[HN Gopher] Google destroyed our startup by terminating our Play...
___________________________________________________________________
Google destroyed our startup by terminating our Play Developer
Account
Author : busymom0
Score : 433 points
Date : 2021-10-02 17:21 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| Trias11 wrote:
| This never ends.
|
| People never learn.
|
| Someone bets success of their business solely on grace of someone
| else's private platform and then disaster strikes.
|
| You been booted for whatever reason they felt like.
|
| What were you thinking?
|
| Generocity and grace of FAANG's will never end?
| ccvannorman wrote:
| 1) As you know this is super common and there is no recourse.
| Abandon Google, read something by Kafka, have some whisky.. life
| isn't over.
|
| 2) Take your IP and rearchitect your games for web or other
| platforms. Despite losing your user reviews and published
| applications, you clearly have something of value that was
| trending up. DO NOT let Google smite your startup by simply
| banning you. Android phones are not the only place where your IP
| can continue to thrive.
|
| 3) If you don't want to rearchitect, Consider selling your IP to
| another mobile developer. IP with a track record of positive
| reviews/downloads/cash flow is pure gold. There are websites
| where you can list your business and IP such as EmpireFlippers
| and Flippa.
|
| 4) Lastly.. having a team who is competent, you enjoy working
| together, and has success under your belt is also gold. What else
| can you do with this team to take the world by storm? I envy your
| position; I have not a team nor 1M+ users anywhere. Good luck
| friend.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| Mostly great suggestions but number 3 is hilarious. "We are
| banning your account as it appears to be associated with a
| previously banned account".
| cronix wrote:
| I've talked to too many people who staunchly state that "it's a
| private company" when it comes to not caring about censorship in
| one sentence, but decry actions like this in the next, to really
| think there is an adequately beneficial solution to these types
| of problems.
| tw04 wrote:
| > As far as policy is concerned they have contacted us previously
| and we solved all of the issues to their satisfaction.
|
| He admits they were in violation of policy previously and fixed
| it, but then repeatedly states they've never violated any
| policies. Curious what the original violations were for. While I
| know Google is notorious for things like this, it feels like
| they're not telling the whole story.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| That is like saying.. we got our email blocked because we were
| sending spam, but we decided to stop sending spam and they
| still blocked our email.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| > Also, one of our manager's PCs was compromised so we have
| wiped entire hard drives to be sure that there is no virus in
| the network!
| 2cb wrote:
| Yeah this part and the other comments about multiple malware
| infections makes me think this is an issue they caused with
| poor security practices.
|
| Google support should still be better at this rather than
| banning with AI and never being flexible, but the developer
| is not exactly sounding blameless here.
| mthoms wrote:
| Don't worry, customer data is safe because it's located on
| a computer based in the U.S. /s
| VLM wrote:
| Actually no, they didn't seem to admit any violations.
|
| I've been in this game awhile, dealing with Google is a
| continuous stream of "we have a new policy and you now have 30
| days to provide the URL of your official formal legal privacy
| policy." or whatever new policy they invent.
|
| Usually its not terribly exciting or controversial. For example
| by next month ALL updated apps must target Android 11 aka API
| level 30 (AFAIK unless they've recently altered the date, etc).
| I'm not having a significant problem with that, but
| historically its been a pain occasionally.
|
| AFAIK all in-app subscriptions have to support account hold and
| restore as of next month, as a policy example, I'm not in that
| game, but as I understand, its perfectly OK to not support that
| today; just make sure its all good by Nov 1st.
|
| I see there's a new "data safety section" on the play app
| content page as of next April. I would casually interpret that
| as being similar but different from the privacy policy
| requirement in that the priv pol seems to cover all activities
| of a company whereas the app data safety section will lay out
| exactly what OS calls your app is making. Which begs the
| question of why the play store or the OS don't simply automate
| the whole thing seeing as they have a pretty good idea what the
| binaries are calling...
|
| Anyway the play store list of requirements is in continuous
| flux and has been for years and probably will continue to
| change until it closes someday.
|
| Just because they haven't announced the official deadline date
| probably sometime next year when you'll have to upload only
| Android 12 / API 31 as a minimum doesn't mean that just like
| clockwork "everyone" knows its coming in a year or two.
|
| The legal contract says they only have to give 30 days warning;
| honestly they're almost always far more generous.
|
| On one hand its continuous lifetime work for me until some
| random bot accidentally inevitably wipes me out; on the other
| hand its also not productive work and most of the changes
| Google demands don't really help anyone, not even GOOG. They're
| so random sometimes.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Not looking to defend Google, but the API 30 target has been
| there for almost two years and they've asked for people to
| migrate ASAP.
|
| Mostly because their new file handling APIs are honestly the
| biggest load of dogshit I'v ever seen.
| SteveGerencser wrote:
| The same thing can happen with Google Ads Accounts. I've seen a
| several ad agencies get totally destroyed when a client does
| something that violates the TOS and then you get the 'guilt by
| association' ban. Then this propagated out to all of their other
| client accounts because, well, guilt by association.
|
| Rather than Google taking the time and effort to identify the
| single issue, it's FAR easier for them to just ban anything that
| touched those accounts. It is hands down my single biggest worry
| when working with Google. And why I immediately revoke access for
| anyone (including me) that does not need direct, active, access
| to any account. There is simply no way to talk to a real human
| and say, look, I've been working with you since you launched and
| this one account way over here that's 'new' did something you
| don't like and now I'm banned for life?
| noway421 wrote:
| Would you consider password sharing the same account instead of
| inviting other people via email as a workaround? I'm thinking
| if it's only one account, the blast radius of 'guilt by
| association' is 0.
|
| Or does Google associates even if you're logged in into
| multiple accounts in the same browser?
| 2cb wrote:
| > Or does Google associates even if you're logged in into
| multiple accounts in the same browser?
|
| Of course they do. Fingerprinting browsers is extremely easy.
| smoyer wrote:
| On the other hand,if all ad agencies were totally destroyed
| that would eliminate the incentive to collect our personal data
| and profile our browsing/purchasing information.
| jschveibinz wrote:
| I haven't read all of the comments, but I would like to add this
| note of caution to all startup founders: if your startup
| innovation, technology or business model is largely based on
| someone else's capability and that capability alone, then you
| have designed a single point of failure into your business and a
| high degree of risk to your future business viability. Using
| capabilities like Google or Amazon have to offer is a great way
| to prototype your solution and to get initial customer feedback.
| But you can't depend upon these services always being available.
| For example, just look at the number of products and interfaces
| that Google has changed or canceled in the past 15 years. So if
| you do decide to take this approach, just go into it knowing the
| risk you are taking.
| everyone wrote:
| Just out of curiosity can they not just upload all the games
| again with a new account?
| 2cb wrote:
| They could but Google's AI would likely pick it up instantly
| and they actually would have broken the ban evasion rule at
| that point so they wouldn't have a leg to stand on when
| accusing Google of being unfair.
| Terretta wrote:
| Little bit confused as I thought being open Android App Store
| instead of closed iOS App Store was supposed to mean this is
| totally not a problem?
|
| That's the gist in the anti-Apple anti-walled-garden threads
| common during the Epic tussle; though some less popular comments
| have sounded skeptical, referencing stories like this.
|
| From this thread, sounds like Android gets you 15% of the
| consumer wallet share for app spend compared to iOS 85% wallet
| share of app spend, but _still_ has enough distribution curation
| woes to "destroy our startup"?
|
| What's the attraction then? Or is this melodramatic?
| 2cb wrote:
| 15% of the consumers is, I'm guessing, based on US marketshare?
|
| The company in the OP here is not American, and outside of the
| US, Android has the majority of the smartphone marketshare in
| most of the world.
|
| Despite what Americans often think this is not only true for
| "poor countries" either. In the UK it is pretty much 50/50
| between iOS and Android. Most people have either an iPhone or
| Samsung. Usually the flagship models.
|
| So there's very good reasons to target Android and it is very
| possible OP's company is simply in a country where Android
| smartphones dominate the market, not iPhones.
|
| But yes regarding the Epic thing, you can indeed submit your
| apps to third party app stores including ones that come
| preinstalled on the major brands. Samsung Galaxy Store for
| example.
| codinghermit wrote:
| Just submit it to the Amazon Appstore. According to Google they
| are a major competitor, right? Same same?
|
| Yes, I'm being sarcastic
| 2cb wrote:
| Best non-sarcastic option is to submit to the OEM app stores
| like Samsung Galaxy Store and Huawei App Gallery.
| gbajson wrote:
| Yet another similar story.
|
| Will your next startup also rely on Google?
| ObamaBinSpying wrote:
| This is one reason why I was hoping web apps would be more
| popular then jail-apps... I'm still hoping for an open future but
| I'm not holding my breath... why even block linux native apps on
| android?
| iJohnDoe wrote:
| I have a feeling these things are caused by jealous Google
| engineers. Once they see an app or company being successful they
| will find ways to mess up the business. Either through their
| store account or their Google rankings. We've seen these stories
| too many times.
| throwaway982j wrote:
| Disclaimer: I work for Google, not involved with app
| moderation.
|
| I am pretty sure most engineers don't have access to do such
| things. And certain that doing something like that is an
| effective way to terminate ones career.
|
| I'm also pretty sure no lawyers at Google want anyone to get
| manually involved with search rankings. If anyone did that it
| would open a massive can of worms, one the smart lawyers knows
| should never be opened.
| iJohnDoe wrote:
| Obviously, I cannot say for certain if what you're saying is
| correct or incorrect. However, if you've read HN for any
| length of time, you would have seen that Google clearly
| manipulates search results to control competition or to
| punish certain companies.
|
| Furthermore, no company would be asinine enough to allow
| bots, AI, or ML make decisions without a way to undo those
| changes. This tells me that Google employees are doing these
| things or your contractors are.
| 2cb wrote:
| > Furthermore, no company would be asinine enough to allow
| bots, AI, or ML make decisions without a way to undo those
| changes.
