[HN Gopher] We became experts on Google Play Store policy violat...
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We became experts on Google Play Store policy violations
Author : Guzba
Score : 309 points
Date : 2022-10-27 17:51 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.pushbullet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.pushbullet.com)
| evolve2k wrote:
| [Ding]. They'd sent me another automated notice. THIRD THIS WEEK.
|
| My work had been PATmatched for review, pending cancellation.
| _Drat_ I was already low on credits to cover food bills this
| week.
|
| Car capsules filled the crimson sky of the small windows in my
| 10000 story apartment room, day and night the automated vehicles
| rolled past my window like a raging torrent. Living so high, not
| much to do but sit at the console.
|
| Another automated notice from TECHCORP. Always the same. Never a
| human. So insanely lacking in logic that often I'd want to scream
| in rage.
|
| But actually, IT WAS LOGICAL. To the billions of learning
| machines, running at basement level, in windowless buildings,
| beyond places I'd never know; I was the anomaly.
| [deleted]
| Multicomp wrote:
| Just wanted to say I appreciated this nice start to a story and
| now I have an app idea to create crowdsourced interactive
| fiction or at least branching fiction, one paragraph at a time.
|
| You pay the in-app-token equivalent of $0.25 to post a new
| paragraph at any given node, then as other users select your
| node for that branch, your node rises in popularity.
|
| Once a month, the most popular branches get paid a prize of in-
| app-currency for submitting good content.
| hancholo wrote:
| As someone that used to work on the Play Store team many many
| moons ago... a lot of that was outsourced to overseas which
| resulted in much slower response time. Here stateside we had a
| lot of metrics in place to fast response. Typically your app
| would get reviewed the same day. Not sure what it's like now but
| the managers were incompetent back then even so.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| > the managers were incompetent back then even so.
|
| This. So. Much. This.
|
| We go round and round about specific policies at corporate or
| civic levels. We hash it all out and pat ourselves on the back
| that we've at least proposed how whatever the issue of the
| moment might be improved.
|
| But we never come to the basic generic issue. That large swaths
| of decision makers should not make the decisions they do.
| nicoburns wrote:
| My experience has been that the Play Store does have relatively
| quick review times (usually under a day). But the feedback
| given upon rejections is often so poor that it doesn't help
| much. As it can often take several trial and error submissions
| to resolve the issue.
| Aulig wrote:
| Only for app updates in my experience. Publishing new apps
| takes ~7 days for years now. If I remember right, it started
| with Covid but it never improved.
| bambax wrote:
| > _Your app did not receive a deliberate analysis by a human
| leading to the violation notification. There is no one to debate.
| There is no opinion at all. Your app simply didn't look enough
| like the AI's training data. (...) your goal is to look as much
| as possible like the training data. Unfortunately, this can be
| easier said than done since we do not have access to the training
| data._
|
| A solution will be to have an AI submit modifications to the
| other side's enforcement notifications. Robots talking to robots.
| What a world.
| mkmk3 wrote:
| Outside of the implications it might have for the economy built
| up around SW dev, it's significantly better that AI modifiers
| deal with AI masters, than human modifiers with AI masters.
| Scary either way.
| ransom1538 wrote:
| Eh. This looks like pushbullet just got a different reviewer once
| that approved it. I imagine (atleast apple does) the reviewers
| are assigned a submission and any new update - gets you the same
| reviewer. BUT! IF you submit over and over, you will catch this
| person on vacation or sick, then Approved!
| ranger_danger wrote:
| It's completely automated. Even Google does not have enough
| money to pay for human support.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| With a net income of $76 billion USD in 2021, I beg to
| differ.
|
| Google just has so much money sloshing around they don't
| notice or care if they lose a bunch of revenue over stuff
| like this. There's no business pressure to retain customers.
| Even with the news from the other day that profits dropped:
| it's still more than what they did a just a few years back.
|
| Almost all these tech companies have very high profit/per
| employee; the idea that they can't afford a small army of
| human support people is just not the case; they just don't
| because they don't have to.
| veeti wrote:
| Fuck Google and fuck anyone who works for them. How do you live
| with yourself? A $300k paycheck?
| pacifika wrote:
| I think they are getting rejected for not mentioning the url of
| their api?
| Guzba wrote:
| Hello, thanks for reading my post. I just wanted to reply here
| quick and see if I understand your suggestion correctly.
