[HN Gopher] Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies:...
___________________________________________________________________
Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from
hell
Author : ajdude
Score : 324 points
Date : 2022-01-17 15:21 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sylviavanos.nl)
(TXT) w3m dump (sylviavanos.nl)
| jeffbee wrote:
| The play store review program is there to serve the installing
| users, not the app authors, so even a high rate of obvious false
| positives is probably considered acceptable.
| simion314 wrote:
| >The play store review program is there to serve the installing
| users, not the app authors, so even a high rate of obvious
| false positives is probably considered acceptable.
|
| This article should provove that Google incompetence exists and
| it works in both ways, it blocks good apps and there is no
| reason why bad apps would get away. I mean code like
|
| if(shity title translation constains an word from
| illegalWordsInEnglishList) proves there is no super clever AI
| here but at best a quick workaround , so if quick workaround or
| shity code is allowed why would you be convinced that the
| "security" scans are better? (we found that 100% Apple security
| scans are as bad so I won't be surprised if a Google dev also
| created a list of illegalAPUIs and does a naive search that
| clever developers can get around with a bit of clever
| reflection/dynaimc class or obfuscation)
|
| TL:DR I am not convinced that badly implemented policies and
| shiutty implemented security scans do not affect the users.
| pastrybanking wrote:
| The implementation of the Play Stores policies for consumers is
| also fundamentally broken. In my country's version of the Play
| Store, the number two ranking app is currently rated at 2.6
| with multiple complaints of users losing money to an alleged
| scam.
| Hizonner wrote:
| So, how am I "served" by being denied actually useful apps,
| while I am still offered a vast array of malware and crap?
| mondo2000 wrote:
| Maybe I missed something, but I don't see how Google's conduct
| relates to the other app stores, as mentioned near the beginning
| of the article. Did she leave that part out?
| foxfluff wrote:
| Some Google engineer probably thought they were very clever when
| they applied "the algorithm" to translated titles.
|
| Pretty fucking draconian some of those rules, if you ask me. In
| games and works of art it's not uncommon to have a title longer
| than 30 characters. Nevermind when you have different editions or
| things that are related to the main title.
|
| So how does this actually work? Why is 'Life is Strange: Before
| the Storm' (33 characters) on Google Play?
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.squareenix...
| f137 wrote:
| Until recently the limit was 35, and 50 earlier still.
|
| Google enforces new limits on app updates, so this game was not
| updated recently.
| bitwize wrote:
| The rules can be and are waived for big-time publishers.
| donarb wrote:
| It just amazes me that developers try to cram editorializing into
| the title of the app, when you're already given a search word
| field and a description field in which to tell the world about
| your app. IRL nobody searches for "Cheerios - Toasted Whole Grain
| Oat Cereal for the Whole Family".
| [deleted]
| phreack wrote:
| It's sad but if you search for 'cereal', you're going to see
| the one with the awful title higher up in rankings.
| stickfigure wrote:
| I feel this just shows lack of imagination in the search
| algorithm. It seems pretty trivial to discourage this kind of
| thing - to start with, how about penalizing longer titles or
| longer lists of keywords?
|
| Let the publisher decide whether to rank low for lots of
| words, or high for a few.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Why even have names then? Might as well just be a serial number
| that isn't displayed, and a bag of keyword fields that also
| aren't displayed but can be searched.
|
| A name has to convey some sort of meaning, otherwise everything
| will be a billion versions of Verizon. A toothbrush would be
| indistiguishable from a tax prep software by their names.
|
| And of course people search for every one of those words in
| that long cheerios name. You can't search for a thing by it's
| short unique meaningless name until _after_ you find it by
| searching for what you want, like toasted oat cereal or wallet
| of freedom.
| jsnell wrote:
| So, the relevant bit from the Play Store policy documents is
| probably: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-
| developer/answ...
|
| That policy seems very reasonable. Is the policy being misapplied
| here? Hard to say, since it's describing the spirit of the rules
| rather than an exhaustive list of specific violations. It doesn't
| seem that anything in the title would be misleading. But the
| original title is kind of irrelevant; whether the app is libre or
| not has no bearing on its functionality.
| xeromal wrote:
| Yeah, once I caught gist of what was bothering them, I would've
| just nuked Libre from the title and all translations.
|
| Just call it the Card Wallet and be done with it.
| sdoering wrote:
| This would be practical - but what about companies like "Free
| Now" that are (at least currently) seemingly allowed to keep
| operating under that name in the Play store.
|
| Why delete something from the name that is actually
| transporting information for the user just because Google
| arbitrarily decides that for this rue the mistranslation
| comprises a rule break while other apps (with probably bigger
| marketing spend on Google) are allowed to keep "Free" in the
| name.
|
| Imho is not the rules per se. It is the mistranslation and
| also the arbitrary enforcement that reminds me personally of
| stories by Kafka (the author, not the tech).
| xeromal wrote:
| If your livelihood is tied to an app in the store being
| published, you gotta play ball.
|
| If you can survive with or without the app being published,
| then I'd definitely take a crack at trying to explain to
| Google what their problem is.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Once I had my app rejected from Google Play, because they decided
| it was plagiarizing another application... which was actually the
| very same application posted by me somewhere else. Took some
| effort to convince them that I'm me, even despite of my Google
| account being registered on a domain that's prominently displayed
| as the first thing after launching the app.
|
| Another time, they suddenly decided that "No information is
| gathered from users whatsoever." is not a valid privacy policy
| for a Free Software application that does not gather any
| information (it was a simple game that couldn't even store
| highscores locally).
| neoneye2 wrote:
| I have a similar story about the App Store. I wanted to move my
| app to another owner, but Apple has detected it's a plagiarism of
| my original app. Now I have neither the original app on the App
| Store, and the new owners app is stuck. It seems to be automated
| rejection without a human taking an actual look at the problem.
|
| My app is open source
| https://github.com/triangledraw/TriangleDraw-iOS
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| which one is more incompetent as a service company - Amazon,
| Google, Facebook, or Apple?
|
| I think my ranking would be Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, but
| that is not so much decided via any sort of logical evaluation
| but only due to my feeling on the matter.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| For all the problems Amazon has and causes I will say I've
| always found their support to be pretty excellent. From what I
| understand Amazon's foundibg philosophy is focused on just
| serving the customer at the cost of any other externality and
| that's where most of the conterversy surrounding them comes
| from is placing whatever is needed to please the customer above
| every other concern. But that means when working with them they
| are pretty great.
|
| Whereas it seems like Google and Facebook view you as a
| resource simply to have value extracted from and moved on.
|
| As for Apple, well there are no problems you're just holding
| the phone wrong.
| smallerfish wrote:
| Amazon's FBA support on the other hand is horrendous,
| possibly betraying their more adversarial relationship with
| their sellers. I was so annoyed by repeated incompetence that
| not only did I stop doing FBA side projects, but I (mostly)
| cut out my Amazon shopping and am unlikely to recommend AWS
| as a first option to a client in future.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I've personally never contacted Facebook or Google support,
| seems like a futile effort. I do agree out of all the
| companies, Amazon seems to have support figured out the most,
| at least they make it easy for the customer. I had a package
| that was not delivered, actually pretty sure it was delivered
| but then stolen (apartment had a package locker so it was the
| delivery drivers fault).