|
| Sadly this is actually the norm across all these big tech
| platforms these days. Algorithm bans an account, humans
| might give it a look later if a big enough fuss is kicked
| up about it, else there is no appeals.
|
| Of course there is a button a human can press to undo these
| things, but the trouble is getting a human to bother
| looking at it in the first place.
|
| Google, Facebook, Twitter, Discord all do the same thing.
| karaterobot wrote:
| It must be said that, to the extent Google destroyed their
| startup, it also created it by launching an app store. This
| developer built their apps on top of Google's ecosystem, in a
| world where these kinds of executions have happened before, many
| times, to many frustrated developers.
|
| It is true that developers cannot make their own operating system
| and marketplace to compete with Google's, but it's also true that
| they do not need to get into the business of selling games on
| Google's Play Store in the first place. Equally true is the fact
| that Google is known to be an unfair, capricious,
| uncommunicative, and disinterested landlord.
| barcoder wrote:
| "Competitors using our ad ids and publisher codes inside their
| policy incompliant apps and violates policy knowingly to trigger
| associate accounts!"
|
| Scary. So it sounds like they were attacked by a competitor and
| Google is not willing to support.
| pricecomstock wrote:
| Your quote is a wild guess by them. The malware explanation
| after that sounds much more likely
| heavyset_go wrote:
| This is a good example of how innovation, competition and small
| businesses are being stifled by the anticompetitive behavior of
| the mobile app distribution cartel.
|
| Consider contacting your state's Attorney General office, and the
| US Attorney General office. Many states' AG offices have
| antitrust divisions[1].
|
| The US Dept. of Justice also has an Antitrust Division[2], along
| with a page that details how and why[3] to get in touch with
| them:
|
| > _Information from the public is vital to the work of the
| Antitrust Division. Your e-mails, letters, and phone calls could
| be our first alert to a possible violation of antitrust laws and
| may provide the initial evidence needed to begin an
| investigation._
|
| The FTC has the Bureau of Competition[4], as well.
|
| [1] https://www.naag.org/issues/antitrust/
|
| [2] https://www.justice.gov/atr
|
| [3] https://www.justice.gov/atr/report-violations
|
| [4] https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/bureaus-offices/bureau-
| competi...
| TechnoTimeStop wrote:
| Awesome links! Google deserves the entire book thrown at them.
| This is so fucking unacceptable, we have built their fucking
| product lines for years with their bullshit every shifting
| APIs.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> This is a good example of how innovation, competition and
| small businesses are being stifled by the anticompetitive
| behavior of the mobile app distribution cartel._
|
| No, it's an example of how small businesses are foolishly
| making their business model dependent on a company that is
| known to be unreliable. What should be happening is that mobile
| app distributors should not be depending on Google at all;
| alternate mobile app stores should be out-competing them by
| providing better service to developers. If there is a "cartel"
| that is making that difficult, it's not the mobile app store
| gatekeepers, it's the mobile phone companies that are tilting
| the playing field sharply in favor of the Android phones they
| distribute, which are tied to Google Play Store, instead of
| allowing free and open competition in phone operating systems.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| maybe if there was any other option. It's not like everyone
| on Android has a million distribution options. It's the most
| popular OS in the world and there is essentially one company
| that makes its own rules controlling what gets onto phones.
| josephcsible wrote:
| The manufacturers' hands are tied. People aren't going to buy
| a phone that they can't run Snapchat and Netflix on.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> The manufacturers ' hands are tied._
|
| By "mobile phone companies" I didn't mean mobile phone
| manufacturers. I meant mobile phone providers like Verizon,
| T-Mobile, etc. They are the ones who have wormed themselves
| into the role of gatekeepers for phone purchases (with
| government help). If phone manufacturers' hands are tied
| with regard to what they can put on their phones or what
| app stores their phones can use, they're tied by the phone
| providers, not by users.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Even if Verizon were to back something like Tizen or
| Windows Phone, how would that fix the lack-of-apps
| problem?
| Retric wrote:
| I don't care about running either on my phone.
|
| I have watched YouTube instructional videos, but I can't
| see the appeal of watching a movie on a tiny phone screen.
| As to messaging apps, SMS and email work just fine but for
| anyone who cares I suspect they would simply jump to
| whatever messaging app did work.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > As to messaging apps, SMS and email work just fine but
| for anyone who cares I suspect they would simply jump to
| whatever messaging app did work.
|
| Absolutely not. Telecommunications applications have
| extremely strong network effects. There is no jumping
| ship to whatever works, people will do whatever is
| necessary to join the network their social circles
| participate in. In my country it's virtually impossible
| to communicate without WhatsApp. People buy phones just
| to run WhatsApp. I've had Signal installed for years and
| I've not received a single message there, not even from
| technologically minded friends who really should know
| better.
| Retric wrote:
| WhatsApp only has 500m daily average users worldwide,
| while being installed on 2 billion phones. Do you expect
| it to maintain it's #2 spot for 10 years? None of them
| have had a run that long.
| josephcsible wrote:
| It doesn't matter what will be dominant in 10 years. What
| matters for phones being bought today is what's dominant
| today.
| Retric wrote:
| But we aren't really talking about today we are asking
| about what happens when a new phone shows up without it.
| You don't need to sell to everyone on day one they just
| need to erode dominance fast enough that it doesn't stop
| adoption.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > we are asking about what happens when a new phone shows
| up without it
|
| Nobody buys it.
|
| Do Linux phones have access to WhatsApp? If not, there is
| no point. It will be a perfectly good mobile computer but
| it will never actually replace the one in my pocket. And
| that's coming from a programmer who loves Linux. Imagine
| the utter disdain normal people would have for a phone
| that doesn't even run WhatsApp.
| 2cb wrote:
| A Linux phone could run WhatsApp if the Linux distro was
| implemented in such a way that it could run Android apps
| (remember Android is basically just a runtime on top of
| the Linux kernel) and since AOSP is FOSS this is very
| doable and legal.
|
| How commercially successful it'd be is still a different
| story, but it could run WhatsApp.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Only if WhatsApp never activates SafetyNet:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28731431
| 2cb wrote:
| WhatsApp has no motivation to use SafetyNet. For one
| thing plenty of their users use cheap Chinese phones that
| aren't actually Google certified (but come with the Play
| Store anyway) and they know this full well from their
| analytics.
|
| For another, SafetyNet is used primarily for DRM on
| streaming services and for banking or other financial
| apps. Absolutely no messenger uses it that I am aware of
| (unless you count Snapchat as a "messenger" but that's
| literally it).
|
| Every FB owned app runs fine on Android devices that fail
| SafetyNet. No reason to believe that'll change because
| where's the benefit for FB?
| m4rtink wrote:
| Whatsapp used to be openly hostile against efforts for
| providing native client applications even for platforms
| _they never plan to support themselves_. Going as far as
| effectively attacking open source project developers
| working the clients - for an example see:
| https://reviewjolla.blogspot.com/2014/10/got-banned-in-
| whats...
|
| (Sailfish OS is a Linux based mobile distro.)
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| That sucks. I hate when companies do this. How would they
| even know what kind of client is talking to their
| servers?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Does it matter? The fact is pretty much everyone in my
| country uses WhatsApp. There is no getting away from it.
| It's so absurdly important ISPs have stopped metering
| WhatsApp traffic. A phone that doesn't run WhatsApp is a
| literal paperweight.
|
| Mobile telephony is irrelevant: 98% of incoming calls are
| automated marketing/scam calls, the rest are people who
| couldn't call me on WhatsApp for some reason. It gets to
| the point I wish I could turn it off. SMS is irrelevant:
| it's mostly 2FA codes, companies using it as a
| notifications system and phishing.
| Retric wrote:
| It matters because the segment of population in your
| country that doesn't care about WhatsApp is a nucleus of
| adoption for _both_ the next messaging app and a phone
| without WhatsApp. Facebook is already hedging it's bets
| by owning and promoting the next most popular messaging
| app.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > the segment of population in your country that doesn't
| care about WhatsApp
|
| No such thing exists. At best you have people such as
| myself who care about alternatives. Those too have
| WhatsApp installed.
| Retric wrote:
| WhatsApp isn't installed on 100% of phones in any
| country, try to look at actual statistics before making
| such bold claims.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| So what? Those people are essentially ostracized. They
| don't matter, they never mattered. Also, I guarantee you
| they still care about WhatsApp, even if the only thing
| they do is seethe about how dominant it is. I hate
| Facebook and its data collection yet look at me talking
| about WhatsApp. I'm actually happy that the people of my
| country are using something so secure. At least it has
| end-to-end encryption just like Signal.
|
| Try living in a country where nobody asks girls for their
| phone number anymore. They ask them for their WhatsApp.
| Phone numbers are just an old idiotic thing you need to
| put into your contacts database to get the person to show
| up in WhatsApp. The WhatsApp word itself has become part
| of the language as a synonym for message, just like the
| Google verb has become a synonym for search in the
| anglosphere. People even compressed it into "zap" to make
| it easier to say. "I gotta go but I'll send you a zap
| later." Want to order some food? You want the
| restaurant's WhatsApp. Those that don't have a WhatsApp
| contact are losing so much money it's not even funny
| because it's better than every single food app out there.
| First day in college? The very first thing you want to do
| is join your class's WhatsApp group, or make one if it
| doesn't exist. Actually, you'll want to make two: one
| with your professors and another without. If you don't do
| this, you'll be so hopelessly out of the loop you might
| as well quit. I had classmates who barely had money to
| buy a cheap phone being forced to do so because they
| couldn't keep up with classes otherwise. Their phones had
| literally a single app and that app was WhatsApp.
|
| WhatsApp once refused to comply with a court order to
| decrypt user messages during a _child abuse
| investigation_. It was impossible to comply because they
| didn 't have the end-to-end encryption keys to begin
| with. The judge got mad and blocked WhatsApp nation-wide
| at the ISP level as punishment. You would not believe the
| disruption and outrage this caused. I remember teaching
| at least 10 friends how to bypass the block with VPNs.