|
| Your thought is that mentioning that the necessary data is sent
| to https://api.pushbullet.com instead of just "Pushbullet
| Servers" might help?
|
| I had not considered this but it is an interesting idea.
| savy91 wrote:
| We tried that, it doesn't work.
|
| In our case, Google was claiming we were sending contact
| information to a URL corresponding to our static landing
| page.
|
| In fact, we didn't even upload contact information anywhere.
| pacifika wrote:
| Exactly. Probably in the privacy policy not the ui.
| Alupis wrote:
| Seems like Google was oddly specific here with exactly what
| they were wanting from OP. Every single screenshot called
| out that URL explicitly...
| return_to_monke wrote:
| I love the (cat) json response. Rock on!
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| Seems to me like the common denominator
| gopher_space wrote:
| How much would a private investigator charge to find someone at
| Google who'd talk to you about this off the record? This might be
| a situation you could farm out.
| busymom0 wrote:
| I remember there being a case where a developer's app got banned
| because they used the word "windows" in the play store
| description and Google considered this as a third party trademark
| violation. The developer was referring to house windows, not the
| operating system...
| V__ wrote:
| Sometimes you have to change the code of the privacy policy page,
| because the AI might have problems parsing it correctly. Here is
| Luke from LinusTechTips talking about the problems with their
| Floatplane app:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8iy4qYONAc&t=941s
| Arnavion wrote:
| The pushbullet article indicates an appeal succeeding doesn't
| mean the issue was fixed to the reviewer's liking. So I
| wouldn't assume the correlation that LTT's appeal succeeded
| because of what they did. Google's review process seemingly
| does not comply to logical reasoning.
| V__ wrote:
| Maybe, but he talks about sending it in a few times and only
| after changing the page's loading behavior it got accepted.
| Therefore, I don't think there were human reviewers involved
| at all, otherwise why not spell out the problem directly?
| Would save everyone's time and reduce the number of
| interactions.
| stevage wrote:
| People complain a lot about developing for the web, but at least
| we don't have to put up with this kind of thing.
| iandanforth wrote:
| I'm convinced that the only way this situation will improve is
| via legislation. There are simply no other sufficient incentives
| since strikes/bans/policy enforcement is uniformly broken across
| the large players.
| Eumenes wrote:
| been using pushbullet for many years, feels like they always got
| the shaft from google
| ohbleek wrote:
| Chiming in to say I love Pushbullet. I find it invaluable for
| sending things between my devices.
|
| I recently learned that it's no longer available for iPhone and
| that if I get a new iPhone I won't be able to load it onto the
| new device. It has kept me from upgrading. Eventually I'll have
| to but it will be a sad day. I've seen a few alternatives but
| they don't appear to have the same usability.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| Pushbullet is a great app, been using it for a long time.
| Hopefully they're able to permanently sort this out (yeah right)
| derN3rd wrote:
| From most friends and colleagues I know that most of these
| rejected updates simply go through if you resubmit it a second
| time a day or two later.
|
| Somewhat frustrating, but most of the times the issue was just
| that the apps were already compliant, but the reviewer on
| Apple/Google side was just not carefully checking
| djbusby wrote:
| One time a project I was on got booted from Google Play. Then we
| did an appeal, they would let us back in! Yay! And we'd have to
| pre-appeal our next try.
|
| But, we could not use the same Name or Namespace
| (com.company.project) because those were locked. They are keeping
| the blocked in, with notes.
|
| Our fix was to refactor the namespace in the code, change product
| & company name. Jk, we just abandoned Google Play, wasn't worth
| it.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Was it due to copyright/trademark hit on the namespace/name? I
| saw that once before on a very large app 5 years into it's life
| on google play (I assume they implemented this copyright check
| job circa early 2018 based on that). Was a simple "we own the
| domain and here is the proof" reply and it was reinstated
| without further issue.
| djbusby wrote:
| No, we work with deadly deadly cannabis.
| flutas wrote:
| Any tips or things to avoid that they called out to you?
|
| Working on an app right now that is very close to the
| industry and we're really worried about a rejection because
| of that.
| djbusby wrote:
| Don't mention anywhere at all that you have any
| connection to cannabis.
|
| Also, if I had known the block would lockout my
| name/namespace I would have entered with a throwaway,
| then get the real one in.
