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Google now requires and lists phone number in Play Store listings
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- elitistphoenix 3y agoAnd you've got to give all your info to some consultancy! " the information that Dun & Bradstreet has about your business is up to date before creating a developer account"
- pierat 3y agoDun Dun Dun! Playtality! (In the voice of Mortal Kombat)
- nicolas_17 3y agoApple's App Store has always required D-U-N-S numbers for organizations.
- westurner 3y agoWhat percentage of existing app developers on the Play Store do not have a DUNS number? Do they need to incorporate an LLC in order to get a DUNS number for their open source project? Google decided to take the first 15% of app developers' first $1M in revenue instead of 30% in 2021. Google decided to take a 30% cut from all Play Store app and in-app revenue, and you may only use Google Payments in your app (just like Apple). $150,000 out of $1,000,000 is a lot of money to host downloads, comments, and scan APKs. Shopping malls don't even demand a 15%-30% cut of revenue. F-droid charges $0 to host APK app downloads and comments but doesn't scan APKs IIUC? https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Security_Model/ https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Security_Model/ How to donate to F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/donate/ https://f-droid.org/en/donate/
- westurner 3y agoAnd now we need a key to consume our content with Chromecast; which is now the opposite of an open standard.
- nicolas_17 3y agoThey're now requiring DUNS numbers for organization accounts, not for individuals. Read the article.
- efitz 3y agoThe screen mock-ups for developer information for users show the phone number. It’s not clear from the blog post if the phone number display is a requirement.
- nicolas_17 3y agohttps://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/13628312 https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ... Individuals: "Google will display your legal name, your country (as per your legal address), and developer email address on Google Play. If you decide to monetize on Google Play then Google will display your full address." Organizations: "To help improve transparency and user safety on Google Play, Google will display your legal name, legal address, developer email address, and developer phone number on Google Play."
- pokeb 3y agoGoogle has the worst customer service ever and no phone number anywhere. Wtf is this “do better” bs?
- rhdunn 3y agoReading the blog post and linked question/answer, the phone number requirement only applies to organization accounts, not to personal accounts. What is unclear is whether a non-US organization is able to create and use a D-U-N-S number -- especially if they don't have an office in the US.
- Mindless2112 3y agoWhat phone number will Google be listing for their own apps, I wonder.
- emestifs 3y agoA number to a text-to-speech system with Bard on the other end of course
- ineedasername 3y agoBard might be a step up from their historic methods that appear little better than an auto responder hooked up to a traditional classifier that occasionally throws a low confidence match over to a human. One who will spend at most 60 seconds reviewing before they choose the canned response. Bard, given a little leeway, might at least sound human.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- emestifs 3y agoNow only if it were that easy to get a phone number to speak to a human at Google
- kyrra 3y agoDepends on the product. If it's something you pay for, you can get a phone number. For example, GPay and Play store for billing issues has an accessible phone numbers. Any place where scaling customer support to the revenue vs number of users tends to lead to a lack of phone numbers. (Googler, opinions are my own)
- adambatkin 3y agoAbsolutely. As a paying Google Workspace customer (or whatever it's called this week) I have called support on a number of occasions. Zero times have they been able to help in any way (despite technical issues that they admitted were Google's responsibility), but I had a phone number.
- nucleardog 3y agoExact same experience contacting AdWords support when we were spending over a million a year. You can get a hold of someone but they can’t really help you. When issues crossed over into any other area (engineering, other Google products, etc) the answer was basically “I can put an internal ticket in… but you probably want to find a workaround.” We were only ever contacting them for bugs/issues with Google products or internal processes they had screwed us, not for “help me use the product” type support. Maybe they would have been more successful with that.
