Sounds like a bad situation. If I were you I would simply change the app ID, create a new Play account and publish it there. If there problem is with the connection to a banned account and not the app, then this removes that problem/connection.
If Google is anything like Amazon, that will probably not be as easy as it sounds. Name, credit card, address, any of those will be used to link the newly created account with the old one and it will get banned again. If Google is feeling particularly clever, they will have fingerprinted the app somehow and changing the ID won't be enough. This is, after all, a company who makes their living on such techniques.
Won't they associate you again to the banned account through either your address, credit card, phone number, email or anything shared with the old account? It looks like they apply very extensive transivity, including (from a previous story I read on HN) using recovery email address to associate and ban accounts.
There would no doubt be people succeeding at this, but it would be a real pain ensuring that none of the details match to the old account and that no future actions end up causing a connection.
Do NOT do this. Google will then ban all your accounts including Gmail, drive and ads as creating an account to circumvent their ban is really dangerous.
This ban is lifetime unfortunately and you or related accounts are not allowed on Google ever.
Did at&t or bell telephone have the absolute power to keep you off of the phone network? There is no way that they could technically or realistically. Yet google can do both.
> Understanding Freedom's Heritage: How to Keep and Defend Liberty.
This list, prepared for young people by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, includes some acknowledged classics and some idiosyncratic choices.
I don't understand how anyone can be surprised. Companies like AT&T and Comcast budget to support 100m people by phone, while Google has $100,000,000,000+ in the bank. This kind of expense evasion is just a dirty accounting trick to spend less. It would barely even eat into their revenue to provide Comcast-level shitty support. Google's massive profits could even absorb the occasional tax, unfortunately it's much more profitable to just abstain from support, taxes etc.
I imagine the comments will be either: its your fault, dont trust google and have a strategy that totally relies on a party out of your control, & in this day and age you have to do this and this happened to me with google/apple/paypal/microsoft etc.
While i think relying on google (or a single platform) is dangerous, these platforms really need to address these issues. While their isn’t much competition, they are really eroding developer trust. Developers may decide to build for an entirely different platform or work on a different idea that is outside mobile. This ultimately hurts app stores and this these platforms.
Short term a small amount of discontent doesnt matter, but it could reach a tipping point.
Considering there aren't many totally reliable ways to avoid shady software save going through the source of a program line by line and verifying it yourself, least-unrealiable sort of comes across as best.
A generalization is not necessary here, for me there is a huge difference between Apple's App Store and Google Play. The former actually has real people behind it that you can talk to, also on the phone, and who are really friendly and will reach out to help you fix problems. Also, they do really review the app, obviously using automated tools, but still there's some human involvement. Google tries to be smarter than everyone else but they're not. Many people have this love-hate relationship with them, but recently there's less and less love in it.
I think there's a couple solutions to this. First, "trust" should depend on your own evaluation of the developer, based on metrics like how long their app has existed, customer reviews, what protections they have around handling data, etc. You have the ability to do a much better job evaluating trust than Apple or Google are likely to. But even beyond that, sandboxing needs to be made effective enough that even if you do install a malicious app, it doesn't matter. iOS actually does a really good job of this - apps are contained in their own sandbox, and have to get your permission to access any sensitive data, which you can easily choose to accept or deny. There are also limits on resources, and apps can't do much to your system unless you actively open them, which makes it really easy to escape from a bad app.
I know you mentioned disabling javascript, but browsers are also a really good example of this. Browsers run your code in a sandbox, and the rendering engine itself is sandboxed in case of bugs. As a result, you can pretty much visit any random website and know that it won't compromise your system - as far as I know, there haven't been any widespread attacks using browser vulnerabilities since sandoxing was introduced (except maybe Internet Explorer, which doesn't really count). The worst that can happen is that a browser tab starts using too many resources or doing something annoying (like autoplaying a video), and you can just close the tab and make it go away.
""trust" should depend on your own evaluation of the developer, based on metrics like how long their app has existed, customer reviews, what protections they have around handling data, etc. You have the ability to do a much better job evaluating trust than Apple or Google are likely to."
Wow - no, we do not have the ability to ascertain the overall trustworthiness of a dev, certainly not better than Google or Apple.
Reviews can be faked, and 'how long their app has existed' is not a very good measure of anything. Their T&C's on 'protections' don't mean anything if they are not already trustworthy.
So unfortunately, this is one of the valuable things that AppStores can provide.
Assuming the developer has been in business for a significant amount of time, there are a lot of signals that help tell you whether an app is legit or not. As a random example, if I look for information aout Overcast (a fairly successful app from an independent developer), I get:
You could fake all of this, but it would be really difficult and expensive, and probably wouldn't work in the long-term.
It's true that for a brand-new app from an unknown developer, it's difficult to say what their intentions are, but Google and Apple don't really have any more information to go off of than you do regarding that - at best, they likely have the developer's contact information, but you can probably find that yourself as well. Additionally, the nice thing about sandboxing and permissions is that you don't really have to trust the developer in order to run an app. For example, the other day I was looking for a protractor app that would give me measurements in tenths of a degree, and I found this app [1]. Aside from a few reviews (which, as you said, could easily be fake), I know absolutely nothing about this developer - for all I know, they could be trying to steal all my data. But because iOS sandboxes everthing, they won't actually be able to access any of my data or do anything bad unless I approve it, and if I don't like the app, I can press one button and get rid of it. As a result, I can feel comfortable installing the app anyway, even if I don't trust the developer.
I mean, both Google and Apple analyze apps for any sort of detectable malicious libraries/code. It's not perfect by any means, but it's something.
I don't know why this business got banned. I assume it's due to the outsourced dev they used. I doubt they're technically competent and reviewed the app themselves, so who knows what kind of bullshit the dev stuffed in their or their other apps.
Disregarding security, the app stores also (try) to filter out crap applications, blatant rip-offs, applications that steal your data or ruin your battery by mining bit coins. These things usually don't really need to circumvent the sandbox. One can of course argue that the stores don't really do a great job policing the right things but they are efficient to some degree (e.g.: the recent facebook spy-vpn fiasco).
One other thing is that, at least in Apple app store, the review process catches use of private APIs which are in theory harmless but are not considered stable and could cause the application to crash if a minor update changes the way they work.
