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App Submissions On Google Play Now Reviewed By Staff, Include Age-Based Ratings

149 points by kshatrea 12y ago

emsy 12y ago
As an Android and iOS user, I think this is a step in the right direction. As a player I'd rather have a curated games store that allows me to discover new games easily.
- s73v3r 12y ago
  Wouldn't the Humble Bundle store fall in that category?
  - emsy 12y ago
    Yeah, I didn't even think of that. But Humble Bundle is only known to a core audience and if Google did something like HB, I think they could leverage Android as a serious gaming platform (Apple too, but I don't think this will ever happen. They just don't "get" games).
__xtrimsky 12y ago
Nice. I just hope they won't be as annoying as Apple.
- joshstrange 12y ago
  Well if you've been submitting apps in the last month or so then you used this system. They say even with adding humans apps are approved in hours not days/weeks as has been known to happen with Apple. Also they use a lot of automation to reduce the number of apps and the amount of work each reviewer has to review.
  - creshal 12y ago
    From my experience (with one app published in that time frame) it's… meh. The review process is fast, granted (<1 business day), but the enforcement of rules is as arbitrary and byzantine as with Apple, with no useful appeal process.
  - profmonocle 12y ago
    > days/weeks as has been known to happen with Apple. That's understating it. Long review times are the norm, not just known to happen. I've never had a submission take under 72 hours. Typical is 4-7 days. (And I've done it dozens of times.) It's incredibly frustrating when you have users (or clients) complaining about a bug you fixed days ago. I don't understand why they're still have such a deep approval queue after almost seven years. I guess they don't consider it a problem. The perks of having a huge market share, I suppose.
ajjai 12y ago
That's nice.. I hope, now, they will respond to developer queries also..
tomjen3 12y ago
If they want to make the appstore a better place, why not spend some time to make search work? I dunno, an eigen-vector algorithm of some sort. Copying Apples mistakes are not the way to go.
- nemothekid 12y ago
  I believe the top search engine in world with 100s of search engineers have thought of an eigen-vector algorithm of some sort".
ChrisClark 12y ago
And they've been doing it for the past few months and no one knew. So I think this is a good thing all around, as long as review times don't increase to Apple levels.
moubarak 12y ago
after getting 100k active users, and over 2million sessions per week, which was 1 year after submitting my app, google play suspended my app without warning, and i lost all. they were right, i didn't accurately follow their terms, but if they reviewed my app once submitted a year ago, that could've been avoided. it was a bitter experience for me, and i decided to port my app to iOS. i heard iOS provides warnings atleast.
- SunShiranui 12y ago
  For what reason was your app removed?
  - moubarak 12y ago
    infringement. my app was called Nexus Photos. before submitting i read that google was denied the trademark on the name nexus. i also sent an email before publishing the app to google play, and they said it's ok to use the word "Nexus" in the title. i provided this info in my appeal. but the appeal was refused. as i said, they were right, but removing the app with no warning was brutal.
    - valuerange 12y ago
      Was it called "Nexus Photos: Gallery KitKat"? If so, Kitkat is a Trademark. You were also using the standard AOSP gallery icon as your icon. It seems unlikely but they could say you were impersonating a system app.
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  > they were right, i didn't accurately follow their terms, but if they reviewed my app once submitted a year ago, that could've been avoided. Couldn't they say that to you about reading the terms a year ago?
  - moubarak 12y ago
    that's what i'm saying. i wish they did. when they suspended my app i was being contacted by another team from google, AdMob, to "help grow my business". so i thought i was fine as long as i can make them money. they got me excited, then suddenly removed my app.
avinassh 12y ago
Now, will there be any increase in developer program fee? Since reviewing requires resources and will cost more money to Google now onwards.
sergiotapia 12y ago
I'm glad Google got the funding necessary to hire more -people- to review submissions. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Galactigon 12y ago
I like the Apps, Games, Utilities method of organization. I didn't see any word on judging 'content'.
philip1209 12y ago
Google tries to automate everything, so it amuses me that they have had to fall back to manual reviewers instead of fully automating the process.
- marinabercea 12y ago
  So many poor quality apps though on their marketplace, I don't think they have any other choice but to revert to a manual review process.
solomatov 12y ago
These are very good news. We have enough malware and spyware in play store.
speeder 12y ago
I noticed they are working with ClassInd but are not clear how. I really hope this won't open the door to censorship on Android, one of the reasons why I make mobile games is exactly to circunvent ClassInd (as the article calls it). Here in Brazil, to release any entertainment product (even live Circus Shows are included on this), you must first ask the Ministry of Justice to give you a rating, the process, specially for things that aren't a Circus Show, is very long, slow and cumbersome (example: you need to do it again every time you make an official update of your software, and the process involves writing lots of paperwork, sending the physical papers to the Ministry, and waiting AT LEAST 30 days). Although officially they claim it is NOT censorship, the process is mandatory for all entertainment, even if free, the law allow them to punish (with 2 years in prison and fines) anyone that are distributing, storing, selling, buying or creating things without ratings, and they can deny rating you (meaning that even if you ask, if they deny the rating, you are de-facto censored). This does have an obvious effect here: People here create fake US accounts to buy stuff on Xbox Live and