but then there are a few made without app upselling or ads but until you find those you send a lot of time.
- npteljes 5y ago
  Yeah, I gave up on the Play Store very quickly, and so now it's just F-Droid and the occasional play store install with Aurora. I just feel like that if I need to spend energy either way, then I'm better off spending it in the FOSS ecosystem.

seba_dos1 5y ago

Once I had my app rejected from Google Play, because they decided it was plagiarizing another application... which was actually the very same application posted by me somewhere else. Took some effort to convince them that I'm me, even despite of my Google account being registered on a domain that's prominently displayed as the first thing after launching the app. Another time, they suddenly decided that "No information is gathered from users whatsoever." is not a valid privacy policy for a Free Software application that does not gather any information (it was a simple game that couldn't even store highscores locally).

WheatM 5y ago

mandeepj 5y ago

I went through similar hell recently. Google should just sell Google Play at this point. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29640436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29640436

invalidname 5y ago

We had a similar experience to the one here: https://dev.to/codenameone/google-play-kafkaesque-experience-mp3 https://dev.to/codenameone/google-play-kafkaesque-experience... Google is worse than Apple in many regards.

ChrisClark 5y ago

Regarding the update at the bottom of the article, I also just got the email about needing to provide login info so they can review my app. An offline game that has no login functionality...

mondo2000 5y ago

Maybe I missed something, but I don't see how Google's conduct relates to the other app stores, as mentioned near the beginning of the article. Did she leave that part out?

metalised 5y ago

It's the same with all of FAANG. It's now been almost two months since my facebook page of 56k users was hacked, and nobody at facebook seems to give a shit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29876423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29876423 I just gave up and made a new page now. Hopefully the hacker won't manage to claim that one too.

kingcharles 5y ago
There is a paid service to help you get these back.. O_O https://hacked.com/ https://hacked.com/ (I guess it is that common?)
- metalised 5y ago
  $899 Holy c...!

digitalpacman 5y ago

My app has been removed from youtube oauth multiple times because we keep getting different verifiers. We've even had permission revoked after being approved. All we do is use a oauth to get their userid and read their livechat for a chatbot. They just can't get their shit together.

heavyset_go 5y ago

Maybe we shouldn't be relying on Google and Apple to decide what we can run on our phones and tablets. Maybe we shouldn't let Apple and Microsoft decide what we can run on our computers, either.

MrDresden 5y ago
I agree with the sentiment, however you are not forced to run Google's Android on your phone if you don't want to. It is just the most convenient OS to run (as it comes preloaded). For the PC's (yes, an Apple laptop/desktop is a personal computer) you can always install Linux. Try it, it's great!
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  Software freedom is not just about being able to run Linux. Being able to run Linux doesn't help the billions of people who will never use anything other than the stock OS that ships on their phones, tablets or computers. I bought a model of a phone that doesn't have LineageOS support because apparently it's a weird carrier model. The base model has AOSP support, though. Didn't realize that until a few months into ownership, and by then it was too late to return. I'm stuck with Google's Android. I've been running Linux for like 19 years now.
  - MrDresden 5y ago
    Ofcourse it doesn't serve the vast majority of users any good. If it would then Linux wouldn't be in minority use on desktops/laptops. However there is a clear difference between there being the possibility to run alternative OS's on a device vs there being a convenient method to switch to something else. Most Android devices do not force the user to use the stock OS. PC's do not care what OS they run. This runs contrary to your initial comment on users being dictated on what can and can not be run on the hardware. Since, for the mobile industry at least, the business model doesn't revolve around simply selling hardware (Apple as well as Google makes most of their mobile earnings through the stores and ads after all) I can fully understand that that flashing with other OS's isn't supplied as an easy one click selection by the manufacturer. Why should it? The fact that your new phone is only supported by some of the alternative software but not the one you want to use is no judgement on the manufacturer. Not every piece of hardware should be supported by every piece of software. Let it also be known I have run Linux for 18 years, along with various AOSP devices and other funky Linux mobiles over the last 10.

MrDresden 5y ago

I've been making Android applications professionally for a decade now, and I'm of the opinion that who ever manages the Play store, it's policies and developer relations should be fired on the spot along with at least the next two levels of management below. It is frankly a burning dumpster fire. I still don't see why the app is not on any of the other app stores that the author mentions though (only rages about Play and thus the app is only there?)

raxxorrax 5y ago
To be fair, he would be fired if people didn't develop against this environment. People have warned repeatedly that developers make themselves dependent. Money is good of course...