If an application is a "blatant rip-off", users are most likely going to realize it and uninstall it/stop spending money on it/dispute it with their credit card company, which should eventually stop the scammers from making money. And even before you install the app, you can still read reviews from other people to determine whether it's trustworthy.
Excessive resource usage is already pretty easy to avoid - iOS will limit resource usage when an app is in the background, and show you which apps are using a lot of battery power so you can uninstall them. I would imagine Apple could expand this more by showing an unobtrustive notification somewhere with a message like "____ is reducing your battery life, would you like to stop it?"
Regarding private API's, if Apple's position is that third-party apps are not allowed to use them, they should just stop exposing these APIs to other apps completely.
Solving privacy issues is tricker, at least in the short term, although I think this should eventually be handled by government regulation. Assuming we can get fair and well-written regulation (which, to be fair, is a big if!), we could have clearly-documented rules that apply equally to all market participants, and aren't quite as clearly biased based on commercial incentives (although there would still be an indirect effect due to lobbying).
> as far as I know, there haven't been any widespread attacks using browser vulnerabilities since sandoxing was introduced (except maybe Internet Explorer, which doesn't really count).
While non-malicious, jailbreakme.com seems to come back once every few years or so.
That's a good point, although the only recent exploit (in 2017) depended on a combination of 3 vulnerabilities that had already been fixed over a year and a half ago when the exploit was released.
> App stores are the least-unreliable mechanism I have to trust executable code
More so than the repositories that various linux distros use?
I honestly think that something like apt for android would be a much better solution - too bad, it will never happen because it would mess with google's monopoly.
There are Play Store alternatives, such as F-Droid, Aptoide and ApkMirror.
But it still comes down to discoverability and trust - you need to know about and trust these alternatives, and you need to change a setting on your device to "allow untrusted sources".
Distro repositories are great but they are several orders of magnitudes smaller than the app stores. Ubuntu has ~50k packages available, app stores host millions of apps. Package maintainers to a great job but I don't think this model can scale up.
The trust you have in an app store is because you believe in their processes for auditing apps. But the two do not need to be linked.
Google Play Protect, for instance, works just fine on sideloaded apps or apps downloaded from other stores.
The distribution and marketing channel don't need to be the same as the trust mechanism. There's a whole anti-malware industry out there that can do the latter, and could easily do as good a job as Google currently do.
> App stores are the least-unreliable mechanism I have to trust executable code. I don’t even enable JavaScript by default.
How did the rest of us ever live through the 80s and 90s when we had to purchase software from physical stores based on reviews in magazines and word-of-mouth...
More seriously, the PC software industry works well without app stores, download sites usually check for malware to some extent and successful publishers earn trust by not screwing over their users.
> Dont trust google and [don't] have a strategy that totally relies on a party out of your control
Last week, much of Google and Facebook were brought to a halt after Apple revoked their enterprise certificates. While the circumstances justified Apple's actions in this case, the fact remains that even Google and Facebook are largely reliant on another large company. If Apple completely banned all Facebook apps from the app store tomorrow... well, Facebook would probably survive, but it would be a serious blow.
I don't see how you can not be reliant on Apple/Google.
> I don't see how you can not be reliant on Apple/Google.
This is the very definition of a monopoly, isn't it? If the government was working properly, it would be ready to break up these companies, as well in other areas of oligopoly such as oil and banking.
Antitrust covers market manipulation and coercion though, which you could easily argue these companies have (monopoly over certain platforms such as the iPhone; magically identical pricing).
For most of my family and friends, their smart phones may as well be designated Facebook portals. As sick as that makes me, that is the world we live in.
I'm not so sure Facebook could survive. At least, assuming they were not able to get some alternatives in place fast and even then, it would not continue to be the same company it is today. FB gets 85% of their revenue from mobile ads. I haven't seen the breakdown, but I'm guessing based on other stats I've seen that way more than half of that comes from iOS. If they were banned from the app store, it would be catastrophic.
Are they a natural monopoly by choice or by necessity? Not sure what "natural" means, here. I could imagine some sort of federation that would make them less of a monopoly, understandably not Google's choice, though.
Natural probably means that for a given mobile platform it's natural - due to network effects and other market forces (e.g. the platform owner heavily subsidizing/supporting their choice of store) - for one store to emerge as a monopoly.
and yet the lemmings continue to flock to the adsense cliff and follow each other over it. I dropped adsense ten? years ago - I dont have an FB account and I'm not tart now. It may not seem that way to the lemmings but Google and FB are NOT the internet (they just very very good at exploiting it).
What kind of an agreement did you sign with your developers?
IANAL. You might be able to invoke some legal means to limit your losses. The associated-account story wasn’t an act of God. You might argue the developers should have known better. I’d suggest buying an hour of a lawyer’s time to see what can be done.
What agreement. They hire offshore developers. They do not know who these people are, if it is a person, or a group of scammers.
He asks for an app, but lets the offshore "developers" do everything including store deployments. He could take the codes, and take care of the accounts. Heck, he could even study a few hours to understand what's going on the app before submitting.
He just depended on some random company he found on a freelancer website, dumped all the money, then got punished because he let those people take 100% of control.
Would love to sympathize but I can’t agree with their “neighbour” analogy. A more apt analogy is this: If someone has illegal dealings in the past, and you conduct business with them in the present, the authorities are well within their rights to investigate you. If you didn’t know beforehand, the investigation should convince you to cease further activities. If you did know and still proceeded, it’s your own damn fault.
Tl;dr: Cut ties with the app developer, create a fresh google play dev account and deploy your app.
I do agree that Google’s customer support is sorely lacking. If they’re collecting 30% of every purchase, they need to hire real people to deal with these issues. That’s a big chunk of change to collect and not provide any service against.
Edit: While it’s tempting to play the victim, business in the real world also works this way. Businesses can end up tainted by association with sketchy parties or other businesses that act poorly. A good chunk of business is word of mouth and trusting the other party. No one wants to do business with someone untrustworthy.
Please. This is not a court of law. Google, as a business, is cutting ties with your business because your business has toes to someone who shat in their backyard. It’s not your fault if you didn’t know, that’s unfair, but they are entitled to protect themselves too. Sometimes life is unfair and bad breaks happen.
