Still not entirely sure what kind of apps this guy is making, are they legitimate? Otherwise, it looks like a reoccurring HN thing, where people plea for help while they're actually involved in some shady stuff. Not trying to accuse the author, of course.
At the same time, it drives me nuts to see these kinds of flaws in the system. People get invested in a platform, and then one day that platform kicks you in the nuts, and slams the door as you fall out on the pavement.
I don't think we have any way of answering this question without the social media frenzy that will inevitably follow from this playing out start to finish.
Your point, to me, is just another indication of how transparency is a win.
From their website [0] they seem to make city lifestyle apps. Apps for public transport in Spanish cities, a price comparison app for utilities, a pollution level map.
I would guess they supplement their own app income with contracting.
The showcase pieces in their portfolio are urban mobility apps. Doesn't get much less shady than that.
But the ad and in-app revenue streams mentioned in the article suggest that they have also been active in other fields. In-app purchases that still go on after account termination might be a hint in the right direction though: would IAPs via Play still be going on? External ("untaxed") IAPs are the biggest sin from the app-store's point of view. External purchases are allowed to be handled externally (e.g. paying for physical goods in the Amazon app), but definitions are not always clear and then it's all arbitrary judge-and-executioner.
Nitpicking, there've been shady "urban mobility" apps before.
Remember that one which told you which platform your train at eg Penn Station was likely to come in on, so you could wait on your track instead of in the designated waiting area? To put it in clickbait terms, "station operators HATE this", because there are a variety of safety and efficiency problens with people waiting on the platform, even when it helped the user be the first on the train.
Your apps/schedules don't tell you the platform? Here (GER & NL), they always tell you the track - be it official apps or the paper schedules - and all waiting areas are on the platforms themselves. Utrecht is the only exception I know, where there are still larger designated waiting areas outside the platform (tho the building is on top of the platforms, so you basically wait next to the escalator)
At Penn, the track is not announced until just a few moments before the train begins to board. This is ostensibly because the platforms are too small for people to wait on them, but it also has the side effect of keeping crowds up in the waiting area with all the shops.
The waiting area is on top of the escalators at Penn as well, but since you don't know which track you need to wait for, it is always a mad dash down the corridor for your train once the track number has been posted. This is made even worse by the fact that by the time the track number appears, there is only 3-5 minutes before departure of the train, so there is a sense of urgency required to get to the right place before the train leaves.
It is pretty terrible, but so is everything else about Penn.
in china, each track has their own designated waiting area. so you do know which track you need to be on and you can be as close as you need to be to catch the train, and yet people are not filling the platform before it's time to get on the train.
Shouldn't be up to the app store owners to provide evidence against an app and then remove it? Where is the transparency here? These are huge corps. They can well afford to at the very least state why they're blocking a certain app, not just to the dev themselves, but to the public as well. There's a power imbalance here and the onus is on Google/Apple/etc to do the right thing, the way I see it.
Wait a second... Did I understand it bad or if my Google dev account gets banned I cannot even create a new dev account directly linked to my person for the rest of my life? What.
That’s correct as far as I understand it. In OPs case, it seems this is what Google is accusing them of, creating a new account after other accounts were banned.
I don't think any google employee can help. I reached out to Chris the VP of engineering via reddit google_take_action account and even he couldn't do much to our then startup which was terminated because one of the devs had a banned google account.
As someone who has built and published apps on both major platforms, this issue of not being able to speak to someone is a problem on the Apple platform as well (as on Googles). As mentioned in the article, it’s heart wrenching to receive an email saying there is a problem with your app and know that the app or the release you worked so hard on might not get published. Having a release rejected can also be as bad as a termination if that release has a major new feature. The platforms price their developer accounts very low to attract developers but those of us who make a living of it would gladly pay a bigger price to get a higher quality of support. There are many developers who make their living off apps and struggle with the black hole that is app approval and the associated dispute process
Wait, am I understanding correctly that Apple and Google actually charge developers money to produce the content that Apple and Google monetize on their app stores?
They charge to have access to the dev tools and the right to publish apps. There are real costs to doing this right and I believe most developers are happy to pay.
That hasn’t been true since XCode 7. You can side load apps onto your own devices from XCode with a free developer account, you only have to pay the fee to submit apps to the App Store.