PSN, because the local versions of XBL and PSN follow the law, and has much less content. Steam don't have official Brazillian offices, although recently they stated to charge in BRL, and have portuguese translations, the charging part is handled by Brazillian companies and credit card processors, in a way that if Brazil government go ater Steam, Steam can just cut-off Brazil (and let the CC processors take the blame and the lawsuit). Apple for a while, got in conflict with the government here, the Ministry of Justice threatened to sue Apple for 2000 BRL for each unrated app, back then 300.000 unrated apps already existed, Apple in response just set entire categories to be hidden from iTunes users with Brazillian IPs or accounts (leading to lots of fake accounts, sometimes using stolen CCs, and iTunes access using proxies). Eventually, some merciful judge ruled that since Apple don't have offices here, they don't have to follow our law, opening access again. Also, like I said, I make mobile apps to avoid that law, what I do is that I have a Brazil company, a Swiss company, and then I make the Swiss company, hire the Brazil company to create software for hire, then the Swiss company that "create" the completed entertainment software, and sells it (including to Brazillian users, that frequently pay with international CC, of course this leads to lots of inefficiency, since I have to pay taxes on exchanging CHF to BRL, after users already paid taxes on exchanging BRL to CHF, beside the exchange fees, the sale tax from Brazil to Switzerland, and the income taxes on both Brazil and Switzerland).
pluma 12y ago
This seems like a surprising deviation from their traditional stance of "throwing more people at a problem is never an acceptable answer" (which is almost literally their justification for off-loading the bulk of their support to an online manual and a "users helping users" forum with "actual humans" being a scarce resource even paying customers are usually allowed to tap into).
killdill 12y ago
I always wonder how big a staff they would need to review so many apps uploaded every day.
moron4hire 12y ago
Wasn't the point of creating walled-garden app stores the notion that it created checks and balances to prevent malware and bad user experiences from getting on people's devices? Wasn't that the entire reason we were supposed to be fine with the notion that we'd be giving up a portion of revenue to be able to get onto users devices in pretty much the only way the vast majority of our users understood how to do? In other words, "you had ONE job, app stores, ONE JOB."
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  It was hardly the only job, especially considering Google's store didn't have the review process until just now. That cut pays for the payments infrastructure, bandwidth to deliver the app files, etc. that you don't have to provide.
pasta_2 12y ago
Ironic given how the rhetoric suggested the "walled garden" was an evil to be avoided. Over time Apple is being proven right.
- stinkytaco 12y ago
  I can still sideload apps onto my android device, no? I don't view a monitored app store as a "walled garden", I consider it a convenience. I view limiting what I can install as a "walled garden" and Apple definitely falls into that category.
lnanek2 12y ago
I've already been getting kind of ridiculous suspensions due to this. A dice puzzle game where all you ever earned was points for making the right patterns was banned for encouraging gambling. So, uh, goodbye one of the few things that made developing for Google better than developing for Apple. Really don't know how they could possibly be bragging about this.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Hey, there's still the Windows Store. While ostensibly reviewed, they really let everything in. I've found fake Windows Updates. Fake Dropbox, Facebook (second result, even shows up in the start menu if you type in Facebook!), and more. Some even show "Microsoft" as the publisher. And in every case, tech support tells you to piss off. When reporting a fake Dropbox app, the CSR told me it seems to work and recommended installing it again. So if MS is willing to help phish users, they'll probably let a dice game slide by. Oh and if you get caught, just resubmit. It took Netflix at least 3 times of back-n-forth with MS before they started permabanning fake Netflix. Other software devs have told me that MS refuses to do anything to help them, even when a 12 yr old could see this hurts users, the brand, and ecosystem.
  - mhomde 12y ago
    Yeah, there's certainly something rotten with Microsoft's App Store. I'd hazard a guess that most of it is outsourced to India and there's some internal bureaucracy putting it outside of purview of the people who could fix it. It's hard to even search for top apps that you know the name for. I think its one of those things when Microsoft gets around to focus on it they'll "fix it" but for now, crappola.
    - MichaelGG 12y ago
      I'm almost definitively sure it is related to some misguided KPIs or having someone's bonus tied to the metric "number of published apps". At one point, MS was offering $100 or $200 per app, up to 10 or 20 apps. No one would believe a single dev is likely to publish 20 quality apps. Instead they really wanted shovelware. There are thousands of apps that are literally just wrappers around a web page or YouTube channel.
blingojames 12y ago
Two companies and possibly very few people decide what apps will reach a billion people. Sure wish we could elect those people.
- pnathan 12y ago
  Why should they even control this? It should be an open system by default....
  - supabill 12y ago
    And why is that?
    - cpb 12y ago
      I believe pnathan is implying they would prefer to buy and own a device to use as they choose.
  - notatoad 12y ago
    They tried that. The android app market / play store has been "open" since the start. Anybody could publish their app with no control by google. And we blew it. The store filled up with shitty apps, scams, and blatant copies of popular apps. And people complained, so now Google is responding to those complaints by policing their app store, because apparently we can't be trusted with open marketplaces.
- pnathan 12y ago
  Why should they even control this? It should be an open system by default....