|
| We moved away from needing an App and now keep it all
| web.
| meltedcapacitor wrote:
| Obvious YC startup idea here: build an AI model that analyses app
| store rejections and automatically modifies and resubmits the
| app. Fight fire with fire.
| Raed667 wrote:
| I had the unpleasant experience of submitting an extension to
| Google Chrome Webstore. Here is a summary:
|
| 1- Submit an update
|
| 2- Wait a week for it to be approved
|
| 3- Publish said update
|
| 4- Forget about it and move to working on something else for a
| few days/weeks
|
| 5- Get a random rejection email with a bogus claim and 14 days to
| "fix it" or the extension is removed
|
| 6- Drop everything in my sprint so I can handle this. No actual
| code change was required, just a series of Kafkaesque support
| forms and email exchanges.
|
| After 3 or 4 rounds of this, I created a template response with a
| history of previous interactions and arguments and sending those
| became part of the routine ...
| dessant wrote:
| Chrome Web Store reviewers leave a lot to be desired. My only
| effective strategy over the years has been to shame them in
| public and let them know that our interactions are immediately
| published across the web. You have to be relentless, otherwise
| they will destroy a decade of your work in a snap.
|
| These threads will surely give PTSD to any extension developer:
|
| https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image/issues/57
|
| https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image/issues/63
| Fnoord wrote:
| Thank you for Buster!
| BarryMilo wrote:
| Jesus, are even the reviews done entirely by AI?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| And this right here is why we shouldn't let Google, Apple, or
| Microsoft dictate what software we're allowed to distribute
| and run.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if Google put you through the
| gauntlet because your extensions either touch their products,
| or because they offer similar functionality.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| I'm gonna be that guy:
|
| Summery means "characteristic of or suitable for summer", as in
| the season
|
| Summary is the word you meant to use
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| Which one is used in the context of an execution?
| taberiand wrote:
| It depends. Perhaps Summery, if it's a nice warm day, a
| comfortable breeze is blowing and the birds are si-
| jraph wrote:
| This commenter got "cut".
| jraph wrote:
| Summary. "The prisoners were executed in a summary
| fashion."
|
| Also means brief, concise. I guess a summary execution
| (which means without trial if I understand correctly) is a
| briefer process than an execution with a trial...
|
| Would also properly qualify the rejection of an extension
| from the Chrome store, I guess, to go back to the main
| topic.
|
| https://www.wordreference.com/fren/sommaire
|
| (yes, found out by translating from French :-) - sommaire
| also means basic, rudimentary, now I wonder what made us
| use this word for executions - the brevity, or the basic
| aspect, sounded like the latter to me in history lessons)
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| Merci pour la lecon :)
| jraph wrote:
| Avec plaisir ! ah ah
|
| Thanks to wordreference above all. You might have meant
| it as a joke initially, but I learned something.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| I meant it half joking but I'm also in the process of
| learning French so I learned something too.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Raed667 wrote:
| Thanks! fixed it. I shouldn't be using the spellcheck without
| reading the actual suggestion.
| [deleted]
| m00x wrote:
| I worked with the extension Webstore and the Android Play
| Store. The Webstore is absolutely way worse.
|
| We took the resolution really seriously at first, and we tried
| our best to find the issue and fix it, but then we realized we
| had about the same resolution rate if we just changed a random
| character in the codebase and resubmitted. We had contacts at
| Google, but even they couldn't tell us what was wrong.
|
| Play Store was/is much better, but we aren't dealing with
| complicated phone APIs, just basically a React Native app with
| REST calls. We rarely have any issues getting rejected, and
| when it is, we get very fast turnarounds on emails.
|
| Play store had a much lower
| aasasd wrote:
| People are perpetually wondering why Goog keeps doing this, and
| the answer is because they can.
|
| > _I really really need to make Google happy._
| zkirill wrote:
| We switched to distributing our own APK after Google forced
| Android App Bundles. Definitely sleep better at night because of
| that decision.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| For most people, this is not an option though, since it
| bypasses the Play Store (and the majority of the userbase)
| entirely.
| lordleft wrote:
| I used pushbullet for years, until they deprecated their iOS app
| (I think for similar reasons?). I have yet to find an adequate
| replacement.
| joshstrange wrote:
| EDIT: Ignore this comment, I thought I knew what PushBullet was
| but I was mistaken.