It sounds like the problem is with the outsourced developers responsible for the app. It's their account which has been banned - for multiple violations of the ToS. Now, perhaps this is just over-zealous enforcement on Google's part, but it's also possible that these developers have created shady apps before, or are adding shady code to apps developed for others.
The OP doesn't seem to know for certain what code is in their app. Is it possible that the outsourced developers they're using could have introduced dangerous code, and have a track record of doing so before? Nowhere in the post does it suggest that the author has contacted them to find out why their account is banned, which seems a little odd given how frustrated they have become with Google for banning them.
Google has the burden of proof to show why they are guilty by mere association, but won't do it, likely because they don't want to reveal any information about how they determine who is violating the ToS. There should be greater transparency and a better appeals process, but there won't be.
At the very least it doesn't seem that Google has thought of a better way to handle the scenario where an honest client relies upon a firm that has within it one bad actor, which seems kind of short-sighted given the heavy-handed nature of their policy - ban and delete someone else's work..
Look at it from the other perspective - if Google doesn't police the Play Store then users are put at risk. When bad actors are detected, they're banned. It sucks if you've hired one of these bad actors to do development work for you, but that can't trump the need for users to be protected from malicious code.
In an ideal world, code review of the app would reveal whether or not there's anything fishy going on. It doesn't seem like anyone has done this - not the OP, or Google. OP thinks their developers must be OK, and Google thinks (based on some past evidence) that they're not. This doesn't strike me as totally unreasonable on Google's part.
I’ve seen enough posts like this that end with the developers being reinstated to doubt google here. They need to provide actual humans as resources to developers and companies. They take a huge cut, they should provide the service.
But really we should move away from these app stores.
Exactly. It seems there should be some certain legal "level of expectation" that they will act in good faith for 30% (I'm guessing- I don't use them).
But really we should move away from these app stores
Yep. Which is why I have to guess at the 30%.
I find this whole story very disturbing. I understand Google's need to protect their ecosystem from malicious code, and the desire to ban developers who try to do harm (although I suspect that the real bad actors find work-arounds for the bans), but I can't help thinking that this isn't the way a good (morally) company would behave.
I guess it points to way more developers out there than Google needs in order to have a vibrant ecosystem, so if they burn through some percentage it isn't worth their time. It makes me think of fishermen who fished ruthlessly and perhaps wastefully when the ocean harvest was plentiful. Years later, however, those fishermen face some dire times, with perhaps more ahead, because the harvest is more modest and future harvests are threatened.
I don't know if Google gets a huge cut now but they certainly didn't start that way. Originally when Android shipped Google took 30% but only got 5%, the other 25% went to the carrier. The fact that they only got 5% apparently meant they were barely covering costs.
That maybe have changed in the last 10 years but I don't think it has. The help on it says
> The remaining 30% goes to the distribution partner and operating fees.
The problem here isn't that Google terminated the account (which seems reasonable, given the circumstances), but that's its essentially impossible to have it reinstated because there's no real appeals process.
I don't think you can - once you get banned, they run you through some automated thing which usually just tells you the decision is final, and you're banned for good. Then you CANNOT talk to someone. And if you do speak with a customer service rep that finds out you've been banned, they have to stop talking to you.
I had an account representative from google at some point. As soon as I was banned, all my calls were routed to voicemail automatically.
The owner most likely doesn't have them. If he had from the beginning none of this would've happened. Considering the publisher is the offshore developer, the owner would've gotten worse trouble than this in the future.
Knowing all these, I wouldn't touch their iOS app with a ten-foot-pole.
> Nowhere in the post does it suggest that the author has contacted them to find out why their account is banned
Which, to be fair, is by design. The article admits straight up that it's an attempt to get publicity and embarrass Google into reinstating the account. Giving a complete and forthright accounting cuts against that goal, they want to seem as sympathetic and innocent as possible.
And, to be fair, the iPhone set around here is eating it up. Pitchforks are sharpened, torches are lit and the march to the castle is underway.
As to the truth? We really have no idea. I think your theory sounds most plausible -- they hired someone scammy to write the app and Google happened to bring the banhammer down on them while this app was being launched.
I get where you're going, but Google has been guilty of similar egregious behavior in the past countless times. The testimony of so many people in this thread alone swings the case in OP's direction, not by virtue of evidence but by virtue of reputation
Yeah this makes sense. This one particular example seems fishy but when so many people have voiced their support it's clear something is really broken with Google's procedures. This kind of thing is always hard to deal with though it seems Google does have it worse than many other similar behemoths.
This is typical Google behaviour unfortunately. With GCP there have been countless similar stories. Unless you have a dedicated account manager (meaning you spend millions) there is basically no human support.
Yep, Google is by far the company with the worst customer support I've ever seen - they sucked up $500 without telling me and then when I found out, they hid behind a smoke screen as to why they couldn't refund it.
I also have another friend who has been banned for life by Google for the Play Store as well by association. Google refused to reconsider on appeal, and offers no recourse for him, a professor who teaches Android dev.
Google's lesson is clear here - don't use their services if you can help it because you expose tremendous liability due to Google's unwillingness to take any.
This is why PWA is important: Google cannot ban a website!
Also, the author should make sure to publish their app on non-Google App Stores and remind users that they still have a choice.
And for those questioning on why the author is upset if they're still on the iOS store: Android is about 85% of the global market, and about 2/3rds of the US devices.
iOS is this weird dying phone OS that Apple is keeping alive even though there really aren't that many users.
yeah, but Apple has always been it's own worst enemy. Jobs and it had this co-dependent relationship, and I think they are in long term decline now that he isn't there to rein in their worst excesses and insist on certain things.
The question I always have with this stuff is this:
To attract developers, these platforms make some promises. A "review" process for supposed violations of TOS causing cancellations is always among them. But to me these "reviews" always seem either completely faked or some version of a lowest-level employee simply restating that the algo has made its choice and they are powerless.
More incriminating is that every time a story starts to go viral, it seems a higher-up jumps in and instantly fixes it. (i.e. they can deliver a "real" review if they want to)
Since you paid them money (which they never refund) and they promised you an actual review if something goes wrong (which they never seem to actually deliver)...How is this any different than selling a counterfeit product? Isn't this legally actionable fraud?
I would assume if they could show that they depended on the promise made by the "supplier (google)" when they purchased the fraudulent good, the supplier would be liable for damages as well. Sort of like if I sold someone "aircraft grade aluminum" and then delivered compacted used soda cans and they actually did try to build a plane from it resulting in a crash.