149 points by kshatrea 12y ago

emsy 12y ago

As an Android and iOS user, I think this is a step in the right direction. As a player I'd rather have a curated games store that allows me to discover new games easily.

s73v3r 12y ago
Wouldn't the Humble Bundle store fall in that category?
- emsy 12y ago
  Yeah, I didn't even think of that. But Humble Bundle is only known to a core audience and if Google did something like HB, I think they could leverage Android as a serious gaming platform (Apple too, but I don't think this will ever happen. They just don't "get" games).

__xtrimsky 12y ago

Nice. I just hope they won't be as annoying as Apple.

joshstrange 12y ago
Well if you've been submitting apps in the last month or so then you used this system. They say even with adding humans apps are approved in hours not days/weeks as has been known to happen with Apple. Also they use a lot of automation to reduce the number of apps and the amount of work each reviewer has to review.
- creshal 12y ago
  From my experience (with one app published in that time frame) it's… meh. The review process is fast, granted (<1 business day), but the enforcement of rules is as arbitrary and byzantine as with Apple, with no useful appeal process.
- profmonocle 12y ago
  > days/weeks as has been known to happen with Apple. That's understating it. Long review times are the norm, not just known to happen. I've never had a submission take under 72 hours. Typical is 4-7 days. (And I've done it dozens of times.) It's incredibly frustrating when you have users (or clients) complaining about a bug you fixed days ago. I don't understand why they're still have such a deep approval queue after almost seven years. I guess they don't consider it a problem. The perks of having a huge market share, I suppose.

ajjai 12y ago

That's nice.. I hope, now, they will respond to developer queries also..

tomjen3 12y ago

If they want to make the appstore a better place, why not spend some time to make search work? I dunno, an eigen-vector algorithm of some sort. Copying Apples mistakes are not the way to go.

nemothekid 12y ago
I believe the top search engine in world with 100s of search engineers have thought of an eigen-vector algorithm of some sort".