I'd believe I'd rather just have a secure platform that's open to any apps, no gatekeepers. Kind of like the web. Almost anyone can make an website and no gatekeeper gets in the way. We mostly trust the browsers are secure (or at least I trust Chrome to be secure, maybe Firefox too soon).
I feel like iOS in particular could already do this. They could just let users install apps from anywhere and then do their best to keep their platform secure.
I'm sure others disagree though but I feel like if you want a gatekeeper you should opt in. You're free to only install apps certified by "somecompanywhoauditsapps.com" or "apple.com" but if you want to you're also free to just install them from anywhere.
I suppose you'd still end up with the same problem that if you choose to go through "apple.com" they might not approve your app but hopefully with alternatives there would be more incentive to provide better support. I can certainly imagine Epic Games would jump at chance to offer their own iOS store. Valve might as well.
On Android, you already have this since you can install apps directly. There is no dedicated open store, but nobody is preventing developers from publishing their Android apps on their homepage.
Get used to gatekeepers and censors. If you say or do the wrong thing too loudly, MasterCard will step in and yank your ability to accept payment out from under you.
I believe it is _STRONGLY_ against apple/google interests to allow apps to be installed from anywhere especially considering they have an economic interest on their own marketplaces... actually I think they are soon gonna even discourage the use of webapps in subtle (eg on purpose performance hits on browser experiences) or not subtle ways.
The final decision to terminate is usually taken by a human, not an algorithm. However, that human is not allowed to speak to you because anything they say is a potential liability in court or in PR terms.
Companies exist to produce profits for their owners. Without public regulation, you should not expect fair and faithful service. If you no longer represent a revenue opportunity - since they clearly decided just that - then you no longer exist.
The solution is often to try to align the incentives of the company with your own, with public shaming campaigns like this one.
I'd say companies exist to provide value to society, and profits are an incentive provided by said societies, which allows them to operate in the first place.
> The solution is often to try to align the incentives of the company with your own, with public shaming campaigns like this one.
Which is probably why it got flagged off the front page by people who won't say why they did that. They forget that the internet's ability to "route around problems" is really just a shadow of the ability of people and life in general to do that, and that trying to suppress local solutions just widens the area to be routed around.
I've worked on apps on both platforms, and with others who have.
IIRC you can actually organise a call with somebody at Apple to discuss issues, but not with Google. Can anyone else confirm this? The app dev who shared this info with me was making millions for both Google and Apple.
The same app dev had their app taken down from Google Play but then reinstated within 24 hrs after some furious emailing. I know of another dev who received no response to their desperate emails, who was told to never try to create another account, just like OP. This dev hadn't made Google any money.
Wow, I feel for that company. I was always skeptical of people raising alarm bells at everything "going chrome," but now I'm starting to get it - Google has the ability to just nuke a company from orbit on a whim, and I'm not sure anybody can do anything about it.
Sure, that company developed a business around Google. But it still feels bad.
The only problem is that I don't trust a large portion of American politicians that are seeking regulation - they seem highly motivated to force Google to become a Chinese-style propagandic censorship machine (i.e. Republicans complaining about "bias" because the president's picture shows up if you Google image search for "moron.") So while articles like this make me feel bad, I feel trapped into a need to fervently defend Google and "tech companies" to avoid my concerns being coopted.
> Google has the ability to just nuke a company from orbit on a whim, and I'm not sure anybody can do anything about it.
And that's why you don't build that critical point of failure into your product, even if it's harder and more expensive to do it another way. Which, sadly, means don't build your company around an Android app.
They can do this to your personal Google account, too. What are the repercussions, to most people, of being summarily banned from all Google products? (Hint: What's the recovery email address for all of your random online services? What's your personal contact email for work, taxation, etc.? Do you have a local backup of your Gmail archive?) It's unlikely, sure, but if it does happen then it's gonna suck.
For me it's (just) a way to log in into YouTube, I have a coupple of lists there which are nice, and I also use it for the Play Store on my phone where I bought 2 apps which I use, so I guess those would be gone too.
Otherwise I don't think I use a google account for anything else.
> Hint: What's the recovery email address for all of your random online services?
hey_$service_dont_spam_me@my_domain.com
> What's your personal contact email for work, taxation
my_name@my_domain.com
I always thought of gmail like gmx.net or something, it's where people who don't know internet things could get free email. I figured it's a good way to test the waters, I also had free email long before I had a domain... but over a decade later, we're actually building houses out of this duct tape? It's duct tape, it's useful, but it's still duct tape.