|
| Pushover is what I've used for as long as I can remember, I
| bought the app so long ago that I can't even remember what I
| paid. It's decent, a little basic though.
|
| Recently I've just been using a Discord server since that's
| trivial to setup and I can get notifications on desktop and
| mobile easily. I just have 1 channel per "thing" that might
| want to alert me and then grab the webhook url for that channel
| and then I'm good to go.
|
| I usually drop a "push" binary in the ~/bin folder on my
| machines (which is in my path) so I can do:
| ./longRunningCommand.sh && push "Command finished!"
| klabb3 wrote:
| It's really sad that software distribution has deteriorated into
| this submissive permission-seeking practice of pleasing an opaque
| moving target, as a sort of disorganized morality police that
| claim to act on behalf of the users. And not only that, but we
| still have 0 standardization or agreed-upon APIs so devs
| generally have waste heaps of time on per-platform idiosyncrasies
| that has nothing to do with business logic. We do have cooler
| tech today, but that is despite, not because, this suffocating
| and unsustainable selection of walled "gardens".
| liotier wrote:
| Should developers come together with a foundation for software
| distribution ? An appstore, members are individual or
| corporations, governance through election of a board by the
| members (see Debian and Openstreetmap)... And a little help
| from the European Comission who'll be happy to have a neutral
| channel to impose on the monopolists !
| karmelapple wrote:
| Sounds neat. How will you help ensure malware doesn't show up
| on there?
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Time to nationalize F-Droid!
| jahnu wrote:
| We developers sure do act like temporarily embarrassed
| millionaires at times.
| greysphere wrote:
| Starting around January, our app (Dominion[1]) has randomly had
| updates rejected (including one that _delisted the existing app_)
| because of our app description. We make some irrelevant changes
| and resubmit and, so far, it's been accepted each time. We've had
| the same description for over a year/10+ releases before.
|
| The latest rejection:
|
| >>> The app title or description does not accurately describe the
| app's functionality. Issue details
|
| We found an issue in the following area(s): Full description
| (en_US): "# Tutorial & Rules " <<<
|
| So we changed this to:
|
| # In app Tutorial & Rules
|
| And it passed. Every release is just a bucket of stress that we
| are going to lose N-days of revenue again for no obvious reason.
|
| [1]
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.templegate...
| sneak wrote:
| lakomen wrote:
| Excuse my ignorance, not a native English speaker, what's
| sharecropping? Google's description doesn't make any sense to
| me.
| sneak wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping
| acomjean wrote:
| Basically they are saying to stop putting your app on the
| app store and letting google take a large % of the app and
| letting your business be dependent on another business.
|
| In this case the landlord is Google, and you are the
| sharecropper, giving a share (30%) to google to be allowed
| to use the play store.
| sneak wrote:
| More importantly: a share whose figure is chosen by the
| owner, not by you.
| Imnimo wrote:
| Sharecropping originally refers to a process where a
| landowner would let people farm their land in exchange for
| a portion of the yield. It has negative associations with
| post-slavery exploitation of black farmers as well as poor
| farmers in general in the 1800s and early 1900s. In this
| setting, it's being used to compare the practice of hosting
| and selling your app on someone else's platform, with those
| same connotations of exploitation.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| Do you think their attempts to make a living would be less
| stressful if they started releasing only on f-droid?
| sneak wrote:
| They could release on their own website. The Google store
| is not the only game in town - unlike on iOS.
| warent wrote:
| I've owned an android for years and have never once
| installed an app outside the google play store. There's
| no way this is a viable business option
| nine_k wrote:
| What you lose then is the auto-update. You can of course
| make the app nag about installing a new version when
| available, but it works much, much worse.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| The app can auto-update itself without nagging.
| eropple wrote:
| By being granted very broad security permissions that an
| application shouldn't need on a phone, yes.
| svnpenn wrote:
| Not sure why the downvotes, this is exactly what's happening.
| woodruffw wrote:
| No, it's not "exactly what's happening."
|
| At the best, it's a thought-provoking analogy. At the
| worse, it's a tasteless comparison between software
| engineering (overwhelmingly lucrative, mostly filled with
| otherwise well-off people) and a legal loophole for
| slavery.