- totalZero 3y agoMy experience: Even if you pay Google, they don't offer adequate phone support and they don't take customer support seriously. Google Ads sent me an email saying my ad was rejected, then billed me anyway. No idea if the ad ever ran, but they attempted to charge me and suspended my account when the charge didn't go through. It was difficult to get in touch with a support person because they do not offer phone support for accounts that are suspended, and I ended up paying for the ad without ever talking to someone over the phone to figure out why the ad was run after it was rejected. I filed a web form request after payment asking that they reinstate the Google Ads account, but they rejected the request. I was billed twice for a certain month of Google One, and I had to file a web ticket and send emails with screenshots in order to get one of the charges reversed. There was no option to talk to a person.
- dazbradbury 3y agoWonder what will happen when millions of people phone Google the next time Gmail or YouTube goes down? This assumes Google have to comply with their own policy of course!
- MBCook 3y agoThe page isn’t clear on if the info has to be shown or can be shown. I get doing more to verify developers (ignoring what I think of DUNS). But acting as an individual developer if I were to think of creating an app for Android and saw that I had to publicly post my phone number that would be an absolute dead stop to development.
- kccqzy 3y agoJust create a virtual phone number (say Google Voice) and put that up.
- a1o 3y agoGoogle Voice is dead, isn't it?
- fencepost 3y agoNot dead, but certainly looks pretty abandoned.
- MBCook 3y agoSo just to list list an app I need to sign up for an additional phone number. Why? So people can call me? For what? Tech support? To ask if I exist? I’m not answering that phone number. Im not signing up for it. People in Hacker News complain left and right about all of Apple‘s policies and the hoops they make you jump through and how you have to pay $100 a year. I have an app on the App Store. I don’t have to post my phone number and I don’t have to pay for a second one to ignore.
- kccqzy 3y agoI don't understand. You are paying $100 a year for the App Store. And yet you are unwilling to pay for the existence for a phone number that costs less than $100? People on Hacker News rightly complain about Apple's store. But you are applying this double standard here. If you want to complain, complain better.
- nicolas_17 3y ago[flagged]
- voakbasda 3y agoAlternate headline: Google decides to dox app developers.
- nicolas_17 3y agoWhere in the article (or the documentation[1]) does it say it will dox individual app developers? [1] https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/13628312 https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- voakbasda 3y agoFrom the link you posted: Google will display your legal name, your country (as per your legal address), and developer email address on Google Play. If you decide to monetize on Google Play then Google will display your full address.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lucb1e 3y agoThere's more Play news, unfortunately... Two days ago, I updated Stellarium Mobile. On launch, it now requires that you are logged into the Play Store. No more anonymous Android usage. I emailed the developer with what I saw in adb logcat, they came back yesterday with this: > I see your point. The new google verification code requires a google play account it seems. It works with some third party stores, but you need a google account.. > This is probably going to be the case for most apps in the future because Google is pushing for this feature to be enabled by default for all Google Play apps at submission time.. so that's the end of being able to grab apks via Aurora (an alternative, open source client for the play store), at least if the app has any sort of billing function which is not uncommon even for open source apps (think donations). Maybe this is Google's response to the requirement to feeling threatened by needing to give up the app repository monopoly?
- Aeolun 3y agoI don’t follow. Can’t you bill things without signing into Google? How would they even enforce that?
- lucb1e 3y agoThe app needs to check whether I bought the Plus edition via Google in-app purchases (IAPs) because that's what the developer uses to accept payments. I did not¹ so there is nothing to be billed, but it does the license check of course. As I understand the developer's response, my being kicked into the Play Store and being told to sign in, with no way of using the app until I've done so, is apparently Google's new requirement for using Google's IAP mechanism at all ¹ I'd love to pay for my use, but rather by something like liberapay or just IBAN transfer, so the developer gets 100% of the money and I don't have to give banking information to Google. With my email to the developer, I also asked for an IBAN in case they can accept payment in that way, as I now had to pirate the apk to use it while signed out of Google, but haven't gotten a response to that yet.
- impissedoff1 3y agoAurora still works, you just can't use the search, you enable the search tab and it directs to google play in browser , then you hit a button to send the direct link back to app
- estebarb 3y agoThose numbers can be easily obtained by people outside USA?