I don't mean this to blame the author. (Though them making another account with Google for private stuff made me despair)
My first thought was, if companies want to be persons, and do this to other persons, a fair response would actually be "Dear Google, stop existing. Please don't make another company, either." I know it's not realistic, not even desirable to me -- we don't even boycott really horrible actors on a large scale, so why ruin Google and all the lives that hang off of that. I don't believe in collective punishment under any circumstances, ever. But as a response to Google (et al.) "as a company", it would be fair -- and no need to tell them why, either.
I'd like to do this, but I'm hesitant to give up the convenience of things like Google spam filters or the tools Google software like Inbox or Calendar give me, specifically when they're tied to my email.
Who is proposing a propagandic censorship machine? The example, as stupid as it was, was intended to highlight bias and ask the question of how big tech can be trusted to act without ideological or personal preference when it comes to censoring speech, deciding what apps are permissible, who can earn on their platforms etc. I don’t hear anyone who is championing regulation suggesting that the solution to censorship on the likes of google is more censorship only this time enforced by the government
Nobody explicitly, obviously. However, the head of the Republican party has expressed frustration multiple times that the press is "allowed to say whatever it wants." This sentiment has carried over into the "drag tech companies in front of the Senate" debacle, and my read of the questions being asked of, for example, Zuckerberg, were that they were being asked to try to demonstrate that not only do internet companies "have bias," but that they should be regulated, perhaps made to be more "fair" to the Republican party. I believe such regulation could easily transform or be compared to my Google searches being blocked in China because they "violate the political harmony of the people's republic."
You may fairly say that I am engaging in slippery slope, but I take freedom of speech and thought very seriously, and so any attacks on it to any degree are terribly inflated in my mind.
From the wording of the email, it sounds like his previous ventures might have been doing something shady and those accounts are linked to the startup account.
> My “personal publisher account”, was terminated last August 1th. I probably will never know why. It was mostly abandoned, I had just a few old apps just for testing features or make experiments.
That's distressingly vague, especially when he provides screenshots of the recent termination emails. If there wasn't more to this, you'd expect the history of that other account, which is pretty clearly relevant here, to be laid out in a lot more detail.
I agree that Google is prone to arbitrary and Kafkaesque behavior, but this instance smells fishy.
This is what monopolization looks and feels like. Google Play is less of a monopoly within its ecosystem than Apple’s App Store is, but in both cases you have a monopoly that brooks no competition and is consequently unaccountable and, well, evil. The only way to fix this is to force Google and Apple to allow alternative markets/stores on their platforms.
iOS user so Ive no idea, but I thought they did? Isn’t there a setting in Android to enable sideloading, and lots of phone manufacturers include their own app stores, notably Samsung. Or is this comment a sarcastic ‘why don’t they just do X’, when everyone knows they already do X? In which case what dies the ‘brooks no competition’ comment mean? Honest question.
Is online Office 365 (I'm using Firefox on Linux) comparable to gdocs?
My account's payment method has been flagged twice for some reason, and reading this makes me think how screwed I'd be if my startup's gapps account gets flagged.
>Do not attempt to register a new developer account. Any new accounts will be closed and your developer registration fee will not be refunded. We recommend that you use an alternative method for distributing your apps in the future.
If this is a serous problem, why is there no other app store? There should be plenty of programmers who need another method to reach their customers.
For starters, Amazon's app store should do [1]. If enough developers reach out to their customers, it could become a viable alternative.
That said, "The Castle" [2] should be a compulsory reading for each Android developer, or app developers in general.
"Other app stores" do exist, but Google went to great lengths to destroy them. Publishing clients for alternative stores in Google Play/Android Market have been prohibited by Google's ToS for years (don't know if it is still prohibited). The "allow alternative app sources" checkbox (unchecked by default!) has been deterring users from installing from non-Google sources till Android 8. It still exists, but Google have ruled, that third-party marketplace apps are better than malware-riddled piracy websites, so Android 8+ allows to whitelist specific marketplace apps while still keeping the checkbox unchecked. And let's not forget about Google's war to banish alternatives to their services from Android devices, while using their own Google Services packages as leverage.