| Not only was it an ineffective and unpopular measure, it
| lasted only a couple days before a higher authority undid
| the judge's decision. In my country, judges are perceived
| as gods who can do literally anything they want, but
| WhatsApp is so important it put some much needed humility
| into them. The judge wasn't punishing WhatsApp, she was
| punishing _every citizen of my country_ by denying them
| access to such a vital tool. WhatsApp is so important
| they replied to the fucking judge in english instead of
| portuguese. I still remember the judge 's pissed off face
| when she talked about that during a media interview. The
| nerve, right?
| 2cb wrote:
| It is similar in the UK as well regarding WhatsApp. Not
| quite to the extreme you describe, but WhatsApp has 100%
| replaced SMS. No one uses SMS. It is all WhatsApp. People
| don't talk about texting they say "I'll WhatsApp you." If
| you join a new social circle, whether it's personal or
| professional, the first thing is to be added to the
| WhatsApp group.
|
| The only thing I'll say about the security aspect though
| is the on-by-default cloud backups make the E2EE a red
| herring. Even if you turn it off on your own phone, it is
| almost certain the person you are talking to has it on.
| And if you turn it off it nags you to turn it back on
| after each update, most users will just do it to make the
| nagging go away, and FB know that.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| My family lives mostly in the UK. None of them use
| Whatsapp. They still use SMS for random messaging, and
| they use Telegram for coordinated messaging. They range
| in age from 30 to 78. WhatsApp might be dominant, but "No
| one uses SMS" is almost certainly an overstatement.
| Retric wrote:
| People sent 50 million SMS messages in the UK in 2020,
| your social group isn't the same as everyone.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Interesting. What country is that? (sorry too lazy to
| search your comment history for clues)
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Brazil.
|
| Here are some sources for the event I described:
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/19/whatsapp-blocked-in-
| brazil...
|
| https://theintercept.com/2016/05/02/whatsapp-used-
| by-100-mil...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/19/whatsapp-
| ban-b...
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2015/12/17/zucker
| ber...
| Retric wrote:
| The so what is dominance gets eroded at the margins. It's
| not the 99% who matter it's all about what a tiny
| majority who actually care do everyone that really wants
| to talk to them will install the app that lets them. Then
| those people are suddenly spending time on another
| platform and it snowballs.
|
| What's really interesting is you essentially need
| isolation to get a steady state dominance by any one
| platform, but nobody is actually isolated any more. New
| platforms win not by slowly growing 5 or 10% a year but
| by crazy exponential curves where 30% more people install
| in a single month.
|
| Having said that I don't mean to suggest WhatsApp is
| going to die in Brazil tomorrow. Their currently is no
| real need to move right now.
| skydhash wrote:
| Haiti here. WhatsApp took off because SMS was still not
| free and the providers were rent seeking. It was either
| send 10 sms or have 50mb for exchanging messages. People
| even got to learn how to share the binary when their Play
| store got outdated. Phone call is still used a lot
| because 3g networks reception varies and people still buy
| feature phones. But SMS is gone and a lot of people
| disabled notifications for it as it's only used for ads
| by the provider (and it was a big issue with the
| government tried to run health campaigns there). The next
| one is telegram for movies and TV shows sharing (no
| theater here). So yeah, WhatsApp has a lot of appeal here
| and no one care about privacy.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yeah. SMS is not free here either. Probably. I don't even
| know, nobody uses it anymore. I do remember friends
| describing "plans" that included some number of free
| messages or whatever. I also remember the mobile service
| providers absolutely seething about WhatsApp. They
| lobbied the government for protectionism against the app
| that was disrupting their shitty services. Hilarious and
| sad at the same time. Wish these legacy corporations
| would just get wiped off the face of this earth so that
| humanity can make some actual progress instead of keeping
| these parasites on life support.
|
| > But SMS is gone and a lot of people disabled
| notifications for it as it's only used for ads by the
| provider (and it was a big issue with the government
| tried to run health campaigns there).
|
| My mobile carrier also thinks it's acceptable to send me
| ads via SMS. The very first time they did this, I
| disabled all SMS notifications forever. The government
| also tried to send me COVID-19 related messages but I
| only saw them years later when I randomly decided to
| clean up my SMS inbox.
|
| They have only themselves to blame, really. If they
| wanted a clean communications channel, they should not
| have allowed companies to pollute it with an infinite
| amount of worthless noise. Nobody wants to be subjected
| to advertising.
| [deleted]
| alanlammiman wrote:
| In Brazil it is close enough to 100%
| Retric wrote:
| It doesn't matter if it's close to 100% that's not
| enough. There's a huge difference between a solution with
| and without a seed crystal and the gap is plenty large
| for the next platform to win and win surprisingly
| quickly.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| are you representative of most people?
|
| I certainly wouldn't say I am.
| Retric wrote:
| Considering actual adoption numbers I think I might be
| representing of most people in this. How many people do
| you know that actually watch Netflix on their phone?
| psyc wrote:
| I watch TV/movies almost exclusively on the phone. Not
| because it's the best experience, but simply because it's
| the only device that is on my person at all times. So it
| has been years since I thought in terms of going _to_ a
| screen to watch something.
| Retric wrote:
| Which is still quite rare when you look at peoples
| cellphone network usage.
|
| In 2020 the average cellphone user in North America only
| consumed 11.8 GB per month and the median is much lower.
| That really isn't enough to be regularly be watching
| videos.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Netflix allows you to download and cache videos for later
| viewing, and some carriers don't count streaming videos
| on certain platforms against their users' data usage.
| josephcsible wrote:
| But people can watch videos over Wi-Fi on their phones,
| not just over cellular data.
| 2cb wrote:
| Not rare at all if you sit on a train and glance around
| you. I see people watching movies/TV on phones and
| tablets constantly out in public. Very common.
|
| It's partly the reason I got a Fold 3. Very good for on
| the move media consumption.
|
| As for data use, aside from the points already brought up
| - ability to download for later from Netflix, certain
| services not counting towards data usage on some plans,
| etc - Netflix and other streaming services will also know
| you are on a mobile network and provide a more compressed
| stream at a lower resolution (720p with lower encoding
| settings being common) to reduce data usage and
| buffering.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > As to messaging apps, SMS and email work just fine but
| for anyone who cares I suspect they would simply jump to
| whatever messaging app did work.
|
| Messaging apps have a network effect. You can't just jump
| ship from one at will, or you get cut off from all of
| your friends who didn't jump along with you.
| Retric wrote:
| They aren't sticky enough on their own to avoid people
| just installing the next one. I think I have used 10 of
| the things at various points but SMS and email are still
| massively more popular. Remember Yahoo messenger etc?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > They aren't sticky enough on their own to avoid people
| just installing the next one. I think I have used 10 of
| the things at various points but SMS and email are still
| massively more popular.
|
| That works in a different way. Today you have WhatsApp
| and Signal. 95% of your friends are on WhatsApp and 5%
| are on Signal. Now let's say Signal starts taking over.
| In five years it's the other way around. This is possible
| because you can install them both on the same device
| during the transition.
|
| If you buy a kind of phone that can run Signal but not
| WhatsApp at the time when 95% of your friends are still
| on WhatsApp, that doesn't work. You're not going to buy
| that phone right now because your friends haven't moved
| yet and won't for another five years.
|
| First you have to spend five years getting everyone to
| switch messaging apps, and even then you can only switch
| platforms if the next messaging app to become popular
| runs on the new platform, which it generally doesn't,
| because nobody writes apps for platforms nobody uses and
| nobody uses platforms with no apps.
|
| The usual solution to this is something like wine that
| allows you to run the old platform's apps on the new
| platform. But Google prevents that by encouraging third
| party apps to have dependencies on SafetyNet or some
| other Google services or code that the new platform can't
| easily implement as a result of excessive complexity or
| legal restrictions.
| Retric wrote:
| Your assuming the market is homogeneous with you. Someone
| buys their kids phone X because they don't care. Now
| their kids friends are forced to use a different app to
| talk to those kids. Even tiny fraction of the market can
| force huge numbers of people to install and use a
| different messaging app.
|
| The effect is like crystallization even if 99.99999% of a
| mixture is in state X only a tiny seed is needed because
| it's a one way conversion. People have a reason to
| install app Y, and no real need to use app X over app Y
| but they do have a reason to use app Y over app X.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| You don't get any crystallization when the people with
| the old phones can run both apps. The one kid gets the
| new phone, he convinces five of his closest friends to
| install that app, then those five people have both apps
| installed and use the other one to talk to the other
| billion people on the old app, none of which have any
| reason to switch.
|
| Meanwhile the first kid could only convince five out of
| twenty friends to install the new app, and also couldn't
| run some other apps the new platform doesn't have, and
| then complains to the parents to return that phone and
| get a different one.
| Retric wrote:
| You say that like there isn't any other popular apps for
| people to be switching to. Facebook messenger almost as
| popular for example and it isn't like this would only
| happen to 1 family on the planet.
|
| Further people often switch clients even when they have
| friends on the old platform simply because it's the new
| thing. That's how all the current major messaging
| platforms took off, none of them are very old.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Today you have WhatsApp and Signal. 95% of your friends
| are on WhatsApp and 5% are on Signal.
|
| I asked google: number of signal users:
| 40 million number of telegram users: 400 million
|
| I know this is not completely central to your point, but
| it does speak to a part of what you're saying in that the
| choices are typically not binary.
| 2cb wrote:
| This is a very US centric view. In virtually all of
| Europe, for instance, WhatsApp is the go to messenger and
| no one uses SMS anymore.
|
| In some countries - primarily Russia, but also in Europe
| e.g. Germany and increasingly the UK - Telegram is also
| popular, and Viber is popular in African countries, while
| WeChat is used extensively in China, and so on... people
| have to use the messenger everyone else is on.
|
| I do use Signal to chat to close friends, and Telegram
| has become popular enough as a second to WhatsApp that I
| often use it too, but as others have said it's a strong
| network effect.
|
| The only other messenger I can remember having the
| position WhatsApp has was BBM back in the day. But as
| soon as BlackBerries went out of fashion it was all
| WhatsApp and has been ever since.