That's assuming that someone associated with the developers actually did something wrong. For all we know, it could have been a mistake, a misinterpretation of some activity by Google's algorithms etc. - we'll never know because the lack of transparency gives Google advantage, and they're not legally required to provide any information on that.
That's why I think it's in the best interests of everyone to support alternatives like Librem, so that no single entity can make such kind of decisions.
Does it matter if it is? B2B lawsuits only get down to the actual law if the parties have a relatively equal amount of money. A small or medium business going after google _after google has shut off their revenue_ is not going to ever win
Why not? If you take them to court over this they would have to at least send a representative and that costs money - in a case like this they would almost definitely tell the engineering team to fix this specific case. Especially since this is in the UK so if Google lost they would be liable for the process fees. Maybe even small claims court would be enough, and that's 100% not worth sending a lawyer for.
I'm nowhere close to a lawyer and law is always a head-scratcher for me, but I'd hope that if that theory held even the slightest amount of legal water, a letter for your lawyer to their legal team might be enough to nudge them to fix your account and that'd be the end of it.
That's basically how it works. It costs you very little(couple hundred £ at most) to ask a lawyer to craft a letter to send to Google legal team saying they have to resolve the issue for you within 14 days or you will be taking them to court. And if there's one thing that's absolutely certain is that Google's law team's time is way more expensive than whatever lawyer you found to write a letter or two is going to charge you . So yes, they can write back telling you to fuck off. But they will know that if you do file a case against them, they will have to send someone to court - and that's going to cost them a lot more than just fixing the stupid issue.
If your theory here was true, why does every small business who gets in this situation get stuck with no recourse when its just a few hundred to fix the problem?
Yes, Google could likely not handle the legal costs if everyone went after them in court. Much like prosecutors in the US, what Google does is go hard on anyone who tries to defend themselves legally. At the point the calculus a small business has to make is if its worth it to try and get a remedy in court when Google will make sure to push back as hard as possible and likely destroy your business.
OK. Under this definition of "going hard," literally all companies will "go hard" to defend themselves against incorrect small claims suits. The alternative is to always pay anyone who sues you for $100, since the effort of defending any individual suit in that amount will always be greater than the amount of the potential judgment. Of course, you can't do that, because then more people will start suing you for $100, seeing as you're just giving away money for the asking.
Personally I think that a definition of "going hard" that encompasses the behavior of all actors in a space is absurd. But you're free to interpret those words how you wish.
Because any other approach would be game-theoretic suicide. If it became common knowledge that you could threaten to sue Google to get special treatment, that's exactly what everyone would do in every situation where some kind of special treatment was desired. The special treatment would no longer be special; it would be the normal treatment. And so the typical costs associated with handling developers detected as fraudulent by automated defenses would skyrocket. Somebody would have to pay for that, either the shareholders (lol, not likely), or non-fraudulent developers, in the form of handling fees.
> small claims court would be enough, and that's 100% not worth sending a lawyer for.
I think the UK is like the US, and you have to represent yourself in small claims (to avoid wasting the court’s time). A county judge would probably find in the claimant’s favour in 2 seconds if you sent a solicitor…
Let's imagine for argument's sake that there's a developer account team inside Google which could pull the relevant machine levers and reinstate OP's account. OP has already talked to developer relations support managers who have proven to be unable to get the developer account team to comply. Why should a Google legal team be more successful than a developer relations support manager at getting the developer account team to comply, when Legal is almost certainly laterally farther away inside Google?
Ultimately, in-house counsel at an org the size of Google is tasked with making the problem go away. It's easier to do that by burying the opposition in machine-generated paperwork than it is to convince people laterally far away in your org to comply. As a small business, you can't afford to pay for lawyers to deal with all the paperwork, so the bigger side (Google) always wins.
You're correct if the case has any amount of complexity to it. This case does not. So unless they actually commit to it, the chances are very decent that the court will ask "yeah Google, why did you take this person's money and then closed their account? Unless you provide extremely compelling evidence for a good reason to close it, I'm going to order you to reopen that account".
You can't bury a small claims court in paperwork - that's by design. And like others have suggested, if you write the letter in plain language, stating that they should at least look over your case again or it will be taken as bad will by the court, then the legal team might request that this information be provided by the engineering team - who will in turn say ok yeah, this is bollocks. Or they might not and he will lose. Either way, I would at least send a letter indicating such intention.
we need more of the Max Schrems type in Tech. I wonder what a lawyer that moved into software / Tech or vice versa could achieve. I wouldn't underestimate the havoc "little men" can reach
Where does Google promise that review process? The sign-up flow for a developer account doesn't appear to mention anything like it.
Even if they did, fraud is a high barrier, it sometimes producing "bad" results that are reversed for PR reasons isn't enough. Given the case here, "A human has looked at the account and has confirmed that the only developer that has ever used it has been banned, this matches the criteria for banning the account" would be a review. (If they really gave the app developers the credentials to the account, that alone might be a violation of the rules? But I don't know how the Play Store backend works in detail)
Businesses treating businesses badly aren't that easy to reign in.
avip actually responded similarly below actually citing the relevant section of the TOS but got downvoted? Don't know why, this is perfectly valid.
I'd simply ask, can they very publicly offer a review process which is essentially a functionless placebo button or is that misleading enough to subject them to any liability at all?
I doubt it's actually functionless, but it's not a "please reconsider your decision", but only "please check you haven't made an error" they probably expect everyone to hit, and treat it as such.
I guess it boils down to if anything is actually checked, ever, or if its just a glorified autoresponder. The always super-vague nature of the responses does not fill me with confidence as to the former.
Google may terminate this Agreement with You for any reason with thirty (30) days' prior written notice. In addition, Google may, at any time, immediately suspend or terminate this Agreement with You if: (a) You have breached any provision of this Agreement, any non-disclosure agreement or other agreement relating to Google Play or the Android platform; (b) Google is required to do so by law; (c) You cease to be an authorised developer, a developer in good standing, or are barred from using Android software; or (d) Google decides to no longer provide Google Play.