| aliqot wrote:
| It's a throwback to a painful point in history, so while it
| is accurate, some people will kneejerk downvote out of
| internal distaste to it.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| It's a bit hyperbolic to compare the experience of a
| Reconstruction era sharecropper to the plight of a 21st
| century app developer.
| etc-hosts wrote:
| My dads family were sharecroppers in the south.
|
| The system definitely was not confined to Reconstruction
| sneak wrote:
| The situations have more in common than you might think.
| In both cases, you accept the non-negotiated deal offered
| to you unilaterally by your owners, or you accept zero
| revenue.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| They're very different scenarios, because throughout
| history sharecroppers have almost always been "stuck" in
| their situation with no hope of relief, whereas app
| developers can realistically just go do something else.
|
| When I lived in Asia as a white guy I was regularly the
| target of "racism": inflated prices (I was earning local
| salary), you're automatically "in the wrong" in any
| conflict even when you did nothing wrong, being a target
| of theft and government corruption, sometimes just
| general hostility. But it's not really the same "racism"
| in the same sense that, say, a black person in the US
| experiences it, as I can just choose to leave, whereas a
| black person in the US can't really. In spite of the
| similarities, in the end the experiences are not the same
| at all.
|
| This makes all the difference. I'm not saying that what
| Google is doing is right, but it's just not the same
| thing at all.
| [deleted]
| aasasd wrote:
| Yes--the developer can simply move into a different line
| of business, that doesn't require having a mobile app.
| [deleted]
| dipsyduck wrote:
| I'm wondering if the & sign is causing the issue. Perhaps the
| AI reviewers can't parse it well?
| rvba wrote:
| I find it incredible that Google's sharedholders did not do
| anything about the company just plain losing money "here and
| there" which probably adds up to billions.
|
| Just because someone wants to get promoted by making another
| half baked pseudo-AI to check apps, or someone making the 6th
| chat program (sorry, all people quit already after the 3rd
| change).
| deathanatos wrote:
| Is there any evidence that there's any causal link here? Like, it
| seems like to me it could just be the act of changing something
| -- _anything_ -- and the output from review is just a roll of the
| dice. Sometimes you change something, and it 's approved, but
| given the frequency with which these sorts of articles crop up on
| HN, I don't think I'd assume that the change necessarily meant
| anything more than "they changed it".
|
| ... of course, it would help build confidence that there is a
| causal link if Google would clearly articulate their reasons for
| rejection.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Of course, we do not hear from the approved apps, so it is hard
| to tell which part of the review is random and which is
| deterministic.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| naet wrote:
| I love Dominion the card /board game. Have played it many times!
|
| I'm a little confused why the app version would need to access my
| SMS message history, send messages on my behalf, and access my
| contact info though.
|
| I don't want that even if you claim to not be sharing it with
| anyone else...
| shkkmo wrote:
| You seem to have missed the fact that the commenter talking
| about Play Store issues with the Dominion App is different
| person at a different company, the author of TFA (who works for
| PushBullet).
| binkHN wrote:
| I have a somewhat related story regarding the first Android app I
| ever created. It practically drove me to give up on Android
| development.
|
| https://medium.com/@daniel_11666/331c98270ec4?source=friends...
| andwaal wrote:
| After dealing with booth Google and Apple for a couple of years I
| cannot express how much better the Apple experience with an
| actually human you can communicate with on the other end. To
| whomever thinking about starting a business relying on publishing
| through the Play Store, please think twice.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Google's play store approval process really is a nightmare.
| Apple's reviewers might be slow and not always the most
| competent, but at least they're real humans you can talk to and
| reason with. Google as usual is just an automated process that
| often gives you little to no actionable feedback.
| kyle-rb wrote:
| It's been a couple years since I did mobile dev, but in my
| experience you don't get to reason much with Apple's reviewers
| either, but you can change something minor, re-submit, and hope
| you get a different, better reviewer.
| mrbombastic wrote:
| You can reply to app review in app store connect and ask for
| clarification, in my experience apple is much better at this
| than google.
| djbusby wrote:
| With Apple, I got to actually talk to a human, on the phone
| and have a 10 minute conversation to clear things up.
| dessant wrote:
| Luckily all of this will be illegal in the EU thanks to the
| Digital Services Act, developers will have the right to know
| the exact reason for a rejection, and Google will need to
| provide real human support.