ChrisClark 12y ago

And they've been doing it for the past few months and no one knew. So I think this is a good thing all around, as long as review times don't increase to Apple levels.

moubarak 12y ago

after getting 100k active users, and over 2million sessions per week, which was 1 year after submitting my app, google play suspended my app without warning, and i lost all. they were right, i didn't accurately follow their terms, but if they reviewed my app once submitted a year ago, that could've been avoided. it was a bitter experience for me, and i decided to port my app to iOS. i heard iOS provides warnings atleast.

SunShiranui 12y ago
For what reason was your app removed?
- moubarak 12y ago
  infringement. my app was called Nexus Photos. before submitting i read that google was denied the trademark on the name nexus. i also sent an email before publishing the app to google play, and they said it's ok to use the word "Nexus" in the title. i provided this info in my appeal. but the appeal was refused. as i said, they were right, but removing the app with no warning was brutal.
  - valuerange 12y ago
    Was it called "Nexus Photos: Gallery KitKat"? If so, Kitkat is a Trademark. You were also using the standard AOSP gallery icon as your icon. It seems unlikely but they could say you were impersonating a system app.
ceejayoz 12y ago
> they were right, i didn't accurately follow their terms, but if they reviewed my app once submitted a year ago, that could've been avoided. Couldn't they say that to you about reading the terms a year ago?
- moubarak 12y ago
  that's what i'm saying. i wish they did. when they suspended my app i was being contacted by another team from google, AdMob, to "help grow my business". so i thought i was fine as long as i can make them money. they got me excited, then suddenly removed my app.

avinassh 12y ago

Now, will there be any increase in developer program fee? Since reviewing requires resources and will cost more money to Google now onwards.

sergiotapia 12y ago

I'm glad Google got the funding necessary to hire more -people- to review submissions. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Galactigon 12y ago

I like the Apps, Games, Utilities method of organization. I didn't see any word on judging 'content'.

philip1209 12y ago

Google tries to automate everything, so it amuses me that they have had to fall back to manual reviewers instead of fully automating the process.

marinabercea 12y ago
So many poor quality apps though on their marketplace, I don't think they have any other choice but to revert to a manual review process.

solomatov 12y ago

These are very good news. We have enough malware and spyware in play store.

speeder 12y ago

I noticed they are working with ClassInd but are not clear how. I really hope this won't open the door to censorship on Android, one of the reasons why I make mobile games is exactly to circunvent ClassInd (as the article calls it). Here in Brazil, to release any entertainment product (even live Circus Shows are included on this), you must first ask the Ministry of Justice to give you a rating, the process, specially for things that aren't a Circus Show, is very long, slow and cumbersome (example: you need to do it again every time you make an official update of your software, and the process involves writing lots of paperwork, sending the physical papers to the Ministry, and waiting AT LEAST 30 days). Although officially they claim it is NOT censorship, the process is mandatory for all entertainment, even if free, the law allow them to punish (with 2 years in prison and fines) anyone that are distributing, storing, selling, buying or creating things without ratings, and they can deny rating you (meaning that even if you ask, if they deny the rating, you are de-facto censored). This does have an obvious effect here: People here create fake US accounts to buy stuff on Xbox Live and PSN, because the local versions of XBL and PSN follow the law, and has much less content. Steam don't have official Brazillian offices, although recently they stated to charge in BRL, and have portuguese translations, the charging part is handled by Brazillian companies and credit card processors, in a way that if Brazil government go ater Steam, Steam can just cut-off Brazil (and let the CC processors take the blame and the lawsuit). Apple for a while, got in conflict with the government here, the Ministry of Justice threatened to sue Apple for 2000 BRL for each unrated app, back then 300.000 unrated apps already existed, Apple in response just set entire categories to be hidden from iTunes users with Brazillian IPs or accounts (leading to lots of fake accounts, sometimes using stolen CCs, and iTunes access using proxies). Eventually, some merciful judge ruled that since Apple don't have offices here, they don't have to follow our law, opening access again. Also, like I said, I make mobile apps to avoid that law, what I do is that I have a Brazil company, a Swiss company, and then I make the Swiss company, hire the Brazil company to create software for hire, then the Swiss company that "create" the completed entertainment software, and sells it (including to Brazillian users, that frequently pay with international CC, of course this leads to lots of inefficiency, since I have to pay taxes on exchanging CHF to BRL, after users already paid taxes on exchanging BRL to CHF, beside the exchange fees, the sale tax from Brazil to Switzerland, and the income taxes on both Brazil and Switzerland).