There are varios ways a ToS may be not applicable depending on the jurisdiction. In this case considering the monopoly position of Google here I doubt they can terminate an account that is equivalent to market access for any reason in the EU
You are quite right about that. I guess the question is, can they very publicly offer a review process which is essentially a functionless placebo button or is that misleading enough to subject them to any liability at all?
They have collected billions from developers via their 30% commission on sales and IAPs on their app store, plus the massive volume of advertisements shown in their customers apps for which their split is much more than 30%. Many developers are paying thousands or more a month to Google.
Google's customers include advertisers, and they include people paying them for hosting, and people paying them to buy apps, and people paying them to publish apps, people paying them for online services, people buying their hardware, etc.
Their revenue last year was 136 billions. Even if we charitable assume app developers spend 10 billions per annum in aggregate, that's only 10%. Ancillary revenue.
Android alone accounted for $31b revenue in 2016, according to Oracle, of which $22b was purportedly profit just for 2016. Excluding Android's contribution to their advertising ecosystem, which is another chunk of that $136 billion you mention. That's far more than 10% of their gross profit, but even if it was less why would that absolve Google of responsibility? The % doesn't create the customer the transactions do.
It's probably wrong, just something internal Oracle leaked on a topic without much transparency. But even if all Google ever made was the $25 one-time fee all Play Store developers have paid they meet the criteria to be customers.
It's got to be about 2 decades since only advertisers gave Google money in exchange for goods and services, since then there are dozens of ways to be their customer.
Caprices of TOS details, reviews, algorithms, service quality, or whatever are not the real problem. The real problem is when you can't reasonably choose to do business with someone else and move on, as they are free to do with you.
Network effects are causing more and more important things to both expand into great significance and to be dominated by a single company (or pair of gatekeepers, both of whom must be appeased, as in the phone platform.) Your business can be utterly wiped out with no realistic recourse by any of a thousand actions that could be taken at any time by the giant, like an elephant stepping on an ant.
I'm afraid that the only real recourse is to have certain anticompetitive regulations automatically kick in once a business rises above a certain percentage control of access to some market or medium that has become significant. They lose the ability to unilaterally ban, for example, except in narrow cases involving fraud or suspected criminal activity, which will eventually have to be proved to some official. If they fail to prove it, the official will order compensation without the banned party having to fight the giant's lawyers.
I can't believe the down-voting for suggesting Google - clearly NOT a provider of essential infrastructure like phone lines or internet connectivity - NOT be classified a class II common carrier!
In what universe are companies like Google, Apple, ... classifiable as class II common carriers? On what grounds?
I wonder - how big does a company have to become before a society steps in and says "you have enough power to control and affect the lives of X% of our citizens. Therefore, we must have a say in how you conduct your affairs." I mean, this is for all intents and purposes what regulation is - and the reason for it. Otherwise, set aside the very idea of government as a farce, and populate the world with a dystopian patchwork of private corporations that behave like nations.
This of course can never be true for mom-and-pop. But hell yes it is true for Google.
Exactly. It's always been the same bargain as with government.
'We the people / customers / market recognize that it's in our interests for your functions to be centralized (whether through functional necessity, efficiency, etc), however, in return for our granting you a monopoly we demand some say in how you run your affairs.'
The alternative should be, if Google isn't willing to accept that, then they deserve a lot harsher anti-competitive regulation. The GDPR would be the tip of the iceberg, and would continue into preventing their leveraging their size and customer knowledge into new related industries.
I think it isn't even a matter of bigness per say but of monopoly essentially. Your local water company can't decide to just jack up prices to $2500/gallon because they have an exploitable monopoly position.
Meanwhile say GE could be very huge and produce 50% of lightbulbs but if they decided to be grossly unreasonable people could just stop buying lightbulbs from alternatives. Now if they had created their own bulb-socket standards and enforced them so that only they could produce bulbs that fit into the socket then there would definitely be an abuse of monopoly standard and ample grounds to argue "No you abused the patent and it will go into public domain now as part of the punishment.".
The real problem is when you can't reasonably choose to do business with someone else and move on, as they are free to do with you.
Something I learned the hard way when I first started out in business is to never make your business dependent on a single entity.
Whether it's a supplier, or a publisher, or a telco, or whatever. They are all single points of failure, and unless you're a huge business, one failure can be all that's needed to take you down, too.
Yes, Google Play is effectively the only way to publish an Android program. But it's also a single point of failure, which is why until there is no longer a mobile program duopoly, I don't invest in app companies.
I can't remember the exact details of the story I read here on HN, but there was a case of some SaaS company that had this exact issue. Fortunately they were able to spread the word to temporarily use a backup domain on a different registrar via social media until the issue was resolved.
If anyone reading this remembers that story, I would very much appreciate a link.
how did you make your business not dependent upon your domain registrar?
It wasn't an internet business, so I didn't have to deal with those kinds of perils.
But more to your point, I knew a guy who put one on .com, one on .info, one on a county tld. Advertising material rotated through the three. His logic was that it didn't really matter what address was advertised because people just hit a search engine for the brand name. I haven't spoken to him in years, so I don't know how it worked out.
> Advertising material rotated through the three. His logic was that it didn't really matter what address was advertised because people just hit a search engine for the brand name.
Seems effective, but I assume he took a huge SEO penalty, possibly without being aware of it. The search relevance of the site got divided by all the domains.
Typically, a registrar is not irreplaceable. They could terminate your account so you'd have to transfer to another registrar, but unless their TOS says they can seize your domain they shouldn't be able to completely block you. Even then you have the ability to sue then if they break the contract terms.
This is in contrast to the app store gatekeepers, where there are effectively two, each serving a non-overlapping chuck of market, and you can't shop around for better terms or an alternative.
Not an ideal situation if something happens with your registrar, of course, but at least there is some possible recourse. The risk of this leading to your business closing is significantly lower.
That is precisely the problem with the current landscape for online businesses. Nearly every step of the way there is a single entity that you need to work with, or you are toast.
The biggest one lately comes down to marketplaces and payment processing. For example, if you are running a business selling a physical product, and you are banned from:
- Amazon
- PayPal
Your business is dead. It usually comes down to exposure and payment processing. Some businesses can gain exposure through a variety of channels. But most businesses get the majority of their customers through a small list of channels. That can be Facebook Ads, SEO, Forums, etc.