|
| When I contacted Amazon I was expecting them to talk for a
| while to determine what happened but no, immediate no
| questions asked refund. Amazon I'm sure has issues around
| delivery, but as a customer I could care less if a package
| gets lost once in a while if the company is immediately going
| to correct the issue.
| derbOac wrote:
| Not everyone has the same experiences with Amazon. I guess
| I've had pretty good experiences with Amazon as a retail
| customer per se, in terms of delivery and returns, but beyond
| that it's an entirely different story.
|
| I had an experience very similar to the one in this article,
| for example:
|
| https://consumerist.com/2013/06/18/amazon-cancels-
| my-6000-or...
| bkav wrote:
| Google is awful. I worked at a company in a now-legal business
| with a YouTube channel from the not-as-legal days... it has
| incredibly unprofessional and embarrassing branded footage and
| there was nothing we were able to do to pull the channel down.
| (No one currently working there has the login)
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| I think AWS is the best, but only because you can have a paid
| support plan, and real humans will reply to your support
| requests.
| wvenable wrote:
| I've used Amazon support proper for Fire TV stick issues and
| a human (via chat) was able to resolve my problem relatively
| quickly and painlessly.
| masklinn wrote:
| Never interacted with facebook in any position, the rest is
| completely correct.
|
| Google is absolutely trash at support, Apple is quite bad (in
| store support used to be rather good, services was always
| shit), Amazon is competent at least.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| For the record I had a simple oauth problem flagged by
| Facebook and emailed with a number of humans there
| successfully. I'm a non enterprise/paying dev. It felt
| reasonably okay and quick, as if they read and listened to my
| responses.
| disruptiveink wrote:
| Amazon is also in the easiest position to offer support,
| since for the bulk of support queries, if all else fails,
| they can just absorb the cost and refund the customer. The
| customer is usually not any worse than when they started if
| they do this.
|
| The money spent on a purchase is fungible. There is no
| obvious monetary refund to give to someone who can't update
| their app, got their YouTube channel taken down or got their
| Instagram handle stolen.
| invalidname wrote:
| We had a similar experience to the one here:
| https://dev.to/codenameone/google-play-kafkaesque-experience...
|
| Google is worse than Apple in many regards.
| nopakos wrote:
| I once got a warning for sexual content. The offensive phrase was
| "Virgin Mary".
| raverbashing wrote:
| So the right hand built machine translation and the left hand
| falls for naive Scunthorp problems like it's an intern writing
| a PHP app? (Or worse, a human with zero critical thinking)
|
| Why am I not surprised...
| bilalq wrote:
| I've run into issues with both Google and Apple that were just
| ridiculous.
|
| One time, Google randomly ceased payment processing for our app.
| When I reached out to them, the support staff were not at all
| helpful and said an "account specialist" would be needed and that
| they would forward the case along. Afterwards, I got an email
| saying that they would respond in 24-48 hours. After days of
| waiting, they finally message me asking for passport photos. I
| send them over, get another "24-48 hour message", and then two
| days later they reply back saying they want the exact same
| documents again. Insane! I send it again and mention that I
| already sent these. They wait two days and reply back that they
| actually want my co-founder's passport now. I reply back with
| that. Then they send another "please wait 24-48 hours" message.
|
| At this point, I tried reaching out to friends at Google to see
| if they could escalate internally for me. A case got created, but
| two days later I get an email saying that this is something that
| the Google Pay team manages, not the Play Store team. Apparently,
| Google's org chart was my problem.
|
| After all this, a response comes back saying "Your account is
| currently suspended you submitted documents which cannot be used
| to verify your account details. Our team has responded to you
| with specifics about what needs to be submitted in order for them
| to complete our review." Except they hadn't. I responded back
| about how both my cofounder and I submitted every document they
| asked for multiple times and answered all their questions to no
| avail. I pleaded with them to please let me speak to a human
| about this. After yet another agonizing 96 hours, our case was
| resolved and payment processing was re-enabled. We were bleeding
| money at the time and had been paying thousands of dollars a
| month to their ridiculous 30% highway robbery tax on
| subscriptions.
|
| While not quite as bad, Apple blocked an app update because the
| current reviewer didn't like our subscription group separation.
| The only problem is that the app release in question had no such
| changes and the subscription group setup had already been
| approved in a previous release. The setup made sense and used
| common practices for A/B testing different prices, but the Apple
| agent we got on the phone with wouldn't have it. They insisted we
| release an update that would break existing subscribers to comply
| with their policies. Two bugfix updates were rejected for
| nonsensical reasons. We went through an escalation channel to get
| them out. When we submitted updates again, the reviewers
| magically had no more issues with things they'd already approved
| in the past.
|
| Forcing a 30% cut isn't even the worst offense of these app
| stores. There's literally no easy recourse when things go wrong.
| ComradePhil wrote:
| I'm genuinely interested in hearing from people who believe that
| Apple and Google should have a monopoly on deciding what apps
| people can run on their phones.
|
| In case of Google's Android, one can still install third party
| App Stores, even they take away auto-updates and such. Apple is a
| much worse offender.
|
| In either case, why does anyone think that they should have a
| monopoly there and why is nothing being done to fight it? Many
| years ago the EU forced Microsoft to release Windows versions
| without a default media player or a default browser. Yet, nothing
| has been done to Apple and Google. Why?
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| > I'm genuinely interested in hearing from people who believe
| that Apple and Google should have a monopoly on deciding what
| apps people can run on their phones.
|
| It's not so much that I prefer that Apple/Google can decide
| what I can install on _my_ phone, it's that I prefer that they
| decide for my mother and father who click on every 'accept'
| button without reading to just get it out of the way, or my
| aunt who forwards every facebook scam she encounters and every
| a-technical person in my life who I would have to bail out time
| and again if this were not the case.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| I'm not actually so sure of that.
|
| Despite the "review" process at Google, my grandparents still
| managed to infect their Android devices with all kinds of
| malicious apps (mostly adware).
|
| Interestingly, neither have ever installed a virus on their
| Windows PCs.
| freedomben wrote:
| If there was an option in the settings menu to disable this,
| would you be worried about your mother and father finding it
| and changing it from the (safe) default?