Google's overall approach to building it's walled garden is not much different from Apple's. They give some fake "choice", because they know, that tech-illiterate consumers won't be able to make use of alternative options.
If you can escape the "garden" just by checking a box, it's not much of a walled garden. The choice is very real, e.g. there's nothing like F-Droid on iOS devices. This makes Android devices a fairly sensible choice overall, although some devices are still more open than others (supporting e.g. alternative, Google-free OS's like LineageOS, and perhaps the future PostmarketOS).
Imagine a world in which Google Pay is dominant, and your Google Play account is terminated, and nowhere takes cash, and you can't buy food now, or ever.
Considering the reputed prevalence of WeChat in much of China for everyday transactions, this may be moving close to reality for people banned from that platform
There's always F-Droid (+ a custom repo if you're unable to FOSSify your app) or Amazon's app store. Those may or may not be "reasonable" for everyone (in particular since they're not typically preinstalled on phones), but it's a start.
For those of you wondering, it appears that the company mentioned in the article, GreenLionSoft [1], develops apps that show public transportation schedules in Spain, at least as of 2017 [2]. Their Google Play page still exists in some places but has been cleared of all apps [3].
I can't find Pablo A. Martinez's personal developer account; the closest match is com.pablomartinez, which belongs (belonged?) to a law form, according to the description on Google. (The page is no longer accessible and doesn't seem to be archived anywhere.)
Pablo A. Martinez has additional work history publicly posted on his LinkedIn profile [4]. I just gave it a quick skim, but I don't see anything shady. At least on the surface, there's no clear explanation for the account terminations.
Pablo, if you're reading this, please consider adding more info about the apps you published, ideally with links to back up your claims. It'll make your case stronger.
> Pablo, if you're reading this, please consider adding more info about the apps you published, ideally with links to back up your claims. It'll make your case stronger.
I strongly second this. If it is not clear, this means to please be clear on what your experimental and play apps were from the original personal developer account.
> My “personal publisher account”, was terminated last August 1th. I probably will never know why. It was mostly abandoned, I had just a few old apps just for testing features or make experiments.
This sort of app is quite common and serves a distinct, specialized purpose, so I doubt that. Additionally, Google doesn’t generally remove apps that compete with their own; it’s Apple that does that.
Google has been caught banning AdSense accounts to avoid paying website ownsers. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were found to be banning developers of apps that take eyeballs away from Google services.
the case to whom? the primary message from the post is that there is likely no human being who will look at this again (and based on the robotic 24h + 1min timestamp on the email, the question is whether one ever did in the first place).
Google certainly re-looks at cases which make the front page.
They're quite strict on the 'if you've been banned and you use another account, we'll ban that one too', so that's the reason for the recent termination. Sometimes it takes months for them to link together accounts like this, because they gradually accumulate evidence like signing apk's with the same key, or logging into the console from the same IP addresses.
The old account I would bet had something shady on it. For example, an ad-clicker or rooting tools.
Should they really be linking personal accounts with reputable commercial accounts, though? What if one of your developers who has access to the commercial account has published something shady on their personal account?
Hi Zenexer,
I just get aware of the existence of this thread.
I still don't know if our "GreenLionSoft" account is going to be reinstantiated but I've got more info from the review team.
Our company account hasn't violated any policy but it was "associated" with my personal account that hadn't violated any policy but was "associated" to a third account from which I had console access in the past and that was terminated due "IP violation and Trademark" months before personal mine. The owner of this account appealed denying any IP violation but was ignored and the termination cascaded from one account to another.
The point here is not whether this first termination was fair or not, the point is that now anybody that shares wifi, hardware or console access with anybody that suffers a termination will be terminated too.
It is quite usual that developers working for a start-up, have also their own personal GP account just for publishing their pet projects or just testing new API's or features. If any of your employees while or before working for you have their account terminated the company account risks to be terminated too.
I have now sent back to the review team extra info to demonstrate that my personal account and company accounts were not created to impersonate this terminated account, nor republish any suspended app.
This has been going on for years, I've experienced it firsthand and have read dozens of reports from other people in the same situation.
If this was an error, it would have been fixed long ago. At this point in time I'm convinced it's a deliberate tactic - terminate an account once they start to get popular and see if they can pull enough strings or raise enough of a stink to have a human look at it.