If you wake up one day and Google de-lists you from organic search, and the majority of your traffic was from SEO, you're dead. You can try refocusing and investing in other channels, but the majority of your potential new customers probably use one or two channels to find your service. So unless you are the only person offering said service, they'll just go to a competitor.
These companies like Amazon, Google, Paypal, Facebook, Apple have become gatekeepers. Try and do any type of e-commerce without using the above services. Good luck buddy!
Many businesses boil down to 1-3 of the above. Losing access to one can be all it takes to go from a highly successful company to a doomed company. And these services will ban you on ToS violations, without ever explaining what part of the ToS you violated. The implication from such a ban is that your business, your livelihood, your life's pursuit is instantly crippled or dead. The implication to them is nothing.
Do you avoid companies that take only Master/Visa who are happy to prevent certain businesses receiving payment?
All internet business that needs Google search to get visits? 5% bing doesn't really cut it.
I mean it's easy to say and believe that you should avoid those single points of failure, but the real, practical landscape often includes many of them.
GP stated they avoid investing in them. i.e. the risk profile doesn't align with their I vestment strategy.
What you're bringing up is kind of obvious but also irrelevant.
I'd ask what businesses do they invest in and figure out if those businesses are really less risky. I would posit they are probably not. The risk of having amazon Google or apple being a single point of failure is abysmally small compared to all the other risks out there.
Hardly irrelevant as if that's the strategy, you're going to be left with few businesses to start or invest in. From a practical point of view even a single office site may be such a single point of failure.
There are many practical single or narrow points of failure a bootstrapped startup or small business may encounter. The real risk to most starting out business is being seen as irrelevant - by the potential customers or search, whether app store or Google.
I agree, but this is the equivalent of choosing not to walk through dangerous neighborhoods. At a personal level, where you don't make the world but have to deal with reality as it is, this is wise if you have the option. Save yourself if you can. But at the same time, you should also support policy changes that you believe will make the dangerous neighborhoods safe. Save others, too, if you can. Anything that makes a neighborhood "dangerous" should be removed as long as it's not simply replaced by something equally dangerous.
If a market or medium is too dangerous to enter because there is no realistic alternative to submitting to the 800-lb gorilla, the gorilla's ability to threaten rather than compete must be eliminated.
Most media companies effectively have this as a single point of failure: Google Search. And, it's not from lack of trying to diversify. Countless businesses must depend on it, espcially media and content based businesses. I of some very large media companies in existance for over 10 years, and they still get over 50% of their traffic directly from Google. If google decided to ban them, their multi-million dollar business would dissappear almost overnight.
or, of course, stop developing apps. If this is actually a common problem for app developers, then few people will go into this business, and the supply of apps will drop. That will then tell Google/Apple that this is actually a problem that they need to deal with.
All businesses have risks. At least these risks you know about beforehand (a <1% chance that your app developer has been shady in past and will get your account banned). This is actually a pretty small risk compared to the >99% chance that the app will sink like a stone in the sea of apps available, never to be seen again, along with every penny invested in it.
The app stores are swamped with apps. Every single one of those apps was some person's dream that they spent significant time/money/effort on - building an app and getting it on the store is not a trivial undertaking. The overwhelmingly vast majority of those apps will never make a cent for their creators.
From Google's perspective, one less app on their app store at this point is probably a good thing.
From the OP's perspective, unless they're seeing significant revenue from the iOS version, writing the whole thing off as a sunk cost and walking away is probably the best plan. Which is ridiculous, I know, but logically true.
The first real recourse is not to invest your money or time in such an institution in the first place. It is foolhearty to ignore researching your busniess partners and I don't, for a minute, think these people failed to do so; they're just trying to recoup their money at this point.
Nobody is forcing you to use google products, and they are not a replacement for the real security in a business of loyal customers and employee's anyway. Why anyone ever consider investing in making apps for a phone given the way the market is today I will never understand.
Your second real recourse, if you can't get away from them and at that point this becomes a responsability, is to resist or fight them. In this case, getting some capital together and filing a class-action lawsuit. Another way to resist; make an app that roots the phone and poisions the data-brokers well by feeding them garbage information in a way that is impossible to effectively filter. Charge $5 a year, update the phone like antivirus updates it, have teams that work on popular vs unpopular apps, and before launching a campaign against a large app or investment firms, short the companies stock for added revenue. Invest in breaking the model of a closed ecosystem, which is required for all this spyware and for abusive EULA's to actually work right in the first place.
And when you do those sorts of things, you create a ruckus, and plenty of economic damage. That tends to draw the ire of law enforcement and government, and you will find that is the most effective way to demand new regulations. In politics, its only when you hit critical mass that change occurs.
And the final recourse, which is also a responsability that nobody likes to talk about. Their business addresses of them and their executive management can be found, and there are 17 guns per man women and child in the USA for a very good reason. You really have to fail as a society for violence to be justified and to be the only effective measure; arguably right now we're failing pretty hard if the fertility rates and life expectancy statistics are any measure. Google might not be responsable for that, but they are part of the symptom of a disease.
One could say the moment Google decided instant search was a requirement and began putting people in a bubble so effective that the only way to really survive was to decide free news is fake news. That at that moment violence became inevitable. I certainly hope it isn't.
But it is going to require people begin acting like grown-ups and taking some risks to avoid that. You'd do well to remember that.
> I'm afraid that the only real recourse is to have certain anticompetitive regulations automatically kick in once a business rises above a certain percentage control of access to some market or medium that has become significant.
Companies like to say they're providing a "platform"; maybe it's time for that to become a legally recognized concept.
This agreement requires 30 days notice if your agreement is not terminated for breach of terms. So in the case that you have a dispute, they could in fact be in breach of the terms without that 30 days notice. E.g. They can't just say "we don't want to do business with you anymore starting now," at least from this clause.
I see this all the time. Legit mail from Google gets stopped by Googles own spam filters on our Corp google apps account. But clearly forged phishing emails purporting to be from our CEO (sent “from” their email address but not from Googles own servers when we use Google apps and have DKIM/SPF setup) gets through to the inboxes.
System messages getting through the spam filter isn't an antitrust issue, they're not marketing or competition or sales. In this case it's a 'your account is about to be terminated' message which absolutely should not be getting sent into the spam bin, that's actively harmful to your business.