| [deleted]
| noasaservice wrote:
| What I'm hearing is there's a hell of a European market to
| cater to USA and other regions to host apps, and then play
| hardball in getting real answers.
| professoretc wrote:
| Someone will need to start an EU-based business where US
| developers can submit their rejections, and have the EU side
| get a proper explanation.
| klooney wrote:
| I'm sure they'll manage the process so that it so that it's a
| powerless human reading an AI's decision back to you. There's
| no way to legislate wanting to do a good job.
| therealmarv wrote:
| oh, I was not aware the Digital Markets Act will change that
| too. That is a win.
| dessant wrote:
| It's actually the Digital Services Act, I have corrected my
| comment.
| grogenaut wrote:
| there are many completely valid and completely unactionable
| reasons for rejecting people. Yes this might make it a bit
| better but it's very hard to make someone who doesn't care
| about helping you help you. Even regulation can just make
| them do the minimum.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Google will stop servicing Europe entirely before they offer
| competent human support.
| georgebarnett wrote:
| This is a ridiculous assertion. Google won't do anything
| like that. They'll comply with the law, because they want
| European money.
| parkingrift wrote:
| It is really hilarious to me that Google is making PB jump
| through hoops for this. Google is vacuuming vasts amount of user
| data without any explicit user consent at all. It's just buried
| in some encyclopedia length ToS.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| Last time I read it, it wasn't actually all that long. It was
| just full of qualified language like "in some circumstances
| such and such could be collected" and "Some Google services may
| do this". At the end of it, it was entirely unclear to me what
| Google actually did collect, but "services may do this" is
| really no different from "services can do this" and the result
| was essentially little more than "we can collect every bit of
| information you send to us, which we may or may not do". The
| qualified language was engineered very carefully to make it
| sound _not_ like that.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| People should just copy-paste Google's TOS and Privacy Policy
| as their own. After all, Google's own apps on the Play Store
| surely comply with the Play Store's policies and the AI
| gremlins that enforce it will have Google's own apps in the
| "always approve" training bucket.
| mysterydip wrote:
| "but they pressed 'I accept'!" - some lawyer
| mring33621 wrote:
| What I think, after reading the post:
|
| 1) Pushbullet is frequently 'randomly selected' for extra
| scrutiny (TSA style) because it competes with some offering from
| Google or a preferred partner.
|
| 2) The review algo simply diffs the resubmission with the
| previous version and if there are changes 'near' any of the
| keywords from the violation, it gets approved, until the next
| 'random' scan.
| meltedcapacitor wrote:
| Or just because it looks at SMS. Few non-malicious apps have a
| reason to look at SMS and it's very high value data for
| malicious ones, no surprise the AI model misclassifies the one
| app with a perfectly legitimate use. It should be whitelisted
| but hand tweaks to algo results are probably taboo at Google.
| themoonisachees wrote:
| Pushbullet is directly competing against google's "messages"
| app. They have the exact same use case. Note that Messages does
| not display such prominent markers that it's uploading stuf to
| google server yada yada, probably because it is immune to play
| store verification.
| savy91 wrote:
| Related submission (different company, same issues):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33273210
|
| the experience of publishing apps to Google Play is really awful.
|
| After developing native apps for years, we'll be publishing our
| next project as a PWA for this reason alone.
| anononaut wrote:
| It's comforting to know I'm not the only one.
| stevenkkim wrote:
| Can someone explain why both the Google Play Store and the Apple
| App Store give opaque explanations for rejections? Why don't they
| just tell developers what's wrong and what needs to be fixed
| instead of pointing to some broad rule and forcing an
| interpretative song and dance?
| bliteben wrote:
| I'm pretty sure its because the reviewers don't speak english
| and thus can't type a fluent response in your language.
| gjm11 wrote:
| The (plausible) speculation in the article is that the
| reviewers "don't speak English" because, being machine-
| learning models rather than human beings, they don't speak
| any language at all.
| nvrspyx wrote:
| Probably because giving a clear explanation would demonstrate
| how often and how badly app reviewers misinterpret their own
| rules.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Bots don't really care about that, though.
| mrmuagi wrote:
| I think they are using automation in detecting "violations"
| perhaps, given the other commentors did seemingly no-op updates
| and resolved things -- and any pushback would show the wizard
| behind the curtains, so they keep it vague as possible?
|
| Unless someone who actually works behind the scenes can chime
| in.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| While I think it would benefit Apple or Google as a whole to
| explain their reasoning clearly, it'd make things harder on the
| app approving teams, who probably don't want to do this for a
| number of reasons: it'd take more time, it'd expose
| inconsistency/mistakes/incompetence (why was this okay last
| time but not this time?), and worst of all, it'd lead to the
| organic creation of a binding network of labyrinthine
| precedents.