| Retric wrote:
| In 2020 and the UK alone 50 billion SMS text messages
| where sent, that's quite a bit for something nobody uses.
| It's very true people send use other platforms to send a
| lot of messages, but they all lack the utter ubiquity of
| SMS.
| 2cb wrote:
| > The number of outgoing SMS and MMS messages sent in the
| United Kingdom (UK) fell to 48.68 billion in 2020, from a
| peak of 150.83 billion in 2012. The fall in the number of
| SMS and MMS messages sent over mobile networks in the UK,
| coincides with a surge in popularity of apps such as
| WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/271561/number-of-
| sent-sm...
| advisedwang wrote:
| What else is a mobile game dev supposed to do? Ask customers
| to sideload? Tell people to use f-droid? If they do that
| they're restricting themselves to a tiny fraction of the
| possible audience and thereby removing any chance they have
| of being profitable.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> What else is a mobile game dev supposed to do?_
|
| Start a startup to make a mobile app store that out-
| competes Google. Somebody is going to have to do it sooner
| or later. Young devs with nothing to lose are the best
| people to try.
| sircastor wrote:
| Epic tried to get people to sideload Fortnite, and it was
| not successful. Epic is a billion dollar company. The
| right content is not the problem here.
| klyrs wrote:
| Is this a risk that you're willing to take? A handful of
| kids can (and frequently do) make awesome indy games. But
| how do you expect them to scale out a competitive
| software distribution platform, and who's going to pay
| for the marketing necessary to drive adoption among both
| developers and users?
| pdonis wrote:
| _> how do you expect them to scale_
|
| How quickly does it _have_ to scale? Google itself was a
| niche product for quite some time before it had to scale.
|
| I'm not proposing that someone try to displace Google all
| at once. Google took a long time to get to the position
| it's in now. It will take a long time for it to be
| displaced, if it is. But you have to start somewhere.
| [deleted]
| anonymousab wrote:
| > Start a startup [...] that out-competes Google
|
| You know, I don't think that "just be better than the
| trillion dollar incumbent" is a reasonable starting point
| for any healthy market.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> I don 't think that "just be better than the trillion
| dollar incumbent" is a reasonable starting point for any
| healthy market._
|
| I'm not proposing this solution because I think it's
| easy. I'm proposing it because I think it's the only one
| that has any chance of actually fixing the problem long
| term. Government fiat won't fix it; it will make it
| worse, the same way government fiat in general makes
| problems worse, not better.
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| Or MAYBE the solution is to enforce antitrust and pro
| competitive market laws.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Government fiat generally makes problems worse because
| the government is a monopoly and a monopoly has little
| incentive to do things well because of a lack of
| consequences for getting it wrong, unlike a business in a
| competitive market which has to respond to competitive
| pressure or go bust.
|
| But a monopoly/cartel isn't a competitive market and has
| the exact same problem.
|
| And antitrust is minimally damaging as long as you
| restrict the targets to companies that have more than,
| say, 25% market share. In other words, as long as it
| places no constraints on upstarts and challengers.
|
| Because at that point, blindly causing harm to the large
| incumbents is actually good even if it's hamfisted and
| incompetent, because then the market can fix any damage
| by transitioning to smaller suppliers not subject to
| antitrust rules, which is the thing that actually solves
| the problem. The worst thing they can do is fail to do
| enough damage to the incumbents to restore competition,
| which is the same thing that happens if they do nothing.
| jpe90 wrote:
| > the same way government fiat in general makes problems
| worse, not better.
|
| To be clear, you're saying that U.S. antitrust
| legislation left us worse off, historically?
| pdonis wrote:
| _> you 're saying that U.S. antitrust legislation left us
| worse off, historically?_
|
| Yes. For example, look up what happened to Standard Oil
| and Alcoa Aluminum. Both of those companies were
| providing their products with better quality and at lower
| prices than the companies that existed after they were
| broken up by antitrust suits.
| wussboy wrote:
| Or the ban against lead additives. Or against child
| labour. Or any one of hundreds of massive benefits that
| government fiat has brought us.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Or the ban against lead additives. Or against child
| labour._
|
| Sometimes the government manages to mandate something
| that happens to be a good idea. But that does not mean
| that government mandates, overall, are a net benefit.
|
| _> Or any one of hundreds of massive benefits that
| government fiat has brought us._
|
| If you really think there are "hundreds of massive
| benefits" brought to us by government fiat, I suggest a
| review of history. You will find many, many more cases of
| government fiat causing harm than of it doing good. In
| the extreme, government fiat killed hundreds of millions
| of people in the 20th century.
|
| If you want more local, individualized information, try
| asking anyone who has had to deal with a government
| bureaucracy when it makes a bad individual decision
| (which happens all the time) about their experience. (My
| wife and I have had this experience multiple times with
| multiple government bureaucracies.) You will get a very
| different viewpoint on the "benefits" of government fiat.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Phone OSes are hard. Tizen was a big play for it and that
| ended up being a dud. Windows Phone was also another well-
| funded competitor that fell on its face.
|
| Really, the problem is that phone manufacturers want to be
| where the apps are, and app developers barely keep it
| together making native apps for the two dominant OSes.
| Another competitor would need to make it really, really easy
| to make apps performant when ported over with minimal work,
| because the ugly truth is that no one is going to hire a full
| third team to develop for another OS that's just starting
| out.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > Another competitor would need to make it really, really
| easy to make apps performant when ported over with minimal
| work
|
| But this is completely impossible, and Google helps make it
| that way. Their SafetyNet API lets apps verify that the
| device is running an official, unmodified Android build,
| and a lot of very popular apps will refuse to run
| otherwise.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| SafetyNet makes it impossible to run most Android apps on
| Linux using a container-based solution like Anbox.
|
| SafetyNet is also stifling innovation.
|
| Linux/*BSD/macOS can run many Windows apps without
| emulation via WINE, and those innovations allowed Steam
| to create potentially billions of dollars in value by
| making many of their games cross-platform with Proton and
| create new products like the Steam Deck. SafetyNet
| precludes ever creating value like that with mobile apps.
|
| Although they use emulation in WSL 2, Microsoft has done
| something similar with WSL and Linux apps, creating an
| untold amount of value for not only their platform, but
| for millions of developers, as well. SafetyNet prevents
| using something like WSL to run mobile apps on Windows.
|
| For those reasons, you can't build an alternative OS and
| run many Android apps on them with a compatibility layer,
| despite apps without SafetyNet working pretty well using
| compatibility layers like Anbox.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| There's no way to fake this? I just looked it up and it
| seems Magisk is able to fake these attestations somehow.
| I remember using it to get some mobile games to shut up
| about my rooted phone. How would rooted devices and
| custom ROMs work otherwise?
|
| I hate it when these fucking companies use cryptography
| to control us. Cryptography should be empowering us...
| josephcsible wrote:
| Magisk can fake them for now, but only because Google
| still supports some pre-TrustZone phones. On newer
| phones, you can't fake TrustZone, and eventually older
| phones will just always fail SafetyNet.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| That sucks. If this is what the future holds for Android,
| I think I'm just gonna switch to Apple already. There's
| no point to Android if Google insists on destroying
| everything that made it great.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _Windows Phone was also another well-funded competitor
| that fell on its face._ "
|
| Google had a hand in that, though, by intentionally
| blocking interoperability with YouTube and other Google
| services for WP. Even back then they were willing to play
| dirty to keep their monopoly.
| bognition wrote:
| With hundreds of billions of profits on the line this
| shouldn't be surprising.
|
| The only thing a business cares about is profits.
| Everything else is branding.
| threatofrain wrote:
| It should be noted, as discussed by other HN people below, that
| there is a good chance that author (edit: not OP) is quite
| sketchy.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28730865
|
| At the very least, they are not telling their story with an
| attitude of transparency.
| busymom0 wrote:
| Note that I am the "OP" as in I posted the link to HN but I
| am not the author or the developer whose story this is about.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _It should be noted, as discussed by other HN people below,
| that there is a good chance that author (edit: not OP) is
| quite sketchy._
|
| It should also be noted that this is just an opinion. I don't
| find it to be sketchy.
| postsantum wrote:
| After reading all these stories it feels like Google has a policy
| of "sunsetting" a certain amount of projects per year. When the
| company is out of them, it's gonna be yours
| [deleted]
| vuln wrote:
| Just build your own phone/App Store/Bank/social media
| platform/hosting company
|
| It's not hard
|
| /s
| [deleted]
| benlivengood wrote:
| The September intrusions detected sound pretty suspicious. I am
| sure there are plenty of bad actors trying to take over existing
| Google Developer accounts to use for spam/fraud, and it sounds
| like there was at least one compromised account and compromised
| device which could easily lead to other compromised accounts or
| persistent malware.
| viktorcode wrote:
| Based on the author withholding some key details, my take is they
| know more than they say on why the account was terminated. The
| whole post was written assuming (correctly) that Google is too
| big to respond publicly and tell their side of the story, which
| would undoubtedly garner some support.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| It's this type of behavior that caused me to drop google for
| everything except search long ago. You are not the customer, you
| are the product or in many cases a vessel for the product which
| is ads and nothing more.
| noway421 wrote:
| As a mobile apps developer, this is extremely concerning to me.
| Google has a big crisis of trust. I no longer feel safe to even
| have personal apps connected to my real Google account - what if
| the Developer Account gets banned and my main email, Google Drive
| and all my life along with it? There were instances of people's
| entire Google accounts gone. That is catastrophic.
|
| I now believe it is my duty to detract anyone from using Google
| Play-serviced Android devices. With the way Google treats their
| developers they should pay the price of shrinking market share.
|
| I hope a change comes and Google starts being a more customer
| focused company. But they are notorious for providing bad
| customer support, and I just can't count on it.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| My guess, assuming the company is innocent and that this wasn't
| just a thinly veiled attempt by Google to purge the developers'
| gambling apps:
|
| Google bans accounts by association. One of their accounts was
| logged into during a hack. They blocked the device, but the
| notification usually comes only after the login has already
| succeeded.