Blaming an "algorithm" is becoming a very convenient way to abdicate from any responsibility for shitty business practices and biases against certain groups of people.
Email is the most dangerous service for you to be relying on a company that you describe as having "a total lack of customer service". Email is the gateway to all your accounts across the entire Internet.
Aaaand flagged of the front page, what just by score and would would probably still sit firmly at the #1 spot it shot to.
What's a valid reason to do that, rather than clicking "hide" and just ignore the story if you personally don't care about it? Sure, I'd also prefer an article, that maybe contains this and other things as examples. But the discussion can be in that spirit regardless -- and who who will that article, or have such a discussion, when stuff like this is actively being hidden from sight?
Once again it turns out that most people are way better than the manipulated results make it seem like. I think of that whenever someone says "the market decided that "$shitty_thing is okay".
edit: answer the 2 questions, and we'll see who's contributing and thinking, and who isn't.
The once beloved company Google turned into a gigantic evil company with absolutely no compassion towards its developers and users. Everything they do is presented and marketed as something good, but deep under it is shady, controversial and goes straight into our norms of a good society. Imagine if companies like Google, Amazon, apple etc are dictating the rules. It won't be far of a regime in China. Expelled from society based on automated bits and false information. We shouldn't accept that kind of behaviour. We all should standup and knock this evil thing over.
These app stores need to be made accountable for their decisions to do this. A sympathetic judge setting a precedent is all thats needed for this process to be more transparent.
Google, Apple, PayPal and other platforms that can cause a major disruption to a business by terminating its account must offer a service of auditing on demand in order to mitigate and control the risk of sudden deactivation. Such service can be paid, no problem. Customers should be able to request the auditing in order to understand what they look like from the platform's point of view and estimate possible risks. Shutting down established business accounts without a notice is absolutely not acceptable.
Am from India ....This newYear2019 goes very difficult to me...Because same email am also received about the Google Play console account termination ...if some buddy has answer for that please reply me...am waiting for you all answer.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadhahahahahhahahaha
no
Pay to play? I guess so.
At the same time, it drives me nuts to see these kinds of flaws in the system. People get invested in a platform, and then one day that platform kicks you in the nuts, and slams the door as you fall out on the pavement.
Your point, to me, is just another indication of how transparency is a win.
Yeah so you decided to post this bullshit comment and spread FUD instead of reading a few paragraphs into the actual article.
Let me check. /s
I would guess they supplement their own app income with contracting.
[0]: https://www.greenlionsoft.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/20170428152946/https://play.goog...
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lx9Xke...
At first glance doesn't seem to be scummy, but you never know.
But the ad and in-app revenue streams mentioned in the article suggest that they have also been active in other fields. In-app purchases that still go on after account termination might be a hint in the right direction though: would IAPs via Play still be going on? External ("untaxed") IAPs are the biggest sin from the app-store's point of view. External purchases are allowed to be handled externally (e.g. paying for physical goods in the Amazon app), but definitions are not always clear and then it's all arbitrary judge-and-executioner.
Remember that one which told you which platform your train at eg Penn Station was likely to come in on, so you could wait on your track instead of in the designated waiting area? To put it in clickbait terms, "station operators HATE this", because there are a variety of safety and efficiency problens with people waiting on the platform, even when it helped the user be the first on the train.
(I have no idea what is going on in this case.)
The waiting area is on top of the escalators at Penn as well, but since you don't know which track you need to wait for, it is always a mad dash down the corridor for your train once the track number has been posted. This is made even worse by the fact that by the time the track number appears, there is only 3-5 minutes before departure of the train, so there is a sense of urgency required to get to the right place before the train leaves.
It is pretty terrible, but so is everything else about Penn.
Perhaps Pablo should get a job with a high profile but small on tech company (maybe a bank?) and watch Google change their policies immediately.
I feel like iOS in particular could already do this. They could just let users install apps from anywhere and then do their best to keep their platform secure.
I'm sure others disagree though but I feel like if you want a gatekeeper you should opt in. You're free to only install apps certified by "somecompanywhoauditsapps.com" or "apple.com" but if you want to you're also free to just install them from anywhere.
I suppose you'd still end up with the same problem that if you choose to go through "apple.com" they might not approve your app but hopefully with alternatives there would be more incentive to provide better support. I can certainly imagine Epic Games would jump at chance to offer their own iOS store. Valve might as well.