- el-salvador 3y agoIt’s doable from my region, but it has to be done via a partner company that upsells additional services during the onboarding process. If I recall correctly there is a fee for creating the number and an extra free for updating the records. As someone who is not from the U.S, it was surprising to learn that so many businesses rely on a number issued by a private company instead of a government issued Company ID or Tax numbers like the ones in other countries.
- LeoPanthera 3y agoWhat services offer long term phone numbers without be having to create new "lines" on my cellular plan? I currently use an app called "Hushed" but it is extremely expensive, especially compared to how much raw providers like Twilio charge. There seem to be plenty of "disposable" phone number apps but I just want cheap extra numbers, without having to write code.
- jki275 3y agoGoogle Voice...
- LeoPanthera 3y agoIs it not the case that Google Voice only lets you have one additional number? I need a few.
- jki275 3y agoI think you can have one per account. I'm not sure what their policies on that are, I know I've had many accounts over the years.
- pests 3y agoYou need to verify a real phone number with each additional account and those can't be virtual numbers.
- jki275 3y agoYeah, I vaguely remember they said that was a thing. I still have probably about ten google accounts and none of them are tied to a real phone number. It's been years since I set them all up, so I don't remember exactly how I got around that, but it seems like it wasn't terribly difficult. Maybe I used Skype?
- pests 3y ago
- a2128 3y agoNow not only will you be forced to endure unsolicited emails about boosting your app's ranking, but also unsolicited phone calls. I recently got a new phone number and it's already doomed to eternally receive phone calls about "boosting your business's ranking" because it was once listed on Google Maps for a business
- Etrnl_President 3y agoNo more Google. This is why we can't have nice things.
- radley 3y agoIt says the phone number needs to be verified. It doesn't say a phone number is required.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- skybrian 3y agoWhen I signed up for Substack, I saw that there was a setting for "mailing address," which is pre-populated with Substack's mailing address. Why? Because apparently there's a law that at the bottom of commercial email, you need to have a mailing address and unsubscribe link. (So I guess if they got any mail for you, they'd let you know somehow?) Similarly for getting a domain name. Technically, you are required to provide your mailing address, email address, and phone number. However, most registrars will let you keep them private and use theirs instead. Perhaps something similar will happen for Android developers? There could be a relatively lightweight and user-friendly company that handles Play Store listings for indy developers. Do such companies exist already? It would be interesting to hear from developers who use them.
- frumper 3y agoWill Google have a phone number?
- lapcat 3y agoSeveral years ago I discovered that the Chrome Web Store was giving out my home address to customers on the email receipt. There was no physical address set in my Chrome Web Store developer profile, but there was an address set in Google Pay. (This was before the Chrome Web Store eliminated its payment system.) As soon as I found out, I changed my business address to Google's own address in Mountain View. Google didn't seem to have a problem with this, or didn't notice it anyway. The "good news" is that my Chrome Web Store sales were quite low. But I never would have known if a customer hadn't emailed me a copy of their receipt (perhaps to get a refund, I don't recall).
- taf2 3y agoInteresting if you'd be interested in tracking both the play store listing number effectiveness at generating leads CallTrackingMetrics company can help. We focus on connecting humans to other humans.
- hansvm 3y agoWhat's the chance Linux phones will be a reliable option in the next 1-2yrs before this sort of BS does too much damage?
- diggernet 3y agoIt takes a lot of nerve for this famously support-phobic company to require apps to publish phone numbers and addresses for support.
- butz 3y agoSo, what would be easiest way to move existing userbase to a PWA web app?
- butz 3y agoThere could be a big issue, as some websites are already scraping Play Store for developer emails, now they will have phone numbers too. And good luck removing them from some random apk download website.
- pd33 3y agolooks like a direct response to EU agreement https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_367 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_... "Furthermore, Google will facilitate also information on the company (e.g. legal name and address) and direct and effective contact points (e.g. a live telephone agent);"
- friend_and_foe 3y agoI think it's about time that one of the few popular Android forks breaks from upstream.