|
| Assuming this wasn't the criminal's first hack, their device
| probably got flagged before by Google. If Google applied their
| logic to that device, they flagged this company's account (and
| probably all of these people's own Google accounts by
| association).
|
| Google won't comment on this so I suppose we'll never know for
| sure. However, when the next company that the people behind this
| startup joins also gets banned, I'd consider the viral properties
| of Google bans proven and these developers could be considered
| "tainted" by our tech overlords.
| oblib wrote:
| Google owes me money too. They screwed me back in the early years
| of this century by billing me for ad "hits" that were clearly
| bogus and I've never used their services since.
|
| I still use their search engine but I always use duckduckgo first
| and I won't click on any of the advertised links the offer.
| Never.
|
| If anyone hasn't figured out by now that Google is a predator
| who'll screw them out of everything they can, including their
| startup ideas, they will sooner or later.
| mrtweetyhack wrote:
| 10 games in 3 years...yeah, that's not sketchy at all
| dave333 wrote:
| This is par for the course with Google. Many Adsense accounts
| have been terminated for similarly vague policy violations. I am
| sure they catch a lot of bad actors, but they also catch a lot of
| folks who have no clue what they have done wrong, in many cases
| losing a large part of their income. Google does send warning
| emails, but they are so vague as to be useless in figuring out
| the violation.
| njsubedi wrote:
| This happens so many times and some people posted it on HN
| before. The most common reply is that you should not put all your
| eggs in someone else's basket. I'm amused no one has posted that
| comment yet.
|
| By the way, Google will most probably not restore the account,
| but I'd be interested to know whether it does because our startup
| is also similar to yours, and half of our eggs are in Google's
| basket too. Please keep us (the community) updated.
| josephcsible wrote:
| So if you want to write a mobile app, what are you supposed to
| do? Aren't your only choices to put all of your eggs in
| Google/Apple's baskets?
| ant6n wrote:
| To what extend could one use a website instead of an app?
| 2cb wrote:
| Depends on the app in question. OP is about a gaming
| company so using a website isn't a serious option.
| techrat wrote:
| > So if you want to write a mobile app, what are you supposed
| to do?
|
| Not hire someone who had been banned before due to ad fraud.
| Thorncorona wrote:
| This is some next level victim blaming for something that
| we don't know happened, and can easily be handled by adults
| with communication channels.
|
| It's not as if devs go around with a visible scarlet letter
| for any malfeasance they get into. Nor is it reasonable
| brand people permanently.
| techrat wrote:
| TIL someone who bans you for life is forced to do
| business with you.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Google didn't tell this company "you can't let this
| employee do anything with us". Google told them "since
| you hired this employee, none of you can ever do anything
| with us again, even if you fire him now".
| busymom0 wrote:
| Google isn't even telling you that that's what happened.
| Also as a developer who used to use ads until 5 years ago,
| I got a wrongful 1 month suspension claiming I was clicking
| my own ads even though I never did. It's obviously my words
| vs theirs but I know what my truth is. Yet Google claimed I
| was clicking my own ads and therefore gave me a 1 month
| suspension. That convinced me to stop using ads all
| together and since then, I have become even more reluctant
| to build Android apps. I just work on iOS apps instead. I
| hadn't built any android apps for past 5 years except last
| month when I finally built one because I was getting many
| user requests to have one.
| techrat wrote:
| I guess you missed all those stories of Apple doing the
| same thing to developers... even going as far as to shut
| down accounts when they want to use the features from
| their apps in the next version of iOS.
| busymom0 wrote:
| I have been making apps for both iOS and Android for past
| 10 years (I did take a 4 year break from Android though).
| While there's small bit of truth to your statement, I
| find dealing with Apple on pretty much every issue to be
| much better than dealing with Google. Maybe this is
| because of Apple charging the annual developer license
| fee.
|
| With Apple, I always get to deal with an actual human
| when they reject an app or update and while their
| descriptions can be a bit vague, it seems to direct me in
| the right direction to fix the issue. With Google, it's a
| nightmare. For example, recently they banned DroidScript,
| one of the most popular IDE on Android accusing them of
| committing Ad Fraud, and the developer had to create a
| whole media storm to get them to re-instate the app after
| 25 days:
|
| https://groups.google.com/g/androidscript/c/Mbh5TZ6YYnA
| laegooose wrote:
| How do you know if a person you hire was banned before?
| tremon wrote:
| In some parts of the world, that would be discriminatory
| against ex-convicts. If a person has been convicted and has
| served their penance, you are not allowed to use that fact
| in decisions concerning them.
|
| Besides, why should we allow corporations to run their own
| private justice system?
| andi999 wrote:
| In which part of the world aren't you allowed to do this?
| evgen wrote:
| > In some parts of the world, that would be
| discriminatory against ex-convicts.
|
| Please name the part of the world where I am required to
| hire a former bank robber to manage my bank.
| techrat wrote:
| Ah. That explains why job applications often don't have
| the line where you check next to a box to indicate if
| you've ever been convicted of a crime.
|
| Oh wait. They do.
| stordoff wrote:
| "In some parts of the world" is an important part of that
| claim, and even if common, it may not be legal[1]. For
| instance, consider the requirements in the UK:
|
| > Most convictions or cautions then become 'spent' after
| a specific amount of time. This might be after a few
| months or years, or straight away.
|
| > You only need to tell a potential employer, university
| or college about a spent conviction or caution if all of
| the following apply:
|
| > * they ask you to
|
| > * they tell you that the role needs a standard or
| enhanced DBS check
|
| > * it's not removed ('filtered') from DBS certificates
|
| > You can check if the employer, university or college is
| allowed to request the standard or enhanced DBS check.
| They can only do this for certain roles, for example if
| you're working with children or in healthcare.
|
| > It's against the law for an employer, university or
| college to refuse you a role because you've got a spent
| conviction or caution, unless it makes you unsuitable for
| the role. For example, a driving conviction might make
| you unsuitable for a job as a driving instructor.
|
| https://www.gov.uk/tell-employer-or-college-about-
| criminal-r...
|
| > Applicants do not have to tell you about criminal
| convictions that are spent. You must treat the applicant
| as if the conviction has not happened, and cannot refuse
| to employ the person because of their conviction.
|
| https://www.gov.uk/employer-preventing-
| discrimination/recrui...
|
| [1] https://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/news/articles/one-
| in-five...
| josephcsible wrote:
| That's not a fair comparison. Court systems have due
| process that isn't there when Google decides to ban you.
| 2cb wrote:
| Do you think such people go around advertising that fact?
| kevingadd wrote:
| Don't
| ipaddr wrote:
| The answer is simple don't make a mobile game. Write a web
| app or desktop application.
|
| It is the same as console games or anywhere someone else
| controls the platform.
| terrortrain wrote:
| I am generally following that advice.
|
| IMO the fact that this is the best path is clear evidence
| that we need mobile app store reform. It's mind boggling to
| me that people still defend this status quo
| cblconfederate wrote:
| > I'm amused no one has posted that comment yet.
|
| It s probaly because it has become impossible not to put your
| eggs in the same 2 baskets. How else are people going to make
| an app / how are they going to launch a startup without an app?
| (I know it s possible to go web only, but they 'll probably not
| be taken seriously by investors)
| VLM wrote:
| Very handwavy most of these stories seem to revolve around
| Google tying ad accounts and play store accounts, and having
| a VERY EXTREMELY heavy hand on ad accounts, which results in
| the banhammer smashing distantly related play store accounts.
|
| The safest way to handle this is probably to not use both
| google play store and google ads. Going to be pretty hard to
| make an app without Play Store so I guess that means no using
| Google Ads. Too dangerous and Google will not support.
|
| If you used, say, Facebook "audience network" ads, then no
| matter how angry Facebook gets, regardless if they're correct
| or not, at least your app would remain up.
|
| Also if you're launching a startup you're probably not making
| much from ads and as using google ads is a HUGE existential
| risk for any app developer, you'd best not use ads. Its not
| like any end user ever used a startup's app because they like
| how well they implemented the ads.
| busymom0 wrote:
| I am not the author of the article, I just posted it. The
| article is about game development so webdev isn't a serious
| option for the author either.
| ourmandave wrote:
| "You should not put all your eggs in someone else's basket."
| [deleted]
| Eikon wrote:
| Maybe the issue here is making one's business solely dependant on
| a third party which is well known for that kind of behavior...
| mnahkies wrote:
| What alternatives would you suggest? F-droid is the only one
| that comes to mind for me, and I'm not sure that this would be
| suitable for this company
| 2cb wrote:
| For their Android apps they can launch on third party app
| stores besides F-Droid, for example Amazon Appstore, Samsung
| Galaxy Store, Huawei App Gallery, and I'm sure there's plenty
| of others... most users are likely to be on Samsung phones or
| one of the Chinese brands so getting your app on those stores
| should cover a lot of the customer base already.
|
| For customers using other phones just tell them download
| Amazon Appstore and provide an APK download on the site for
| the lazy ones (but put a note saying using an app store is
| best to get updates etc.)
|
| While it does damage business to not be in the Play Store,
| thankfully Android is flexible enough it's not a total killer
| if you get into other app stores customers are likely to
| trust, and they are likely to trust the app stores that are
| preinstalled on their phones.
|
| It's also smart to not only be on one platform. Of course if
| their dev account got canned by Apple they really wouldn't
| have any alternatives, but it'd be very bad luck for them to
| genuinely have done nothing wrong but still have both Google
| and Apple ban them.
| ipaddr wrote:
| I would suggest pivoting to a different non-mobile ecosystem.
| _hao wrote:
| Google are horrendous (business partner), but at least you can
| publish and install .apk files without a store. Whether that's a
| sustainable business model is another thing entirely, but at
| least you can do it. Not even going to talk about Apple since
| that's just a more extreme example of the same problem.
|
| From my POV, if you have a business and you rely entirely (or for
| the majority) of your income from these platforms, then your
| business is not sustainable and is not competitive. You're
| playing at a rigged game and you will most likely lose.