For FOSS at least, there is F-Droid.
What's wrong with Firefox? Are you talking about yourself or some security update coming soon?
And give publishers like Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, and similar the ability to offer in-app purchases that bypass Apple’s 30% cut? Never gonna happen.
Companies exist to produce profits for their owners. Without public regulation, you should not expect fair and faithful service. If you no longer represent a revenue opportunity - since they clearly decided just that - then you no longer exist.
The solution is often to try to align the incentives of the company with your own, with public shaming campaigns like this one.
> The solution is often to try to align the incentives of the company with your own, with public shaming campaigns like this one.
Which is probably why it got flagged off the front page by people who won't say why they did that. They forget that the internet's ability to "route around problems" is really just a shadow of the ability of people and life in general to do that, and that trying to suppress local solutions just widens the area to be routed around.
IIRC you can actually organise a call with somebody at Apple to discuss issues, but not with Google. Can anyone else confirm this? The app dev who shared this info with me was making millions for both Google and Apple.
The same app dev had their app taken down from Google Play but then reinstated within 24 hrs after some furious emailing. I know of another dev who received no response to their desperate emails, who was told to never try to create another account, just like OP. This dev hadn't made Google any money.
https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/9n88wv/the_futu...
Sure, that company developed a business around Google. But it still feels bad.
The only problem is that I don't trust a large portion of American politicians that are seeking regulation - they seem highly motivated to force Google to become a Chinese-style propagandic censorship machine (i.e. Republicans complaining about "bias" because the president's picture shows up if you Google image search for "moron.") So while articles like this make me feel bad, I feel trapped into a need to fervently defend Google and "tech companies" to avoid my concerns being coopted.
And that's why you don't build that critical point of failure into your product, even if it's harder and more expensive to do it another way. Which, sadly, means don't build your company around an Android app.
They can do this to your personal Google account, too. What are the repercussions, to most people, of being summarily banned from all Google products? (Hint: What's the recovery email address for all of your random online services? What's your personal contact email for work, taxation, etc.? Do you have a local backup of your Gmail archive?) It's unlikely, sure, but if it does happen then it's gonna suck.
Otherwise I don't think I use a google account for anything else.
hey_$service_dont_spam_me@my_domain.com
> What's your personal contact email for work, taxation
my_name@my_domain.com
I always thought of gmail like gmx.net or something, it's where people who don't know internet things could get free email. I figured it's a good way to test the waters, I also had free email long before I had a domain... but over a decade later, we're actually building houses out of this duct tape? It's duct tape, it's useful, but it's still duct tape.
I don't mean this to blame the author. (Though them making another account with Google for private stuff made me despair)
My first thought was, if companies want to be persons, and do this to other persons, a fair response would actually be "Dear Google, stop existing. Please don't make another company, either." I know it's not realistic, not even desirable to me -- we don't even boycott really horrible actors on a large scale, so why ruin Google and all the lives that hang off of that. I don't believe in collective punishment under any circumstances, ever. But as a response to Google (et al.) "as a company", it would be fair -- and no need to tell them why, either.
You may fairly say that I am engaging in slippery slope, but I take freedom of speech and thought very seriously, and so any attacks on it to any degree are terribly inflated in my mind.
From the wording of the email, it sounds like his previous ventures might have been doing something shady and those accounts are linked to the startup account.
That's distressingly vague, especially when he provides screenshots of the recent termination emails. If there wasn't more to this, you'd expect the history of that other account, which is pretty clearly relevant here, to be laid out in a lot more detail.
I agree that Google is prone to arbitrary and Kafkaesque behavior, but this instance smells fishy.
https://www.greenlionsoft.com
It's a bit out of date, but it looks like they were working on commuting apps for metro bus lines, etc.
My account's payment method has been flagged twice for some reason, and reading this makes me think how screwed I'd be if my startup's gapps account gets flagged.
If this is a serous problem, why is there no other app store? There should be plenty of programmers who need another method to reach their customers.
For starters, Amazon's app store should do [1]. If enough developers reach out to their customers, it could become a viable alternative.
That said, "The Castle" [2] should be a compulsory reading for each Android developer, or app developers in general.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Appstore
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle_(novel)
It is serious, but only for a few developers, not for most, nor for Google. It has to be wide-spread to make alternative store(s) viable.