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| Yes.
| balls187 wrote:
| > I'm genuinely interested in hearing from people who believe
| that Apple
|
| I'm old. I like that I can generally trust installing apps on
| my phone because Apple vets them. It is one less thing for me
| to think about.
|
| Likewise, I have young children. I also like that I can
| generally install an age appropriate app for them, because
| Apple's vetting process. Again one less thing for me to think
| about.
|
| On the flip side, I banned the kids youtube app, until Google
| came down hard and removed ads and started moderating videos
| aimed at kids. Prior to that, it's algorithm was serving up
| highly questionable content to kids. Now, I feel more confident
| letting my kids watch videos on Kids Youtube (though I
| typically have the sound off...)
| phreack wrote:
| But the question is why you shouldn't be able to sideload an
| app at all. Having a curated store is pretty cool, and you
| can have that while also letting users install their own apps
| manually (even with barriers, making it as hard as they
| like).
| elzbardico wrote:
| Just refuse to buy an IPhone and buy only android phones.
| It is not like you don't have an option. But for me and a
| lot of people, apple's walled garden is a feature, not a
| bug. I don't see why apple should be forced to change it
| just because YOU don't like it, when it is not like you're
| forced to have an iOS device.
| balls187 wrote:
| Apple's stance was (IIRC from my days as a mobile dev--it
| may have since changed) was instead of side-loading of
| apps, that there is the web, and people would be free to
| utilize webapps.
|
| ios Safari puts in place some limitation (sandboxing,
| constraint device apis) to guard against malicious actors,
| but it is not curated the same way ios App Store is.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| Developers only put up with the curated app store because
| it's the only option. If there was an alternative, major
| companies would mostly choose to bypass the app store,
| leaving it a barren wasteland like the Mac app store.
|
| If Apple allowed sideloading but went out of their way to
| make it obnoxious enough that everything which could be
| would still go through the app store, you'd just have all
| of the exact same complaints about how Apple is
| deliberately making things painful for users.
| duhast wrote:
| How would you realistically solve this problem? Part of what
| makes these platforms so attractive to the end user is in fact
| app curation. Strict control over APIs and power usage, all
| sorts of minimum standards and mandatory integrations are
| contributing enormous value to these ecosystems.
| Ostrogodsky wrote:
| I coulda/sorta buy this argument for Apple(though I am pretty
| sure that is not the main reason people buy Iphones) , but
| for Android?? Curation??? Hahahahhahahahahaha
| foxfluff wrote:
| I would allow fair competition and let the user choose.
|
| You don't need a monopoly to have curated storefronts. For
| example, GOG is curated and if I don't like their curation, I
| can look at Steam or a plethora of other stores.
|
| F-Droid has its own kind of curation, which I prefer to
| Google's curation; it gives me a decent guarantee that I'm
| looking at free software, and antifeatures are usually
| hilighted. However, I don't have to use F-Droid if I don't
| want to.
|
| So maybe another entity can provide better curation that
| Google does. And maybe another entity can offer an uncurated
| store; if users prefer that, it's their choice.
| duhast wrote:
| Users are consistently choosing locked down Apple ecosystem
| over more open Android. How are you going to explain this?
|
| You also need to realise that you're not an average user.
| You're in 0.0001% of the population when it comes to use of
| technology and your preferences might not reflect the
| average Joe.
|
| Most phones would quickly fill up with apps doing malware,
| phishing, spam, crypto mining and DDoS attacks.
| nottorp wrote:
| > Users are consistently choosing locked down Apple
| ecosystem over more open Android. How are you going to
| explain this?
|
| The choice is not only based on the app ecosystem. I
| started with Android phones because why pay the Apple
| tax? They had so many problems I eventually bought an
| iPhone and never looked back.
|
| As for the "ecosystem", I'm probably an outlier but I'm
| so disgusted by all the IAP crap available in both
| "ecosystems" that my phone is basically an expensive
| portable chat terminal. I have almost no other apps on
| it.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _Users are consistently choosing locked down Apple
| ecosystem over more open Android. How are you going to
| explain this?_
|
| Anecdata, but of the couple dozen people I know well, 18
| or so choose Apple, 1 does so because her husband is an
| iOS dev and it's the only thing she knows, and only 1
| does so (at least he claims) because he likes the locked
| down nature of it. I usually point out that he doesn't
| really, because he uses his developer to account to
| sideload apps onto his device, but for some reason that
| argument gets nowhere with him. 6 or so of the others do
| so because that's what their company gave them (either
| now or in the past). Nearly all of them stay with Apple
| because they have a big investment now in apps and
| purchases that they lose if they move. And of course iOS
| is what they know, and most people stick with the devil
| you know over the devil you don't know.
|
| But how do I explain this? I think it's a multi variable
| equation. No doubt Apple is known for quality and
| deserves this reputation (although the last few years
| they've been losing this on the software side). There's
| also no doubt a lot of people who view it as a status
| symbol. My son wants an iPhone so bad because he doesn't
| want to be a "green bubble" anymore. He's never even used
| one, it's purely social pressure. I doubt adults are
| immune to this stuff either. There's also a pool of
| people that truly prefer to be powerless over what they
| run on their device. I guess they are afraid that if
| sideloading is an option, they will decide to sideload
| apps from sketchy sources and get themselves infected
| with malware.
| foxfluff wrote:
| > Users are consistently choosing locked down Apple
| ecosystem over more open Android. How are you going to
| explain this?
|
| Not true in my part of the world. I don't know, maybe
| people over there see iPhone as a status symbol? Or just
| think it's the best phone? Or maybe they trust Apple more
| than they trust G. I'm glad they can make the choice!
|
| > You also need to realise that you're not an average
| user. You're in 0.0001% of the population when it comes
| to use of technology and your preferences might not
| reflect the average Joe.
|
| I fail to see how this is relevant to the discussion.
|
| > Most phones would quickly fill up with apps doing
| malware, phishing, spam, crypto mining and DDoS attacks.
|
| I disagree. Most users would consistently choose to stick
| to a locked down store they trust; in your part of the
| world, perhaps that'd be the Apple store if they trust
| locked down ecosystems as much as you think. But in a
| world where the platform's blessed app store isn't a
| monopoly, they'd have other alternatives to choose from.
|
| A small fraction of users would be tricked into
| installing malware, but it's not as if they were immune
| to that right now.
| Hizonner wrote:
| What makes these platforms attractive to the end user is that
| they're the only things available for sale down at the phone
| store. And what makes the decision between the two available
| choices is what your friends have, or what you already have,
| or what's on sale, or about a trillion other things that are
| more likely to be "top of mind" for the average buyer.
|
| I bet not one user in 1000 gives any thought to "app
| curation" before they choose a phone.
| dkarl wrote:
| I very much appreciate how freely I can install apps from
| the app store. I hear about, I install it, I try it out, no
| worries. Whereas without curation I'd spend twenty minutes
| making sure it was mentioned by multiple sites or people I
| trust and doing a set of web searches to check for reports
| of malicious behavior, and I'd _still_ worry about it,
| especially about updates. Putting out a good, well-behaved
| app and then putting out a malicious update that is
| required for the app to work with the latest OS update
| would be a common malware vector.
|
| I'd probably uninstall half my apps every major OS update.
| _How often do I use this app? Once a month? Is it worth
| doing a few quick web searches to see if the latest update
| is malicious? Nah, just delete it. I can do without._
|
| Once or twice I've had to install a major OS update just a
| few days after it was released, which would mean no time
| for other people to discover malicious app updates. What
| would I do then? Just roll the dice? What if the initial
| update is fine, but then a week later it's replaced with a
| malicious one, to catch people who put off updating?
| freedomben wrote:
| I completely agree with you on the value of curation.