pluma 12y ago

This seems like a surprising deviation from their traditional stance of "throwing more people at a problem is never an acceptable answer" (which is almost literally their justification for off-loading the bulk of their support to an online manual and a "users helping users" forum with "actual humans" being a scarce resource even paying customers are usually allowed to tap into).

killdill 12y ago

I always wonder how big a staff they would need to review so many apps uploaded every day.

moron4hire 12y ago

Wasn't the point of creating walled-garden app stores the notion that it created checks and balances to prevent malware and bad user experiences from getting on people's devices? Wasn't that the entire reason we were supposed to be fine with the notion that we'd be giving up a portion of revenue to be able to get onto users devices in pretty much the only way the vast majority of our users understood how to do? In other words, "you had ONE job, app stores, ONE JOB."

ceejayoz 12y ago
It was hardly the only job, especially considering Google's store didn't have the review process until just now. That cut pays for the payments infrastructure, bandwidth to deliver the app files, etc. that you don't have to provide.

pasta_2 12y ago

Ironic given how the rhetoric suggested the "walled garden" was an evil to be avoided. Over time Apple is being proven right.

stinkytaco 12y ago
I can still sideload apps onto my android device, no? I don't view a monitored app store as a "walled garden", I consider it a convenience. I view limiting what I can install as a "walled garden" and Apple definitely falls into that category.

lnanek2 12y ago

I've already been getting kind of ridiculous suspensions due to this. A dice puzzle game where all you ever earned was points for making the right patterns was banned for encouraging gambling. So, uh, goodbye one of the few things that made developing for Google better than developing for Apple. Really don't know how they could possibly be bragging about this.

MichaelGG 12y ago
Hey, there's still the Windows Store. While ostensibly reviewed, they really let everything in. I've found fake Windows Updates. Fake Dropbox, Facebook (second result, even shows up in the start menu if you type in Facebook!), and more. Some even show "Microsoft" as the publisher. And in every case, tech support tells you to piss off. When reporting a fake Dropbox app, the CSR told me it seems to work and recommended installing it again. So if MS is willing to help phish users, they'll probably let a dice game slide by. Oh and if you get caught, just resubmit. It took Netflix at least 3 times of back-n-forth with MS before they started permabanning fake Netflix. Other software devs have told me that MS refuses to do anything to help them, even when a 12 yr old could see this hurts users, the brand, and ecosystem.
- mhomde 12y ago
  Yeah, there's certainly something rotten with Microsoft's App Store. I'd hazard a guess that most of it is outsourced to India and there's some internal bureaucracy putting it outside of purview of the people who could fix it. It's hard to even search for top apps that you know the name for. I think its one of those things when Microsoft gets around to focus on it they'll "fix it" but for now, crappola.
  - MichaelGG 12y ago
    I'm almost definitively sure it is related to some misguided KPIs or having someone's bonus tied to the metric "number of published apps". At one point, MS was offering $100 or $200 per app, up to 10 or 20 apps. No one would believe a single dev is likely to publish 20 quality apps. Instead they really wanted shovelware. There are thousands of apps that are literally just wrappers around a web page or YouTube channel.

blingojames 12y ago

Two companies and possibly very few people decide what apps will reach a billion people. Sure wish we could elect those people.

pnathan 12y ago
Why should they even control this? It should be an open system by default....
- supabill 12y ago
  And why is that?
  - cpb 12y ago
    I believe pnathan is implying they would prefer to buy and own a device to use as they choose.
- notatoad 12y ago
  They tried that. The android app market / play store has been "open" since the start. Anybody could publish their app with no control by google. And we blew it. The store filled up with shitty apps, scams, and blatant copies of popular apps. And people complained, so now Google is responding to those complaints by policing their app store, because apparently we can't be trusted with open marketplaces.
pnathan 12y ago
Why should they even control this? It should be an open system by default....