|
| I stopped using 3rd party game engines for the same reason. I
| want to control my source and the potential income I get (if
| any). A lot of people won't agree with that. That's fine. Google
| and Apple's duopoly and their respective ecosystems are not good
| for the future of software. People have to take a stand at some
| point. These companies want to control every part of the tech
| stack (and our lives to extent), you should fight against that.
| We should all fight against that.
| danuker wrote:
| > You're playing at a rigged game and you will most likely
| lose.
|
| Then the whole smartphone market is rigged. This is why I as a
| consumer will not buy a new smartphone anymore.
|
| I went for a year or so without a smartphone at all. What I
| missed the most was maps, but you'd be surprised to learn how
| better off you are without social media pinging you 24/7.
|
| I now use a second-hand smartphone without a Google account,
| and I use OsmAnd for maps.
| 2cb wrote:
| It genuinely does wonders for mental health to disable
| notifications for social media apps. Definitely agree there.
| _hao wrote:
| > Then the whole smartphone market is rigged.
|
| Yes, it is rigged. I've had Android, WP (which I liked the
| most because of the tiles) and now I'm on iOS. I don't have
| social media on my phone. I use it for banking and maps
| mostly, but I also communicate with family through WhatsApp
| :/ I wish I could just get rid of it, but it's not possible
| for me to just use e-mail... At least not yet.
| sneak wrote:
| Sharecropping in these rentseeking App Stores is a model which
| caps your maximum amount of success and increases your odds of
| failure.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| What can I say... Oh yeah, that Google owes me a lot of money
| after terminating my adsense account for false reasons and added
| insult to injury by sending me a 50EUR adword voucher to my
| _physical address_ like it solved anything?...
|
| It was like 10/15 years ago, now everytime I have an opportunity
| to suggest businesses I work with not to use any of Google
| services, including GCP, I do exactly that.
|
| I'd say, unless you signed an actual contract with Google, which
| agreeing to a bunch of random TOS really isn't, do not ever rely
| on Google services or SAAS, and certainly do not build your
| startup on any Google stack.
| ta1234567890 wrote:
| > now everytime I have an opportunity to suggest businesses I
| work with not to use any of Google services, including GCP, I
| do exactly that
|
| What would you recommend as a good alternative to google (and
| Facebook) ads?
| DarkmSparks wrote:
| not using ads.... /runs
|
| in all seriousness, I think in app purchases is probably a
| better model all round, As a user and a developer these ad
| platforms are all just nasty.
| ta1234567890 wrote:
| How would you leverage in app purchases to promote a B2B
| saas product?
| 2cb wrote:
| If your product is B2B SaaS do you really need to put ads
| inside your app?
| edoceo wrote:
| Reddit is like the #4 site in the USA. Can get pretty
| targeted too.
| ta1234567890 wrote:
| Good suggestion. Unfortunately Reddit is not that popular
| for the target demographic I have in mind (B2B in a Spanish
| speaking country).
| josephcsible wrote:
| Why do you say "(and Facebook)"? Even if Facebook were this
| ban-happy, a lifetime ban from them is way, way less
| disruptive to most people's lives than a lifetime ban from
| Google is.
| 2cb wrote:
| I realise this is an edge case, but if you don't have an FB
| account but you set one up to create a page for your
| business and set up ads for it etc, it'll likely get shut
| down very quickly by FB's algorithms. So basically if you
| are a non-FB user you cannot use FB ads.
| ta1234567890 wrote:
| I personally dislike FB. I don't have a
| FB/Instagram/Whatsapp account and would hate creating one
| just to run ads.
|
| Unfortunately I feel like 90%+ of my target audience uses
| Google for search and at least one of FBs properties. It's
| hard not to want to advertise on those platforms.
| helloguillecl wrote:
| A way to think about this is to see Google (or Apple) as a De-
| Facto State which _governs_ a very important "ecosystem" in
| which customers and other businesses rely almost exclusively on.
| Its very existence depends on businesses and people relaying for
| important aspects of their existence on them. This is how they
| stay big and relevant.
|
| In this environment they must make decisions for the sake of
| their their own interests and sometimes to protect other users.
|
| The problem is that like any non-democratic state there's no
| balance in power between the executive power (the company and its
| algorithms) and their stakeholders, so I would expect this to get
| worst and more damaging over time.
|
| Is it possible that they put their actions under the inspection
| of another entity? Can we expect that every government and
| legislation put their own rules to govern Google and protect its
| users from them?
| mchusma wrote:
| Googles process here is fundamentally broken, and so easily
| improved.
|
| I have had issues with them before and there should be:
|
| - a portal to see your status (it's often impossible to know if
| they even got your comment)
|
| - all comments and next steps clearly listed
|
| - send warnings before bans in all cases unless there is some
| kind of extreme safety thing
|
| - let developers respond to accusations before banning them
|
| These would be minimal technical effort on googles part,
| negligible safety impact, but dramatically improve the developer
| perspective of them.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Might be similar to the last time this came up (i'm looking for
| it now, edit: found it[0]) where the developer worked with a
| sizable development-for-hire firm that were themselves associated
| with many other dev accounts, some of which ended up being
| suspended for ToS violations (possibly by this firm, possibly by
| the customer without the firm's knowledge). The anti-ban-evasion
| technology Google runs then effectively poisoned this firm's Play
| developer profile so that anyone working with them would be
| suspended for the potential ban evasion, eventually.
|
| Note that, for this specific case, it might not be a firm but one
| of the developers themselves that has a poisoned account thanks
| to past dealings that violated ToS. I imagine the system only
| banning by associate if the $25 developer account itself ever
| uploads an app so that it doesn't ban associated Google accounts
| for non-play-developer purposes.
|
| 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19124324 (comment
| explaining https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19124463 )
| jmole wrote:
| Ad fraud = ban, it's not much more complicated than that.
|
| It's trivial to make a new developer account and release
| similar products, so as an App Store you can do things like
| looking for similarities between new apps and banned apps to
| root out simple "change of ownership" schemes like this.
|
| Google can't afford to take this lightly, games with fraudulent
| ad clicks can generate (i.e. steal) millions of dollars in ad
| spend from businesses who think they are getting legitimate
| impressions.
| perihelions wrote:
| "It's not much more complicated than that" is the language of
| the oppressor. It's the view of the indifferent technocrat
| who would flatten the world into software, and is willing to
| steamroll over any human bits that stick out. Google's
| algorithmic reinterpretation of justice is a perversion of
| justice. The simplicity of its approach signs its abdication
| of its moral and legal responsibilities.
|
| OP's story isn't remotely okay. Fraud is a complicated issue.
| Here's what's uncomplicated: _OP are not frauds_. Here 's
| what uncomplicated: _Google reneged on a (very one-sided)
| contract, and destroyed a business_. Here 's a really simple
| one: _Google is an abusive monopoly_.
| f6v wrote:
| From what I gather, OP is an anonymous voice on the
| internet. He might as well be Indian, Russian, Bulgarian,
| etc. pretending to be a US developer. That might have led
| to the ban.
| 2cb wrote:
| The blog post says outright they are not an American
| company, they are not hiding that.
| sigzero wrote:
| "the language of the oppressor"
|
| Yeah, the guy who commented on HN is the oppressor. lol
| perihelions wrote:
| I mean it's the language Google would use. It has a
| connotation akin to Stockholm syndrome: to accept the
| argumentative premise of the adversary who is taking
| advantage of you.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| I like how you've put it..
| djur wrote:
| > Here's what's uncomplicated: OP are not frauds.
|
| According to OP -- do you have firmer evidence of this than
| their own say-so?
| RichardCA wrote:
| Yes, and putting the target in the position of having to
| prove the negative is yet another tool of oppression.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Oh no, the attention robbers and psychological manipulators
| are getting a few million our of their literal billions taken
| away :(
| busymom0 wrote:
| "Guilt by association" is a bad way to run companies -
| especially when you don't even know who and how someone is
| guilty. They also do not apply rules fairly. Bigger companies
| like Facebook, Uber etc get to have more of a "human"
| connection to sort out issues while the small developer
| doesn't even get told what exactly they did wrong.
| humaniania wrote:
| You have no clue what information Google used to reach this
| decision.
| yashasolutions wrote:
| That's precisely the point. People want to understand
| what they did wrong.
| Jensson wrote:
| Google didn't give a reason in this case. Have you heard
| of a big company getting terminated like this without
| being given a reason? So as far as I know the rules are
| unfair.
| sharken wrote:
| Isn't that a serious problem, when the final decision
| withholds information related to the case.
|
| For all we know it could be the virus attack that lead to
| Googles decision.
| 2cb wrote:
| Yeah no one outside of Google does including the
| developers who got banned, that's kinda the whole
| problem...
| lamontcg wrote:
| We need an anti-Kafka law to force tech companies to
| disclose the reasons behind account bans and provide for
| an appeals process.
|
| This will naturally make their jobs a whole lot harder,
| but currently they're just externalizing their costs onto
| people like in this article.
|
| Just like all the recent articles pointing out that
| "identity theft" is a term offloading incompetence of the
| companies onto the individual.
|
| We need to stop putting up with this shit.
| closeparen wrote:
| Guilt by association is the only way to cope with a world
| where bad actors can trivially switch pseudonyms whenever
| they're caught.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Google doesn't pay you in Bitcoin. Isn't it hard to
| switch pseudonyms when you need to receive real money?
| 2cb wrote:
| Yeah the genuinely malicious apps are unlikely to be
| using Google ads or other services to generate revenue.
| closeparen wrote:
| I don't think malicious apps are making their money
| through Play Store purchases. Probably ads and data, and
| maybe by taking user credit cards directly.
| sitkack wrote:
| Which itself reinforces cartel behavior. The small players
| get the full force of the automated rulings, the large orgs
| get infinite levels of undo.