|
| But why not have a setting deep in the menu to allow
| sideloading unapproved apps? If Joe Block is able to opt
| in to the uncurated minefield, does that harm you or take
| away from you ability to enjoy curation?
| [deleted]
| ComradePhil wrote:
| I would not mind my apps on iOS being curated by Microsoft
| for example and some people would probably prefer their apps
| on Android devices being curated by Apple... or Microsoft or
| EFF or Mozilla or Signal or say a new community of volunteers
| who come together just for this purpose.
|
| It could also be that I trust a group of vendors while I
| don't trust some others as a user. For example, someone would
| maybe want their Android apps to be delivered by Apple,
| Samsung and Mozilla... but not by Google or Amazon for
| example.
|
| The phone makers could still control their frontends and
| interface of their stores as they please... but to absolutely
| not allow certain apps from vendors altogether even if the
| user REALLY wants to install it on their device is a
| completely different thing (which is the case now as far as
| Apple is concerned).
|
| Note: In the above examples when I am naming companies and
| organizations, I'm imagining a world where any of these
| companies can have hosting service for their own curated list
| of apps where developers would submit their apps for various
| platforms and users can add these as sources on their App
| Store. There could be a chain of trust for new app store
| source vendor, where a group of third party organizations
| decide who to give or take away these rights from.
| freedomben wrote:
| This is exactly the point I try to make but to no avail. I
| don't understand why it's so hard for most people to see
| that you can still have a curated app store even if there's
| an option buried in the menu to allow power users to
| subscribe to additional stores, or sideload, etc.
|
| If there's any Apple people who think that would be bad,
| I'd love to hear about it. So far it's been nearly
| impossible to get an answer on that. At that point the
| argument usually changes to "just get an Android if that's
| what you want" or "nobody but you cares about that" or "if
| you want to sideload just pay the annual developer fee" or
| "Apple's curation is a lot better than Google's" (which is
| an entirely different argument I would point out).
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Legislation mandating all platforms to allow for third party
| app stores to exist with zero functionality/feature penalties
| in terms of what those apps are able to do (Apple can't
| gatekeep certain features as only supported by Apple app
| store apps). I would dovetail this with legislation limiting
| app store cuts to 5%.
| Const-me wrote:
| > Strict control over APIs and power usage
|
| These are doable with technical measures. Modern OS kernels
| are multi-user, when implemented properly, their user
| isolation features are very hard to break. If an OS doesn't
| want apps to have some APIs, it shouldn't expose that API to
| apps. For instance, Linux doesn't allow users to pretend
| they're someone else, but that's not enforces by curation,
| instead the APIs like setresuid() only work if the caller is
| a root.
|
| Similarly, if the OS doesn't like high resource usage of
| background services, it has technical tools to enforce
| various limits. An easy enforcement method is killing the
| offending process. For instance, in Windows Phone 7,
| background audio agents were limited to 15 MB RAM. If a
| background audio process exceeds that limit, the OS silently
| kills the process, audio stops playing.
|
| When something is doable with technical measures or curation,
| technical measures are almost always better because the
| curation is fundamentally unreliable.
| VRay wrote:
| ugh, that's annoying.. At least you made it onto HackerNews, so
| your problem might get silently resolved in the shadows
|
| It really sucks that Google can't be bothered to provide 5
| minutes of human support despite taking such an enormous cut of
| all revenue from these apps
| duhast wrote:
| 1. It wouldn't be 5 minutes. This could easily take hours to
| resolve.
|
| 2. Even with human support, companies like this would continue
| to be incentivised not to share what exactly triggered the ban
| in order to protect their systems from spam and abuse. You
| can't provide services to billions of people without
| automation.
|
| 3. Human reviews would be performed by humans. Have you ever
| met humans? You're replacing an imperfect system with another
| imperfect system except now things are slower and cost more.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _in order to protect their systems from spam and abuse_
|
| Spam and abuse would fall afoul of the CFAA in the US and
| similar laws in the EU.
|
| Outside of the US? Well maybe those apps shouldn't even be
| available in the US or EU.
|
| Spam and abuse only happens because the criminals
| perpetuating it do it without real consequence.
| pixl97 wrote:
| On number 2, why?
|
| If your program is abusive, have the abuser remove the
| function until it's no longer abusive. The entire we cant
| tell you does seem like crap.
| lbriner wrote:
| > not to share what exactly triggered the ban in order to
| protect their systems from spam and abuse
|
| That's kind of true but I think that a company the size of
| Google could afford to assign someone to look into providing
| more information in a scenario like, "you are using geo-
| location without asking permission". Since the need for
| permission is not a secret, telling the vendor this causes
| less friction and makes people hate you a bit less.
|
| Sure, you might also have a "secret" system that does
| something like "if failed 5 times in a row, blacklist them"
| but that is just security by obscurity and doesn't seem to
| stop that many people. Also, in the case where the vendor is
| an easily verifiable company selling, presumably, something
| that is fairly easy to view/check, it doesn't seem to be
| asking for much to either get a human or to get some
| automated messages.
|
| Apparently they employ 140K people! That is a lot of people
| to not provide any human support.
| metalised wrote:
| That's what I was hoping about my similar problem with
| facebook, but alas ... no kind HN denizens have offerred any
| help yet :)
|
| Post is still here if anyone's interested or can help:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29876423
| quambene wrote:
| Right, my history of suffering went on for 11 months.
|
| Unfortunately, I don't know anyone at Google and I didn't made
| it to HN.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| I've read the post, its just how it is with their policies being
| evaluated by automations and not humans. Nothing you can do but
| work around them sadly.
| onion2k wrote:
| _I've read the post, its just how it is with their policies
| being evaluated by automations and not humans._
|
| No, it's definitely a problem with the humans. It's just that
| the humans in question aren't customer support humans. It's
| Google's engineering humans that are to blame for shipping
| these poor quality experiences. They might be able to invert
| binary trees on whiteboards pretty well, but they suck at
| making an HTML page that explains why their system isn't
| working for you.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| The engineers at Google Play really have got to feel
| embarrassed at how bad this situation has been over the
| years. How could they have a conversation with an Android
| developer that's had to deal with the lack of support?
| justin_oaks wrote:
| I find it interesting that people blame the engineers when
| they're the bottom of the hierarchy. It's their bosses that
| prioritize their work, decide whether their work is good
| enough, and decide whether to fix something that's broken.
|
| It's not the individual engineers who decide whether the
| company will have a culture of helping users and/or app
| developers, or treating them like resources to exploit.
|
| It's not the individual engineers who choose to have no
| humans involved in the app review process.
|
| Some engineers are incompetent, yes, but it's the bosses who
| keep the incompetent folks working at the company instead of
| finding better people.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| Engineers at Google can get a job anywhere. They choose to
| work for Google despite building and maintaining a
| substandard product.
|
| Google engineers have a _lot_ of leverage. I refuse to
| pretend that they can 't influence product quality.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Google engineers potentially _can_ get a job anywhere but
| may not want to for multiple reasons:
|
| 1) The pay, plain and simple.