Google's overall approach to building it's walled garden is not much different from Apple's. They give some fake "choice", because they know, that tech-illiterate consumers won't be able to make use of alternative options.
Imagine a world in which Google Pay is dominant, and your Google Play account is terminated, and nowhere takes cash, and you can't buy food now, or ever.
> We recommend that you use an alternative method for distributing your apps in the future.
There is no reasonable alternative method for distributing commercial apps on android. The app store is a monopoly.
How about your company's website?
If your target audience will only use Play, then the only reasonable target store _is_ Play.
I'm in the F-Droid target audience, so you could target me.
However, as they appear to be publishing transport/mapping tools for Spain... It's unlikely they can reach their target audience any more.
I can't find Pablo A. Martinez's personal developer account; the closest match is com.pablomartinez, which belongs (belonged?) to a law form, according to the description on Google. (The page is no longer accessible and doesn't seem to be archived anywhere.)
Pablo A. Martinez has additional work history publicly posted on his LinkedIn profile [4]. I just gave it a quick skim, but I don't see anything shady. At least on the surface, there's no clear explanation for the account terminations.
Pablo, if you're reading this, please consider adding more info about the apps you published, ideally with links to back up your claims. It'll make your case stronger.
[1]: https://www.greenlionsoft.com/
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170428152946/https://play.goog...
[3]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=583922732690913554...
[4]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pamartineza/
I strongly second this. If it is not clear, this means to please be clear on what your experimental and play apps were from the original personal developer account.
> My “personal publisher account”, was terminated last August 1th. I probably will never know why. It was mostly abandoned, I had just a few old apps just for testing features or make experiments.
Banning competitors seems like a recipe for antitrust lawsuits.
the case to whom? the primary message from the post is that there is likely no human being who will look at this again (and based on the robotic 24h + 1min timestamp on the email, the question is whether one ever did in the first place).
They're quite strict on the 'if you've been banned and you use another account, we'll ban that one too', so that's the reason for the recent termination. Sometimes it takes months for them to link together accounts like this, because they gradually accumulate evidence like signing apk's with the same key, or logging into the console from the same IP addresses.
The old account I would bet had something shady on it. For example, an ad-clicker or rooting tools.
I still don't know if our "GreenLionSoft" account is going to be reinstantiated but I've got more info from the review team.
Our company account hasn't violated any policy but it was "associated" with my personal account that hadn't violated any policy but was "associated" to a third account from which I had console access in the past and that was terminated due "IP violation and Trademark" months before personal mine. The owner of this account appealed denying any IP violation but was ignored and the termination cascaded from one account to another.
The point here is not whether this first termination was fair or not, the point is that now anybody that shares wifi, hardware or console access with anybody that suffers a termination will be terminated too.
It is quite usual that developers working for a start-up, have also their own personal GP account just for publishing their pet projects or just testing new API's or features. If any of your employees while or before working for you have their account terminated the company account risks to be terminated too.
I have now sent back to the review team extra info to demonstrate that my personal account and company accounts were not created to impersonate this terminated account, nor republish any suspended app.
Still waiting an answer...
If this was an error, it would have been fixed long ago. At this point in time I'm convinced it's a deliberate tactic - terminate an account once they start to get popular and see if they can pull enough strings or raise enough of a stink to have a human look at it.
Blaming an "algorithm" is becoming a very convenient way to abdicate from any responsibility for shitty business practices and biases against certain groups of people.
The only Google services I rely on are email and search, and even in those cases I’m looking for alternatives.
Pay for your own domain and if you can’t live without Gmail, at least go with GSuite.
Personally I think Gmail sucks for delivering email and I got off it based on technical limitations too.
What's a valid reason to do that, rather than clicking "hide" and just ignore the story if you personally don't care about it? Sure, I'd also prefer an article, that maybe contains this and other things as examples. But the discussion can be in that spirit regardless -- and who who will that article, or have such a discussion, when stuff like this is actively being hidden from sight?
Once again it turns out that most people are way better than the manipulated results make it seem like. I think of that whenever someone says "the market decided that "$shitty_thing is okay".
edit: answer the 2 questions, and we'll see who's contributing and thinking, and who isn't.
skype id : viewpoint92