| Agathos wrote:
| "For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law." -
| Oscar Benavides
| profmonocle wrote:
| > "Guilt by association" is a bad way to run companies
|
| It's frighteningly common in big tech. Amazon is known for
| banning people for life because someone else with the same
| address returned too many items. Pick your roommates
| carefully I guess.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > Ad fraud = ban, it's not much more complicated than that.
|
| You think it's reasonable to ban an entire company because
| one of their employees committed ad fraud at a previous job?
| rudian wrote:
| Ad fraud = ban from everything a huge company offers? Seems a
| tad much when the company literally reaches into your pocket
| by owning your smartphone and/or livelihood.
|
| Bans should be limited in time and scale.
|
| This really must be regulated, Google and co should not be
| able to lock you out of your digital identity.
| delroth wrote:
| Do you have any example of situations where Google have
| "locked [anyone] out of [their] digital identity" for ad
| fraud?
|
| As far as I can tell, this blog post is only mentioning the
| company's Android developer account being disabled. It in
| fact shows evidence that other access to the account is
| still available (e.g. screenshots from the account security
| checkup tool, which wouldn't be accessible if the whole
| account was disabled). This does seem limited in scale.
|
| (Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on anything related
| to this.)
| [deleted]
| veeti wrote:
| One has to wonder how far this guilt by association goes. If my
| personal Google account is banned for one reason or another
| today, does that mean all the companies I have worked for in
| the past are also at risk of being banned? Could an app that I
| haven't had anything to do with for years get removed?
| Macha wrote:
| For any of the startup sized companies, this is totally a
| risk. I presume they wouldn't ban e.g. Twilio's account
| because one of their former or current employees got
| themselves personally banned, but there's certainly been
| accounts of it happening on HN to smaller companies where
| they hire a banned dev, and then the company's own accounts
| get banned (and on at least one occasion, their devs personal
| accounts too).
| age_bronze wrote:
| Why is this legal? Why is it legal for Google to completely
| demolish a business with no human review, no due process and no
| excuse at all?
|
| Why do we keep hearing this without a single developer going
| forward and suing the hell out of Google? Or Apple by the way.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Most people even when they think they're in the right won't
| take legal action. Even when they think they'll get a payout
| they won't take legal action. If they get threatened with legal
| action they'll automatically backdown.
|
| I'm sure there are a multiude of reasons behind why this is.
| But I think part of it is on some level fight or flight. I am
| sure for a lot it's just not worth the hassle.
|
| I'm hoping for the day someone does take them to court
| especially in the EU where they're less likely to put up with
| the corporate nonsense that the American courts seem to put up
| with.
| oblib wrote:
| It's because the cost to bring them to court is far to
| expensive. I don't know anyone who can afford to do that here
| in the U.S.
| josephcsible wrote:
| To be clear, the root problem here is that Google gives their
| own app store an unfair advantage. Third-party app stores can't
| auto-update their apps, among other things, without the phone
| being rooted, which carries serious consequences for
| functionality (e.g., can't use the camera anymore on the Galaxy
| Z Fold 3, can't use Snapchat, Netflix, or Android Pay anymore
| on any phone, and on some phones you just can't root at all,
| period). If third-party app stores could fairly compete with
| the Play Store, then there'd be no issue at all with it having
| draconian and arbitrarily-enforced policies.
| 2cb wrote:
| If you use Magisk you can just sideload Netflix from APK
| Mirror or Aurora Store and you're fine. Samsung stock ROMs
| specifically have extra Netflix DRM checks built in iirc, but
| if you're rooted disabling them should be easy, I'm sure
| there's open source scripts on xda that will do all this.
| Netflix is even fully functional on GrapheneOS despite it
| being a custom build which doesn't pass SafetyNet, although
| the bootloader is locked and it's not rooted, but still it
| fails SafetyNet and Netflix runs fine without any tricks.
|
| Android Pay is easy to get working on a rooted phone you just
| need to slightly modify one single SQLite database. There are
| scripts to automate this on xda for certain, I used one
| before on my old Pixel.
|
| Snapchat though is a lot more tricky yeah, they do their own
| checks outside of SafetyNet and it's a game of cat and mouse
| where whenever someone gets around one Snapchat adds five
| more. But then how many people still use Snapchat these days?
| Everyone I know just uses IG which works fine on a rooted
| phone.
| tdeck wrote:
| > Android Pay is easy to get working on a rooted phone you
| just need to slightly modify one single SQLite database.
|
| "You just need to slightly modify one single SQLite
| database" has got to be the most unintentionally amusing
| thing I've read all week. I'm happy to poke around in the
| internals of Android, but even most of my developer friends
| would see a process like that and go "nope, not worth the
| effort". Ordinary people do not know what SQLite is, or how
| to run scripts, so a barrier like that is a deal breaker
| for them.
| 2cb wrote:
| You can run a script to do it for you, you don't even
| have to know what SQLite is, you just need to go on xda
| and run the script that makes Google Pay work.
|
| Although I would argue that these concerns only apply to
| regular users who wouldn't bother rooting their phones in
| the first place. Most people who root their phones are
| willing to run scripts and know they need to be a bit
| hacky to make stuff work.
|
| Users who are not willing to take that view shouldn't be
| rooting.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > Users who are not willing to take that view shouldn't
| be rooting.
|
| My original point was that a lot of users like this
| exist, and for these users, all third-party app stores
| are unfairly inferior.
| 2cb wrote:
| The only restriction they have for unrooted phones is
| lack of auto updates, a mild inconvenience at worst. You
| also have to hit "install" on a little pop up window when
| you install something. That's it.
|
| Most regular users are capable of hitting an update
| notification manually.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Try getting a non-techie to set up Magisk on their phone
| though. And just doing it for them isn't a practical option
| unless you live with them, because then they won't know how
| to install the monthly OTA security updates anymore.
| 2cb wrote:
| If you have a rooted phone you probably have Magisk, it's
| virtually the universal go to rooting app and the easiest
| method of rooting. You can even still get OTA's if your
| phone uses the A/B update system like basically every
| modern Android phone.
|
| It is managed through a simple UI that automates most of
| this stuff for you, and it also has a library of third
| party extensions you can install as easy as apps from the
| Play Store that apply various system mods including the
| Google Pay hack.
|
| Anyone who cannot work out how to use Magisk is unlikely
| to have a rooted phone in the first place. As I said,
| Magisk is the easiest and most common rooting method used
| these days because it is the most simple and convenient.
| gundmc wrote:
| My Samsung phone came preinstalled with an unremovable third
| party app store. No root necessary. Maybe device
| manufacturers aren't considered third party?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| App stores that come baked into vendor ROMs are granted
| special privileges that user-installable app stores aren't.
| izacus wrote:
| Silent installation of applications without your
| confirmation or knowledge is a privileged permission
| reserved for preinstalled apps. So Samsung can provide a
| 3rd party store on their phones that can silently install
| applications on your phone while others can't.
|
| This was changed in Android 12 (I think) where silent app
| installation is a grantable permission for other stores
| like F-Droid.
| izacus wrote:
| Samsung Galaxy phone, Huawei phones and other phones have 3rd
| party stores that update apps in background just fine.
|
| No need to spread FUD, come on.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Those are baked into the vendor ROM and are granted special
| privileges that user-installable app stores are not.
| 2cb wrote:
| Those are preinstalled apps with system access just like
| the Play Store itself though. It is still true you cannot
| do auto updates with user installed app stores like F-Droid
| unless you root.
|
| Personally I don't mind just hitting update all in F-Droid
| every now and then so it's no big deal to me, just saying
| it is functionality only apps with system permissions
| (meaning pre-installed only if the phone isn't rooted) are
| allowed to have.
|
| If, as you said in another comment, this will change in
| Android 12 that's a cool development. I hadn't heard this
| previously.
| viktorcode wrote:
| It is legal because of the contract between the developer and
| Google. In this case Google decided that the developer violated
| the contract's terms and terminated the account.
|
| Also, there might have been a human review, and it was decided
| that termination is going to proceed, hence no basis for human
| to intervene.
| pkilgore wrote:
| The problem is not quite Google's behavior. It's legal for the
| same reason it's legal for you to not allow someone inside your
| house for bad reasons or no reasons at all.
|
| The problem is that we've allowed digital marketplaces to
| achieve the kind of market power that would make a robber baron
| blush -- and we're not talking enough about how breaking up
| FAANG companies into multiple competing companies helps prevent
| the kinds of harms discussed in the blog above (as well as
| others).
|
| I purchase software from no less than 5 different digital
| marketplaces on my computer, but I am all but prevented from
| downloading software on my phone that does not originate from
| the Play store. Monopolies are not good for markets.
| 2cb wrote:
| I have F-Droid installed on all my Android phones. Admittedly
| it's something you must go out of your way to do, but you can
| put third party app stores on Android phones very easily, or
| just sideload apps individually if they have an official APK
| link (many do).
|
| iPhones on the other hand, yeah very different story.
| summm wrote:
| With alternative app stores, you have to approve every
| single app update, ehich is way inferior to play store.
| 2cb wrote:
| I don't see how it's "way inferior" to manually hit an
| "update" button, it's a minor inconvenience at best.
| my123 wrote:
| Except if the app has an updater built-in to itself, in
| which case there is no prompt as far as I remember.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| When I was a freelancer, I was warned by my legal help that
| taking a businesses site offline in response to non-payment was
| legally risky. There was a chance of being sued for disrupting
| their business.
|
| I wonder if there are grounds for a (reasonable) legal suit
| here. Anyone in the know that can fill us in?
| tazjin wrote:
| > I wonder if there are grounds for a (reasonable) legal suit
| here. Anyone in the know that can fill us in?
|
| If this was this company's only revenue stream, chances are
| they can't survive until such a lawsuit has dragged out to
| the end.
| hollerith wrote:
| That's OK: then any settlement gets distributed to the ex-
| company's shareholders.
|
| (Of course some entity needs to fund the lawsuit: if the
| company cannot, and the lawyers will not take it on
| contingency, then the shareholders would need to.)