|
| 2) Google-scale problems are a very specific kind of
| problem that may not apply to other companies. I'm sure
| most of the engineers would be competent at dealing with
| smaller companies' problems, but maybe they don't want
| to?
|
| The interviewing process already selects for low-level
| LeetCode-style problems and I guess the ones who make it
| through must enjoy it. You're unlikely to have a need for
| those kinds of problems in smaller businesses where most
| of the work is CRUD and connecting APIs together.
|
| 3) At such a large company you could lay back, chill and
| most likely still fly under the radar while enjoying the
| money. This might be more difficult in smaller companies
| who are more demanding.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| Google and other trendy tech companies have a concept
| called Human Ops.
|
| Human ops is designed to improve and keep safe the mental
| health of its engineers. They do this by using machines
| to do all the dirty stuff as possible. Classic example is
| evil image flagging problems causing genuine
| psychological trauma, but it's extended now to everything
| engineers hate like drudge work, customer support etc.
|
| You'd need to convince the engineers that Human Ops is
| wrong first. Engineers like the shield and the
| corporation likes the cost cut.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| They're choosing to use machines to maintain their mental
| health by creating a product that impacts the mental
| health of their customers who get to deal with their
| revenue streams being cut off entirely, arbitrarily,
| often with no know reason or recourse. This argument
| makes the engineers look monstrous, not just mildly
| shitty.
| onion2k wrote:
| Google promotes engineers into leadership though. If you
| look through the board of Google, especially people who
| have titles like "Head of Customer Success"[1], you usually
| see they came up from engineering jobs. Google is not a
| company full of MBAs and pointy-haired bosses. These are
| decisions made by engineers (or at least _former_ engineers
| I guess).
|
| Also, it's _decidedly_ unreasonable to assume the
| leadership at Google are clueless idiots ordering helpless
| engineers around. There are _many_ layers of management and
| engineering, and all of them have to come together to get
| stuff done. At any point people at every level of the org
| could influence the direction of things like customer
| success around simple things like an error page. We 're not
| talking about the long term strategy of the whole business
| that's decided at a board level here.
|
| [1] Slightly unfair to link to someone, but here's an
| example: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/markpidgeon
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I see this and think of all the millions of apps that the
| code controls. I don't know how many do fail validation, but
| it's clearly not a vast number, definitely under 1%.
|
| Given that they're also clearly training a model for this,
| based on a large number of inputs and rules, then this is
| pretty good.
|
| Their end goal is clearly to be able to remove humans from
| this process completely. Which is good - it's shitty work.
|
| From my point of view as an app customer, this is fine. I
| don't see apps that fail validation, and there are too many
| (shitty) apps anyway - more validation is good.
|
| From my point of view as an entrepreneur, I approve. Clearly
| they can live with a certain level of false negatives, and
| that makes sense from a business point of view as they save
| so much in the validation process.
|
| From my point of view as a developer, however, it's a
| dumpster fire and I'm not going anywhere near it.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| > From my point of view as an entrepreneur, I approve.
|
| Sorry, I don't believe you here. If you were trying to get,
| say, a loan from the bank you've done business with for
| years but would only ever get vague replies and could never
| speak with a human, you'd be rightfully angry. There's
| nothing special about being an "entrepreneur" that makes
| this less problematic.
| onion2k wrote:
| _I don 't see apps that fail validation, and there are too
| many (shitty) apps anyway - more validation is good._
|
| You've failed to understand your own problem. You're seeing
| lots of shitty apps. That means the validation isn't
| working because part of the validation process is supposed
| to make sure apps are of sufficient quality. So no, you
| don't see apps that fail validation, you see apps that
| _should have_ failed validation. That 's worse, especially
| when the same validation is apparently rejecting good apps.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| I'm somehow both appalled, surprised, and _un_ surprised at the
| same time. Tech companies have a weird habit of jumping into
| language markets they don't actually have the staffing to
| properly serve. However, I never expected to see Google just
| outright machine-translating titles to do compliance checks on.
|
| > After 4 full days of trying to teach Google staff how a
| dictionary worked
|
| Google's moderation policy is to treat any sort of complicated
| business situation as some kind of DDOS attack, as if you
| e-mailed your appeal buried deep within a ZIP bomb. They have
| strict computation quotas on wetware.
| npteljes wrote:
| What OP unfortunately missed is a post like this: "Tell HN: You
| can't add "no ads" in your Play Store app's title"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29497680
| sschueller wrote:
| Sadly the feature to filter out apps that have ads or in app
| purchases does not exist. Probably on purpose.
|
| There are many utility apps with thousand of similar apps, most
| are garbage filled with ads but then there are a few made
| without app upselling or ads but until you find those you send
| a lot of time.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Clearly this was a fuck-up with machine learning, and while it is
| worrying, what's more worrying is the consequences when this goes
| beyond just developer app reviews.
|
| I'm worried we will have another British Post Office Scandal[1]
| but on a much worse scale. Bad technology coupled with everyone
| in charge thinking the technology is infallible.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
| javajosh wrote:
| This kind of incompetence makes me seriously doubt that Google is
| doing _anything_ to more substantially review apps for deeper
| security issues, either statically or at runtime.
|
| The asymmetry of effort in this situation is profound: consider
| that you spend all your time and effort writing a, long, complex,
| thoughtful message by hand (the app), taking hundreds or
| thousands of hours, but then they respond with machine generated
| message that cost them 10ms of computer time.
|
| The solution, I think, is obvious: Google needs a "zone defense"
| with the play store, a much larger (and expensive) staff, to do
| in-depth app reviews _and be a stable, stateful relationship with
| the developer over time_. This person would, in fact, become a
| 3rd party "expert" on a small set of apks and their contents,
| with a "feel" for what is changing over time, with the core
| mission of protecting users from malice, but working _with_ devs,
| as a human being.
| freedomben wrote:
| That sounds awesome to me, but if they were going to do that
| the cost of submitting an Android app (or the % take by Google
| on sale) would have to sky rocket to make it worth it. As
| someone who rejoices in small developers, I would hate to see
| that.
|
| I think it's ok to do automated review for round 1, but I would
| like to see a human field appeals. Over time I would also think
| that will help find edge cases and cracks in the automation so
| that it can be further improved.
|
| Edit: Based on other comments here, it sounds like that may be
| what Google is starting to do
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > This kind of incompetence makes me seriously doubt that
| Google is doing anything to more substantially review apps for
| deeper security issues, either statically or at runtime.
|
| I actually know the team that does security vuln automation for
| Google Play. They've found millions of vulns in apps over the
| years. One of the challenges they face is precisely this sort
| of headline: how do you use static analysis to find vulns and
| ensure that you don't inundate users with false positives,
| forcing them down the admittedly limited support channels.
|
| > The solution, I think, is obvious: Google needs a "zone
| defense" with the play store, a much larger (and expensive)
| staff, to do in-depth app reviews and be a stable, stateful
| relationship with the developer over time. This person would,
| in fact, become a 3rd party "expert" on a small set of apks and
| their contents, with a "feel" for what is changing over time,
| with the core mission of protecting users from malice, but
| working with devs, as a human being.