Imagine if the gmail spam bin was eating important renewal notifications and business notices for a company that competes with google, would it still be anti-competitive for Google to make sure gmail's spam filter works right?
The problem is that Google might be sending those emails in a way that activates the spam filters on other email providers.
So if the message is "use Gmail or otherwise you can lose important messages from Google and then your business gets screwed" ... that's definitely an anti-trust issue.
There's no such thing as a terms of service that gets you out of openly commiting fraud.
The issue isn't the ToS. It's fighting Google in court. If fraud is occuring, the ToS will not actually protect you.
You want to know what's keeping Jack Dorsey and Sundar Pichai up at night right now? They both recently openly lied to Congress and can be put in prison at any time for it. A powerful congressperson merely has to decide to act on it. Dorsey has begun walking back Twitter's aggressive deplatforming against the political rightwing because he's scared now, he knows they can get him on lying to Congress. They can get anyone on lying to Congress, all they have to do is get you to testify extensively, then you're fucked. It's why Google didn't want to send their CEO to testify.
The only way to deal with a corporation as powerful as Google is to get their executives in front of Congress or on record in front of federal agents and pin them to the wall. Once they've testified enough under oath, they're effectively in a permanent minefield. They have to be very careful with all related business practices after that.
That works when you have a hot political issue, like election tampering. I doubt it's possible to scare up enough attention for app store bans. The only recourse there is to pursue it in court and or hope some state AG will jump on board.
I'm extremely sympathetic with Mark. And Google's support for its ~free services is indeed cursory.
Sure, one possible lesson is not making your business dependent on such third parties. But if your business involves an app, you're pretty much stuck being dependent on Google and Apple. I mean, ask Facebook about that. And amusingly, Google re Apple ;)
The key lesson here, I think, is the importance of vetting any consultants, developers, etc that you use. In particular, the importance of vetting their reputations with Google and Apple.
And indeed, maybe it's best to isolate consultants, developers, etc from Google and Apple. They do work for you, and then you interact with Google and Apple. And you make sure that everything gets sanitized, in the process. That would protect businesses, consultants, and developers from each other regarding their reputations with Google and Apple.
For many years, I did work for attorneys. But I never submitted anything directly to any court, opposing counsel, or whatever. And I was careful to wipe my identity from any electronic files that would be submitted.
The problem here is lack of evidence and availability bias makes the decision process look terrible, without giving us enough evidence to be confident about that conclusion.
If a decision is appealed and reversed, would we hear about it? If the employee did a proper review and concluded that, yeah, it's legit, for reasons we would agree with, how would we know from only hearing the other side of the story?
This is why actual judicial systems are more transparent. Cases are tried mostly in public. Judges write justifications for their decisions. This allows us on the outside to review what they're doing and understand how it works.
But, the downside is that it's slow, expensive, and there is rarely any privacy.
No, it's not fraud. A key element of fraud (civil and criminal) is that the accused knowingly misled, and to prove that you'd need to prove that there is no reasonable interpretation of what they said that they could have believed was true.
With Google they offer enough data points to analyze for just such intent. In the absence of intent fraud is out of the question, but a jury might be convinced that a persistent pattern of incompetence which is brought to Google’s attention again and again without change meets the bar of fraud, especially in a civil court with the mere preponderance of the evidence standard. The post-banning behavior of automated responses and refusal to escalate customer service calls won’t help them either. As in the case of MS back in the day, it can seem like the law is just disinterested, but the law is merely unbelievably slow and equally inevitable. The day some prosecutors can make a career out of taking on Google, they will, and by then Google will be fully on the wrong side of public opinion.
That second half of my post was not in relation to a civil case, which I think was painfully obvious given the reference to MS. Did you really misunderstand?
As in the case of MS back in the day, it can seem like the law is just disinterested, but the law is merely unbelievably slow and equally inevitable. The day some prosecutors can make a career out of taking on Google, they will, and by then Google will be fully on the wrong side of public opinion.
That is pretty damned unambiguous, unless you found as in the case of MS... confusing. If you want to explain what you found “silly” I’m open to reading your perspective of course.
When dealing with a bureaucracy (ie, not Google specific) a "review" might not mean "reconsider the issue" instead meaning "check the process was followed".
In an extreme example, lets say that a bureaucrat takes an action because they have an unreasonable personal dislike of something. A bureaucratic review of the situation will confirm that the person had authority to act as they did then close the case. The reasoning behind the decision may not be examined at all in the review.
A symptom of things getting bad is that reviews will never seem to achieve anything, because a bureaucracy won't take unauthorised action, so any action is by definition going to pass a review. Very frustrating to deal with that sort of system. This sort of thinking is so screwy that it makes sense for the reviewer to report directly to the original decision maker, because the reviewer isn't supposed to challenge the decision, they are supposed to make sure that the decision was made by the person they report to!
There's also a riff on Arthur C. Clarke's law. Any sufficiently complex or opaque system of control is indistinguishable from tyranny.
What we see over and over with tech cases like this is 1) We can't tell you exactly how we figure stuff out because then you'd game it, 2) Things happen based on actions and associations you don't realize are important
This is effectively having somebody show up at your house at random times and punch you in the face.
But, we are told, it's all for the greater good. I don't doubt that the averages work out -- more good is done than evil. I do, however, doubt that such over-generalizing is so much for the greater good as it is for the bottom lines of the tech companies involved.
Not sure what you mean by "attract developers". Attract implies competition, but when a startup releases an app, there's no choice but submit it to the Play Store, due to its 80% smartphone market share.
Same thing happened to me on PayPal when I reported a fraudulent transaction. Automated process said nope it’s not fraudulent and I was unable to appeal this.
It wasn’t until a few times contacting them and DMing their support team on twitter that I was able to force an actual person to look at the obviously fraudulent transaction and fix it up instantly.
The algorithms suck, if I say someone took money from my account with an email and name that I’ve never seen before then you can’t just say nope not fraudulent!
I don’t know about the Google Play process but the App Store review process has been worthwhile. I’ve had many phone calls with them over the years detailing specific changes which need to be made to conform to policy. They are definitely not “low-level” employees but they are also not technically proficient. They are policy enforcers.
I’ve also had reviewers push for internal change on my behalf when policy seems poorly applied.
One specific example I can give is I had a link to my website in a game made for kids. They asked me to put a parental lock on tapping the link (e.g “ask your parents to enter the code” type thing). That was a really good addition.