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| You're talking about self-help that isn't in a contract,
| right? The OP is talking about self-help developer account
| suspension that presumably is a right listed in the
| applicable TOS.
| betaby wrote:
| Because law enforcement is for the rich, that's why.
| ccvannorman wrote:
| snarky and oversimplified, but basically true.
| perl4ever wrote:
| In the US, there's something called a class action lawsuit.
|
| "As of July 1, 2010, Quiznos was close to reaching a
| settlement over the multiyear class-action lawsuit that
| covers nearly 10,000 of its current and former franchisees.
| The case comprises four separate class-action lawsuits
| dating back to 2006 which consolidated in 2009 -- involved
| allegations by attorneys for franchisees that Quiznos
| Franchise Co. LLC and other entities with ownership or
| control of the Quiznos chain had violated U.S. racketeering
| and corruption statutes."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiznos
| ourmandave wrote:
| For them it was the end of it all. For google, it was a Tuesday.
| ksec wrote:
| Normally I would have blame Google for it. But the whole post
| doesn't rhyme with me for some reason. The tone, the lack of
| information about themselves. I had to google it and found
| 6AceGames [1], all of their games are gambling games. Email
| address, Facebook and Twitter registered in May _2021_. Lots of
| other small things.
|
| [1] http://www.6acegames.com/#contact-section
| rkk3 wrote:
| > Email address, Facebook and Twitter registered in May 2021
|
| Their Youtube is from August 2018, 2.5 years ago just like they
| claim in the post. Maybe they just got a new marketing person
| in May instead of it being a "smoking gun" of some conspiracy
|
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWD2aHKFeC_rxDv3d49GOKA/abo...
| kumarm wrote:
| Looking at their App Brain page, they are 3 year old company as
| claimed. You can look at their games here:
| https://www.appbrain.com/dev/6Ace+Games/
|
| They do seem to exaggerate on their website about total
| downloads (1M Vs 10M), Employee size etc.
| TechnoTimeStop wrote:
| I thought this too. Looks like hacker news is being used for
| social engineering attacks on systems as we know it.
| cyansmoker wrote:
| OP talks at length about being hacked. This, of course, would
| ring some alarm bells as far as protecting their user base.
|
| Then, you post this contact form, which is not protected by
| https.
|
| So, google is not dev-friendly. We know that. We have seen
| legitimate horror stories.
|
| However, at what point should google step in and protect their
| customer base from folks who do not care about their safety?
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| A million downloads for a company founded in May is pretty
| good, right? Is that be typical?
| judge2020 wrote:
| Maybe, but a gambling app with localized listings for the top
| markets (India, US, Brazil, Indonesia, Russia, Mexico[0]) can
| get you to 1 million with very little effort.
|
| 0: https://apptweak-
| blog.imgix.net/images/2019/08/18/total%20do... (from
| https://www.apptweak.com/en/aso-blog/infographic-
| countries-w... )
| josephcsible wrote:
| Even if the company is sketchy, shouldn't they be told very
| clearly exactly why they were banned, so they can appeal it if
| it's wrong? Imagine how ridiculous it would be if you could
| lose a court case without having been allowed to see the
| evidence.
| MichaelBurge wrote:
| You only give people details if they're a good-faith actor.
| If a spam bot leaves garbage on my blog, I don't configure my
| spam filter to send them the exact words and phrases that get
| them detected.
|
| I don't know anything about this company, but the other
| comments are giving the vibe that this company is similar in
| social status to a spam bot and Google's customer support is
| correct to cut them off with no explanation.
| cturhan wrote:
| Mobile stores are different. If Google explains details, they
| will understand how google found out so they will develop
| better tactics to not be banned next time.
| grogenaut wrote:
| Not apologizing for Google but if you give out too many
| details of why you banned someone you give people a) leverage
| in a lawsuit, b) information on what you are what suspect
| triggers they are looking for, making it easier for people to
| avoid automated detectoin.
| josephcsible wrote:
| I acknowledge that those points are true, but IMO, that
| should just be too bad for Google and they should have to
| tell anyway.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Looks pretty sketchy indeed.
|
| The post says 15 developers, their website 65+. The reviews are
| written in the same broken English as their website.
|
| Their flagship game, "Tonk", is nowhere to be found in the
| Apple App Store, but there are two other games with a very
| similar logo, published by other India-based companies. The
| same on Play store, where a bunch of identical looking games,
| with different publisher names, share similar logos [1].
|
| [1]
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=tonk.board.car...
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| If that's the case it really seems like some scammers got
| their just deserts. Ironically, an example of Google's
| policies working well.
| Jensson wrote:
| But what would scammers gain for complaining about Google?
| It isn't like they can pressure Google to reinstate their
| account in that case, worst case for Google they would have
| to make a public statement saying these people are
| scammers. I mean, yeah as long as Google doesn't answer
| they can get some minimal public support, but what would
| they gain from that?
| 2cb wrote:
| They've gained free SEO, traffic, and publicity from this
| HN thread alone.
| wussboy wrote:
| Right? Might as well try. The only other option is to go
| quietly into that good night.
| Cheezemansam wrote:
| >But what would scammers gain for complaining about
| Google?
|
| Well, it is probably more what do they have to lose?
| Plenty of internet hate mobs have formed backing a cause
| that later came out to be misleading, if not outright
| fraudulent. Even assuming they are scammers, it is quite
| possible they think they are in the right (there are
| cultures that have... different views about business
| ethics), but they could also just be rolling the dice.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Yes, I have the same feeling, something smells here, I'd expect
| them to be more humble once they got twitter account attention
| but replies look like incoherent blind swings.
| f6v wrote:
| OP: _tells a sad story of how their infrastructure has been
| hacked_
|
| Also OP: _has no https on the web site_
|
| Anyway, the story gives strange vibes.
| 2cb wrote:
| The manager of the company (we can guess likely the CEO since
| it's a small startup) was infected by a trojan that stole
| passwords from his computer, but they're certain it didn't
| infect the network because they "wiped the hard drive." And
| it couldn't have got to user data because that's hosted in
| the cloud. Of course the fact the login details are likely on
| infected computers makes no difference at all...
|
| Yeah usually I am the first to grab my pitchforks against
| tech giants like Google but the devs are only telling a one
| sided story here and their business looks far from legit, and
| that team of amazing devs doesn't seem very competent either
| if they keep installing trojans.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| And note the timing. I suspect the hack did something evil
| to the deployed version and Google picked up on it.
| busymom0 wrote:
| Note that I am the "OP" as in I posted the link to HN but I
| am not the author or the developer whose story this is about.
|
| Regarding https, looks like the parent comment linked to the
| "www" version of their site. Their non-www version does have
| https:
|
| https://6acegames.com
|
| Not defending the author's cleanliness or shadiness, just
| pointing out the facts.
| 2cb wrote:
| Very sloppy for it to not even do a 301 redirect though.
| Even if you use one of those basic website builder services
| they will do that as standard.
|
| Decided to run SSL Labs on the site out of curiosity[1] and
| they still have TLS 1.0 activated as well. That's just poor
| SSL config. A software company supposedly made up of
| talented coders should know way better.
|
| [1] https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=6acegame
| s.com
| TekMol wrote:
| I had the same feeling reading the post. Looking at their
| website and social media makes me even more sceptical.
|
| They say they are a team of developers working on this for 3
| years and having millions of users.
|
| And then they have exactly two Twitter followers?
|
| No address or company type in their contact section? An Alexa
| rank of over 3 million? A website that is not in the wayback
| machine?
| koheripbal wrote:
| OP is being opaque and probably exaggerating, And yet I still
| suspect that the underlying claim is true - Google likely did
| kill the project by killing their dev account.
|
| This is still a fundamental problem with having only two
| global centralized app stores.
| x0x0 wrote:
| Nobody is arguing whether Google killed their account.
|
| We're saying they trip tons of shady heuristics, and we're
| skeptical there wasn't a solid reason. Particularly when
| the majority of games were free -- there's tons of very
| shady monetization strategies out there, particularly for
| games involving gambling.
|
| Plus, for example, a twitter account that either started
| May 9, or was scrubbed. For a company with claimed millions
| of users.
|
| Bundle ids against a domain -- sixace.com -- which they
| don't appear to own.
|
| No company information that I can find on the internet or
| LinkedIn.
|
| Fake testimonials on their website with stolen images from
| the internet.
|
| No company information in the UK company database for
| either 6ace or sixace, despite a claimed address of
| "61,hallwicks road,Luton,Bedfordshire,London-LU2 9BG".
|
| etc etc. All this screams sketchy.
| 2cb wrote:
| > No company information in the UK company database for
| either 6ace or sixace, despite a claimed address of
| "61,hallwicks road,Luton,Bedfordshire,London-LU2 9BG".
|
| To be fair it is common for a UK company to have a
| generic name and for various activities run under it to
| trade under different names.
|
| Usually however when the company is legitimate the footer
| of the website will say "Brand Name is a trading name for
| Actual Company Name Limited" where the company name will
| be registered at Companies House.
|
| Not the case here, cannot see any info on the actual
| company, couldn't actually find a mention of that address
| anywhere on the site either where did you get it from?
|
| That's a residential address for a random house in Luton.
| Not uncommon for a small company to be registered to a
| residential property, but the address doesn't seem to be
| in Companies House records.
|
| Anyway I do agree this is sending off all sorts of red
| flags for me too, I think the post is telling a very one
| sided story and Google in this specific case has
| legitimate reason to ban that dodgy developer account.
| x0x0 wrote:
| The address was prominently displayed on their play store
| pages.
|
| eg https://ibb.co/mFTpzCC
| 2cb wrote:
| Thanks. Since no company is registered under that address
| I'd bet there simply is no company and the guy is just a
| sole trader under the name Six Ace Games. No official
| registration needed for that, you just have to report the
| income to HMRC (taxman) and that's it.
| TekMol wrote:
| Well, something does not add up.
|
| If you make games you are proud of, why would you hide your
| identity?
| JesusRobotics wrote:
| I've noticed a lot mobile games that are also on steam.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| No real due diligence often leads to "disasters" like this.
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