|
| This sort of exists. Google pays external hackers who find
| vulns in popular apps via a rewards program. These don't need
| to be Google's apps. There may be other systems for top
| partners or specific kinds of apps (the org is big) but I'm not
| aware of anything personally.
|
| Expanding beyond a small subset of apps is challenging. Not
| only are there millions of apps, _each app_ contains tens,
| hundreds, or even thousands of individual apks. The staff
| needed to have a concierge for each app would be absolutely
| freaking enormous, perhaps even larger than the number of
| people on the planet who actually have deep security expertise
| on the Android platform.
| advael wrote:
| Sounds to me like what you're saying is that the walled-
| garden approach of needing to approve every app that ever
| gets developed a whole is what's infeasible without creating
| kafkaesque conditions dealing with their automation, and I
| fail to see how you've made a case for this automation being
| all that good in the first place, given that your main
| argument for it is that it's found "millions of vulns in apps
| over the years" but then later cite "millions of apps" as a
| reason you can't expand the support team.
|
| I would suggest that it might be worthwhile to use OS-level
| features to stop apps from behaving maliciously in more
| general ways, but a lot of what I would consider malicious
| behavior (e.g. sending user analytics to third parties,
| feeding them misleading ads, messing with other processes,
| etc) is part of google's business model or claims of added
| value in many cases, so that seems unlikely to happen.
|
| You are nonetheless astute to point out that we can't really
| blame the individual or even group-wise incompetence of their
| support teams here. What it is worthwhile to blame is the
| entire business model of trying to own and control a platform
| that supports so many users in the first place without giving
| them the autonomy to self-govern. No company can possibly be
| so many things to so many people and not screw them over. In
| a way, it's the same problem planned economies have. Even
| making the very generous assumption that this is never out of
| malice or greed, we can still view the major problems
| millions of people face due to this scale and inflexibility
| as practically inevitable.
| javajosh wrote:
| _> Google pays external hackers who find vulns in popular
| apps via a rewards program._
|
| How does that work? Is the submission farmed out to a 3rd
| party as part of the verification process, and proactively
| checked? Or is it reactive, similar to a bug bounty? Are
| there people out there making their living running apks in
| desktop simulators looking for issues?
|
| I always wondered about the economics of checking huge
| quantities of arbitrary code (well, bytecode) for
| vulnerabilities, even for a 30% cut (which is probably 0 for
| 99% of apps, right? I would expect a power law distro). Kinda
| sounds like Google solved this by running the apks through
| something like a CI/CD gauntlet and then...hoping for the
| best.
|
| And of course you can't be too transparent or bad actors will
| game the system. It's almost as if, as a sibling commentor
| mentions, it's just not possible to adequately run a walled
| garden that adequately detects malice at scale.
|
| Here's an idea: instead of charging 30%, you should waive
| that if the dev team agrees to vet 5 other apps for you, over
| time, especially the open source ones.
| TrianguloY wrote:
| About the log-in requirement, happened to me too on an app with a
| textbox used for searching (no login required anywhere). I just
| filled the login form with a sample search and wrote a little
| explanation. They accepted it on the spot (although I doubt they
| will ever read it)
| nottorp wrote:
| And I thought I was joking when I kept saying that Google uses
| Machine Learning!(tm) for everything...
|
| Edit: on further thinking, the last problem about needing login
| info for an app that doesn't have accounts is probably due to
| some poor soul on minimum wage trying to make their review quota
| for the day.
| [deleted]
| dncornholio wrote:
| Parsing text is not machine learning. It's the lack of machine
| learning thats causing the issues IMO. Because this system just
| flags everything with the word free in it.
| metalised wrote:
| It's the same with all of FAANG.
|
| It's now been almost two months since my facebook page of 56k
| users was hacked, and nobody at facebook seems to give a shit:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29876423
|
| I just gave up and made a new page now. Hopefully the hacker
| won't manage to claim that one too.
| WheatM wrote:
| cocoflunchy wrote:
| I have the same experience with the Google Play Store. For all
| the complaints people have about the Apple App Store, at least
| their reviewers are human and you can discuss things with them.
| And they block updates but don't remove the app without warning!
|
| My experience with the Google Play store: I get an email on a
| friday night after working hours stating that the app of my
| company was removed after a routine check and that I have to
| follow an appeal process to get it back. (The reason being that
| we had 2 apps in the store, one for production use and one for
| training). Only after pinging people I knew working at Google was
| I able to get my support case prioritized and the app unblocked.
|
| A second time we had our app deleted from the store because we
| used background geolocation and failed to comply in time with the
| new reporting requirements. Once again, no warning and no grace
| period except a generic "Google Play policy update" email 6
| months earlier...
|
| I guess we're just lucky to have a B2B app that we can install
| via APK to our customers' phones if needed.
| johnyzee wrote:
| I swear I am not a Google plant. I JUST went through the same
| process the OP did (literally yesterday).
|
| The Play reviewer took down the app because they thought they
| needed sign-in information to test it (like the OP). However,
| this was based on a misunderstanding of some menu item in the
| app - the app, in fact, is perfectly usable without signing in.
|
| I replied to the original email I had received about the
| problem, and... A few days later, a real human replied that
| they agreed with my take, and had removed the objection.
| However, they had found other policy violations, regarding the
| maturity rating viz-a-viz the app contents (it's a game). They
| included screen shots, showing that they had not only played
| the game, but pretty thoroughly, too.
|
| Again, I followed the recommendations to comply (went over the
| rating wizard) and requested a re-evaluation. This was done a
| day later and the app re-instated. Done.
|
| I was super surprised about how well the process worked. I even
| went through the trouble of completing their little support
| survey with praise. I had been bracing myself for a Kafkaesque
| nightmare when the app was taken down, considering just how
| many app updates Google reviewers must be going through on a
| daily basis, and I'm pretty sure each violation is met with
| some sort of discussion from the developer's side. Not to
| mention the reputation Google has earned for support. It goes
| to show that people have different experiences, and not all of
| them are negative.
|
| EDIT: Just wanted to add that I don't think the OP's story is
| particularly egregious either. So Google auto-translates your
| app title? I guess you opted into this somewhere, at least they
| don't do this for my app. And I would never assume that Google
| would sit and hand-translate app titles to every language. And
| in either case, it actually looks like OP got timely and fairly
| accurate advice. I must sound like some starry-eyed Google
| fanboy, but I'm really not, just not seeing it here.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >So Google auto-translates your app title?
|
| I mean my reading is that she and her translators hand
| translate the title, and then Google uses Google Translate to
| make sure it follows particular rules, and one of the rules
| it should not say it is free?
|
| >And I would never assume that Google would sit and hand-
| translate app titles to every language.
|
| maybe the assumption is that they would not autotranslate app
| titles for the target language of a particular app store. I
| mean you do understand that the app stores of different
| languages are obviously not in English? And that there is a
| very long and funny tradition of translating from one
| language to English and back to show how things get lost in
| translation?