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| Whilst I don't agree with the opaqueness policy, I understand
| why it's in place.
|
| It's because it leaves them at risk of using previous precise
| answers to others as precedents for future cases. Being opaque
| allows them to not be too committed, and outside of situations
| like "but you accepted XYZ app which does exactly the same, I
| don't understand"
|
| You can still claim XYZ app does what you did and didn't get
| punished by that, but they can never admit it in paper/words.
| MBCook wrote:
| There is also the intent vs letter issue.
|
| Scammers will try to skirt rules by making sure to adhere to
| the letter of the law, even if it's plainly obvious they are
| violating the intent of the rule in question.
|
| Rule 407b: no real money gambling apps
|
| Scammers: it's not real money. It's Linden Dollars. Or our
| company script. Or our new NFTs. You can't reject us.
|
| Should the rule have to list out every single thing that
| could possibly used as currency? Because there are people who
| will argue that point.
| three_seagrass wrote:
| Yep, anti-fraud and anti-scam is an exercise in game
| theory.
|
| The more explicit you are with the rules, the more specific
| bad actors will try to weave around them. It sucks because
| it means the scalable, machine-assisted review process
| comes up with more false positives, but it's a two sided
| market and the marketplace owners care more about the users
| than the devs.
|
| I feel like the U.S. tax code is a good example of when you
| try to go more explicit with the rules.
| mkmk3 wrote:
| Maybe theres a way to functionally build up towards the same
| destination by collecting feedback and accepted changes. I
| don't know how that integrates with law, but is there
| something that influences the legal implications beyond what
| this kind of system would cover (provided a sufficient number
| of samples)?
| np- wrote:
| Isn't that unethical though? Preserving the right to make
| arbitrary decisions and favor some people over others? Most
| of the entire human history of conflict seems to be because
| of this reason of arbitrary unfairness.
| lazide wrote:
| That isn't ethics, IMO.
|
| What you're referring to is the application of power, and
| their retention of arbitrary power, specifically.
|
| Ethics is if they used that power for abuse or an unethical
| goal, or to acquire an even larger amount of arbitrary
| power.
|
| Pragmatically, it's their app store, and they need to
| retain a non-trivial amount of power to police it. It's a
| requirement of ownership. If they don't do so, it will
| devolve to an even worse garbage dump, and rather quickly.
|
| We're of course going to complain about inexplicable
| rulings, things we don't agree with, etc. but that doesn't
| change the equation unless they get so obnoxious that other
| places are more attractive or it violates some law.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| They's no way they would treat random app equally to
| Facebook. It's unethical, but it's convenient for them.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| To answer your question, no.
| stevenkkim wrote:
| Yeah, I think this is probably the right answer. I once
| worked on an iOS app that took about 5 cycles of "guess
| what's wrong?" -> submission -> rejection before we got it to
| pass. Each time, we asked "Can you just please tell us what
| to fix?" and each time the answer was "refer to rule x." So
| frustrating.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| The same reason they are not thrilled about support in general:
| Manual labor is expensive, and at the scale that Apple or
| Google operate, the amount of abuse and unwarranted complaints
| you receive at high traffic, low entry barrier, outward facing
| services is absolutely insane and can not realistically be
| shouldered without heavy reliance on tools and templates.
| Maxburn wrote:
| First off, there's no human involved in the first couple passes
| with this. Also bad actors could then use that detail to tweak
| things and get around policy. It's not a great answer either
| but possible.
| artdigital wrote:
| In my experience AppStore Review is usually pretty direct. They
| tell me I violate this and that because of these things, and
| even include screenshots where the violation is
| sprokolopolis wrote:
| As a long-time Pushbullet user, I would like to thank the
| developer for their efforts in creating it and in keeping the app
| available to us!
| mrsaint wrote:
| Ditto. As an Android user, I am glad Pushbullet exists, and my
| whole daily workflow depends on it. Kudos.
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