|
| At least if they used google translate they should have some
| sort of tool that allowed you to see if there were some
| suggested texts that would be less problematic so a reviewer
| (or bot in this case I suppose) could ask the developer. So
| that it could say you used the word vrij, which is most
| commonly understood as free, but there are these other usages
| which did you intend. Get a result and then run it past a
| human very quick for an ok / not ok decision. But no, Google
| translate is good enough.
|
| >just not seeing it here.
|
| I have a hard time seeing how it is not crystal clear.
|
| on edit: fixed missing words.
| Liquid_Fire wrote:
| > So Google auto-translates your app title? I guess you opted
| into this somewhere, at least they don't do this for my app.
|
| The way I understood it, what they are actually doing is
| auto-translating the localised (by the developer) title back
| to English for the purpose of running automated checks on it,
| and rejecting based on this automatic translation turning a
| word that implies nothing about price in the original
| language into the English word "free".
| jvzr wrote:
| I understood it like you did. She--the author--even wrote
| that she had translators for all the languages supported by
| the app, hence the 50-to-30 chars kerfuffle.
| quambene wrote:
| Google did recently update its review process. I was
| complaining about its previous review process for 10 months
| at least. It's a little better now.
|
| Previously, an app was suspended without any warning. You
| even couldn't comply with their requirements neither because
| they would deactivate access to the app in question in Google
| Play Console. Your only chance was an appeals request. Your
| app still suspended in the meantime which could be months.
| And you might loose all ratings, reviews, and downloads of
| your app.
|
| My feedback at this time was:
|
| > An easy but important improvement in Google Play:
|
| 1.) Don't suspend and remove the complete package id from
| Google Play, but instead just prevent the specific app update
| from publishing
|
| 2.) If the app update doesn't comply with Google's policies,
| then give developers the opportunity to fix that
|
| 3.) Developer submits a new app update which does comply
|
| 4.) App update gets approved by Google
|
| 5.) Google is happy and developers are happy
|
| Which might be the case now. At least in Germany.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| The number of times I've heard of people only getting support
| from Google because they know someone on the inside is quite
| astonishing.
|
| If I were an Google employee looking to make a few extra bucks
| I'd definitely start offering to help "nudge" account issues
| for a few extra bucks under the table.
| thayne wrote:
| That would almost certainly violate some contract you signed
| when you were hired.
| onepointsixC wrote:
| Most definitively, but at least people who do not have
| connections inside of google could stay in businesses.
| Which speaks to just how big of an issue all of this is.
| analog31 wrote:
| There could be an app for that -- a clearing house that lets
| you submit an issue and have it taken up by an employee, with
| anonymity, for a fee. It could be the Uber for access to
| insider support.
| ynx wrote:
| Stuff like this does happen at the big companies, but it's
| also rooted out (when you're that big, you can afford to have
| internal security teams that investigate this stuff) and the
| offenders get fucked by legal (and fired, obviously). Usually
| quietly because of the PR damage it would otherwise cause.
| duhast wrote:
| What is astonishing is that despite the scale at which they
| operate we rarely hear about the problems. False positives
| seem to be ridiculously low.
| passivate wrote:
| It seems to me what people are complaining about isn't the
| false positives, its the fact that there aren't proper
| channels to address the issues - and your basically a
| hostage till someone at Google decides to take pity and
| talk to you.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| This. Reality is going to cause false positives. While
| you can try to minimize them you'll never get rid of
| them.
|
| The measure of a system is how they are dealt with. Note
| that this is not limited to Google by any means. I'm
| thinking of the police throwing some people in jail as
| terrorists because they pinged on a geiger counter.
| Cancer patients, not terrorists. Compare that to what
| happened when my wife tripped a detector in China. The
| officials knew it was almost certainly a false positive
| and were looking for why rather than playing gotcha.
| (However, I think they went too far in the other
| direction--it was due to a nuclear heart test, but they
| didn't even doing the simple test of seeing what the
| distribution of the radioactivity was.)
| ascar wrote:
| Is it really rarely? I feel like I'm hearing about it all
| the time. The comments in this thread reenforce this
| feeling. Having to make it to HN frontpage to get support
| from Google seems also a much too common occurrence.
|
| My assessment would be false positives are way too high and
| customer support is close to non-existent. And we're
| hearing only about a tiny fraction of the problems with the
| majority being stuck in customer support hell.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| duhast wrote:
| HM is a bubble with bias against Google. People here seem
| to believe that bashing this company publicly will
| somehow change how they operate.
|
| Interestingly enough, back in the day Google used to be a
| darling of HN community. I suspect folks might be
| disappointed to see how things turned out at the end.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> HM is a bubble with bias against Google._
|
| It seems that way to you because the front pages of
| Reddit, HN and Twitter are Google's only support
| channels.
| egberts1 wrote:
| Well, yeah. I too am in the bubble of realistic
| experience of having apps repeatedly pulled out from
| underneath me.
|
| Excuse me for being in that bubble.
| nottorp wrote:
| > Interestingly enough, back in the day Google used to be
| a darling of HN community.
|
| For example, back in the day Google search was useful.
| Things change, darlings go to the most hated list.
| kbenson wrote:
| It's almost as if over a decade or more if time that
| people can see the result of behavior they didn't see as
| problematic initially.
|
| Or that google might have changed how they operate in
| small ways as they are steered differently.
|
| Expecting any one person to still have the same opinion
| of any one other person a decade later might be asking a
| lot. It's nothing strange that a community of people
| would have differing thoughts on a whole company of
| people and product and policies.
| [deleted]
| Hizonner wrote:
| We hear about problems on here all the time... and that's
| probably about 0.01 percent of the problems that actually
| happen.
|
| Given the diversity and sheer boneheaded stupidity of the
| problems we _do_ hear about, there 's no chance that they
| don't have a _ton_ of false positives... especially among
| apps developed by people who haven 't yet learned how to
| work around whatever stupidity currently obtains. But you
| can't learn definitively, because they keep changing the
| stupidity.
| zbendefy wrote:
| After my app got some traction due to a reddit post i
| made, admob instantly disabled earning for 2 weeks due to
| "suspicious activity" or something like that.
|
| I tried to reach someone to at least get a
| clarification...am I not allowed to have a surge of ~100
| real users? but there really was no way to present my
| issue to anyone. It really is bad, there was nothing I
| could do. If this wasnt a hobby project I would have been
| really frustrated instead of being just disillusioned.
|
| Its a remake of an old 90s game that is also offline so
| there is not much risk in it.
|
| I suspect there are a lot of these stories never shared.
| [deleted]
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Oh, I've no doubt that's happening in all the major tech
| companies.
|
| Amazon employees got caught doing this.
|
| https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/six-indicted-
| connection...
| erhk wrote:
| Dont worry, google is working hard to make sure that even
| employees are unable to do anything of that sort. Gather the
| world's information and make it uniformally unsupported.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| This is _good_. It will tie the fates of small time
| customers /users to the elites, so the situation gets fixed
| or the business collapses.
| freedomben wrote:
| Agreed. The current state is the most awful for the
| powerless. At least this change evens the playing field a
| bit so that when $HUGE_CORP gets burned they will raise
| enough hell to (hopefully) fix the process.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Occasionally this happens, see Epic Games, and then the
| $HUGER_CORP has their security teams look for spurious
| "vulnerabilities" and then uses their PR team to have
| them dragged through the mud, etc.
| wongarsu wrote:
| I agree. A process that's broken for everyone gets fixed.
| A process that can be worked around by everyone who has
| the power to get it changed can stay broken indefinitely.
| smt88 wrote:
| Google has many processes that are broken for everyone
| and don't get fixed. That's why monopolies are bad.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > A process that's broken for everyone gets fixed. A
| process that can be worked around by everyone who has the
| power to get it changed can stay broken indefinitely.
|
| OK, but the only processes that are broken for everyone
| are processes that are mandatory for everyone. Using a
| different process is a perfectly workable way to get
| around a broken process.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Just speculating, but another possibility may be a new kind
| of business popping up: Google App Store experts who can
| somehow prevent these problems and/or make them go away.
|
| Similar to Google-SEO consultants, or college-admissions
| consultants who help rich kids get into universities they
| normally couldn't.
| mdoms wrote:
| > And they block updates but don't remove the app without
| warning!
|
| Epic would like a word.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| The key is whether or not your violation impacts revenue.
| Almost any other issue will not get you the full wrath of
| Google and Apple. Cut them out of their 30% and they'll act
| harshly.
| buu700 wrote:
| Obligatory reminder that a backdoor was added to the Play Store
| last summer: https://www.xda-developers.com/google-play-apk-
| replacement-p...
|
| I wouldn't be surprised in the least to find out that "Android
| App Bundles" were the ultimate result of a secret FISA ruling.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| > The reason Catima isn't on alternative app stores isn't because
| there is something wrong with them, it's because there is
| something wrong with Google Play.
|
| I don't understand. Why are erroneous policy violations in google
| play preventing them from launching it on Huawei or Samsung?
| phdelightful wrote:
| I agree, it's not clear. Maybe it's because the developer has
| sunk so much time into dealing with Google Play that she hasn't
| been able to release it on other platforms, or she's
| discouraged from trying to do so and getting hit with another
| round of insanity.
| mandeepj wrote:
| I went through similar hell recently. Google should just sell
| Google Play at this point.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29640436
| ChrisClark wrote:
| Regarding the update at the bottom of the article, I also just
| got the email about needing to provide login info so they can
| review my app. An offline game that has no login functionality...
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| My experience of Google Play is that it is 100% corrupted. I
| worked with companies that tried to get their apps back onto
| Google Play for YEARS without success. How do you solve something
| like "this app is not compliant with program X" when the app was
| never registered for that program for just that reason?
|
| ...and the "support".
| ugjka wrote:
| Google is specifically anti-support from their beginnings
| because they have this belief that everything can be solved
| algorithmically.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| When you work for companies that make Google a lot of money.
| Google does all the work for you, so you do not even need to
| care about support in the first place.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Getting boned because of the inability of the English language to
| distinguish between free and free, that's a new ring of machine
| learning hell.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| But... Spanish does have a difference between "libre" and
| "gratis", and the translated title is using the correct one. I
| guess they are also trying to catch synonyms and doing a
| terrible job at it.
| sp332 wrote:
| It's not a machine learning issue. A human would make the same
| translation. The issue is that the match should be run in the
| original language, not translated to English at all.
| kingofspain wrote:
| Oof. I've had the user account one before from Play for an app
| that had no user accounts. Apple isn't much better though -
| currently trying to argue that asking for user location (when a
| user clicks 'use my location') for a real estate app is
| reasonable. They are insistent it's not a valid feature and won't
| accept it til it's removed.
| tyingq wrote:
| Meanwhile, lots of other apps with 'Free' in the title,
| description, etc.
|
| https://play.google.com/store/search?q=free&c=apps
|
| Including some Google owned ones like YouTubeTV.
| billynomates wrote:
| Yeah they only review when you make a new release, so maybe
| these apps just haven't been updated in a while
| nguyenkien wrote:
| Nah. Probably exclude app already in store.
| toyg wrote:
| Nah. Probably exclude any app under X downloads, and even
| then just pick a random sample every once in a while, and
| even then maybe the reviewer had better stuff to do that
| Monday and just waved everything through.
| tyingq wrote:
| "Text Free - Call and Text Now" Updated January 10, 2022
|
| "Free Now" - Update January 11, 2022
|
| Many other examples have recent updates too.
| sdoering wrote:
| I was always wondering how Free Now can stay in the Play
| Store with their name. Maybe it is a trademark thing (as
| this is a trademark).
|
| But yeah - the rules seem quite arbitrarily enforced.
|
| As said in other discussions about Google - I decided to
| untangle my life from Google further. Quite hard actually
| as I am a paying GSuite customer and a lot of stuff
| actually is tied to this account. :-(
| TrianguloY wrote:
| Not quite, it is only reviewed when you make an update to the
| play store description, not when you publish a new version.
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| I think you were lucky they told you _anything_. On Quora they
| just say "your answer was deleted for violating Quora policies.
| Click here to read our policies."
|
| This sort of "tell them nothing" approach seems pervasive in the
| online world. Blame the lawyers.
|
| Their lawyers must caution them "Don't give _any_ details. That
| just opens us up to more questions & legal actions." The fact
| that it's completely self-serving and proves they don't give a
| shit about you is kinda irrelevant. Who are you, after all? There
| are millions just like you.
| freedomben wrote:
| I _despise_ the tell them nothing approach and I think it 's
| despicable, but that said I think there is a more legitimate
| reason than the lawyers. If the person is a spammer or
| otherwise not legit and you tell them what they did wrong, it's
| a lot easier to hack around the problem and beat the automated
| moderation and get your malware into the store.
|
| I don't think that justifies the harm it does to regular
| people, but it is a lot less sinister than just CYA.
|
| I actually blame tech media who capitalize on every "malware in
| the Play Store!!!" story a lot more, and the Apple apologists
| who use any news of malware on Android (even if it only applies
| to people downloading pirated apps and sideloading them with
| root) to trumpet how insecure Android is. Personally I think
| that bad press is the primary driver behind the modern
| policies.
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| Could be, actually. The press sucks: a bunch of untrained
| people too lazy to get off their laptops and _talk_ to
| people.
|
| I don't think Quora falls into that "spammer" category,
| though. No one is seeking to make any serious money from it,
| AFAICT.
| posmonerd wrote:
| I've also had horrible experiences with the Google Play people.
| Will never consider publishing on that platform again, huge waste
| of resources and personal time.
|
| Fortunately PWAs are a thing.
| leros wrote:
| I went through a similar hell getting compliance to use a certain
| Google API after getting algorithmically flagged. Months of back
| and forth, with conflicting approvals and rejections. The same
| automated emails over and over sprinkled with emails from humans
| who kind of understood.
|
| I will never again use any Google service for business purposes
| if I can avoid it.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Title (en_US): "Catima - The Free Card Wallet"
|
| >This proved my theory: Google was using Google Translate to
| translate the app titles instead of reviewing them with native
| speakers.
|
| Why would they use Google translate on an en_US string?
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