That’s actually good advice, bur doesn’t appear to be applied to mist kids apps. All apps that I’ve come across have been litterd with ads placed in such a way to increase the possibility of the kid accidentally clicking on them. A dark grey UX pattern.
There is a very simple solution to this mess which both Apple and Google have created through they duopoly.
Any business that is profitable and employing many people but has single point of failure with Play Store can solve this problem by giving Google some money for a more detailed review with an option to submit additional evidence. Say company X gives Google $10K to do this extended review. If the party wins, Google returns the money and reinstates the account else Google keeps the money.
Secondly, a private arbitrage company which may be setup by all big players in the game that can further review the whole process and provide a neutral view of the whether the ban was warranted or not.
I have advocated with most of these large companies to come together and form an open Privacy Working Group which will advice all companies to adopt privacy standards and also help evolve those standards by a widespread industry participation. If we could do it for HTML, Javascript and Web Standards we can do it for Privacy as well. This will also pre-empt government's heavy handed approach to force these giants to adopt standards that might be completely arbitrary like GDPR.
I had an app attached to a service which required sign in to do anything on the Apple store for 4 years, and according to our metrics no one ever signed into the App Store review account you’re required to set up, which definitely backs up your theory that they’re at least sometimes just doing an automated scan of your app and hitting a button.
It really seems publicly shaming corporations is the only way to get justice in this new digital world. That's not the way justice is supposed to work.
And just for anyone who's crazy enough (edit: and I can see they’ve come out already in the comments here) to say that he deserved it because he associated with some non-reputable people...
My Google account was entered as a recovery email address by someone else. Most likely because it was a single letter removed from an abbreviation of their real legal name. I got an email informing me of that fact and instantly disavowed any association with the link right there in the email.
What should happen but a year later but Google letting me know that "your Google account [other email] was deleted due to a violation of our Terms of Service that was left unresolved.".
I tried to contact Google, I tried to disavow the account again, no reply and a dead page. My account isn't dead, but I seem to be irreversibly linked (the hypothetical Google term would be 'avowed' I guess, given that the opposite 'disavowal' was in the URI to reverse the process) to a ToS violation severe enough to warrant account deletion through no fault of my own. Simply because a random person signing up for a new account on the other side of the world typoed i instead of u.
For all I know my reputation with Google is so bad that a single click on the wrong YouTube video or a new algorithm with marginally different scoring running on my account will delete it all. I have zero certainty through no fault of my own.
Edit: Could hypothetically be a great way of shutting up political dissidents (and their YouTube accounts) or anyone you don't like. List their email as a recovery address on ten new accounts, get ToS violations on all of them before they get a chance to disavow them (do it while they're likely sleeping maybe) and you're done.
I presume my comment was one of the ones you were referring to. You just did what I was suggesting: you explain how your account was inappropriately (IMO, based on your explanation) shut down. These types of stories should be shared when Google/Apple are in the wrong. However, notice the complete lack of detail in the linked story re: the associated account that resulted in the termination. If one is going to claim that an account termination was inappropriate, doesn't it seem reasonable to provide details to support the claim? (i.e. it doesn't seem crazy to me to expect an author of such a story to at least make an effort to show that they aren't a bad actor crying foul)
The author of the story said he doesn’t know what the third party may or may not have done and Google didn’t provide an explanation. And I never said my account was shut down.
This is why I didn't even blink when Apple cancelled Google's Fisherprice Certificate. Google cancels accounts on a whim daily, and in a lot of cases don't even have the decency to tell you why they cancelled your account and 'destroyed' your business; they deserve no sympathy. At least here they gave something resembling a faint reason. I hope the authors find a solution soon.
Is it unfair to form a poor opinion of Google because it's typical for people to only ever share bad experiences? Anecdotally I feel like I have come across so many of these stories, and each of them sound terrible / symptomatic of a broken/apathetic company.
It feels like the money keeps rolling in through ad revenues, and then spent on developing projects like Inbox, Reader, and 5 chat apps, all of which get discontinued.
Is Google (the company & team) turning into a Dilbert Comic?
I think it's interesting to note that Google seems to come up much more often for Kafkaesque customer support problems.
That's not a rigorous scientific statement, but it's fairly consistent with my own experience dealing with Google as a startup. Unless you have a back channel via an employee you know, it's next to impossible to get any non-automated, human judgement on your situation.
The part I don't get is... where in Google leadership does this issue get lost on the company's priorities? Of all of the rational explanations I can come up with, it feels like someone looks at the data and either says "nah we don't lose much money from this" or "nah it's not a real problem". Is that actually true?
> The part I don't get is... where in Google leadership does this issue get lost on the company's priorities? Of all of the rational explanations I can come up with, it feels like someone looks at the data and either says "nah we don't lose much money from this" or "nah it's not a real problem". Is that actually true?
Could it be something to do with company culture? Something like "if we solve a hard problem by assigning a human to it then we have admitted failure as a technology company". It's a lofty goal but it comes at the cost of betraying the trust of partners/customers when things break, and they seem to break often. Someone in management really ought to be weighing those two things side by side (assuming the cultural thing I mentioned even exists).
If they weren't taking mone from each of their app developers, that might be an argument. But when you are making Google scale profits, which are INSANELY high, than you can afford the humans to provide support.
And if you don't, than your monopoly should be broken by the government. And Apple's high end garden barely scratches Google's monopoly.
Do you think it would cost them more than it costs AT&T or Comcast, who don't have $100 billion in savings between them but do offer phone support to about 200 million people?
What happens if Google provides support is their average revenue per employee drops from $1.3m to an even million per year or whatever and their profit margins remain immense and that $100b+ in the bank keeps on growing. But it is certainly more expensive than an auto-emailer faking support.
It's not that black and white. There's "no support", "lots of support", and somewhere in between is "more than what Google has right now."
I think that, when you are the gatekeepers to some people's livelihoods, there's some amount of ethical responsibility to exercise judgement. If you can automate judgement, then great, but if you can't, you should probably implement it with humans.
I think what a lot of people forget or don't appreciate is the sheer scale of FAANG companies and what they deal with on a regular basis.
People complain about how they can't talk to a human being about their one specific issue. These companies are not mom and pop stores dealing with a handful of suppliers, just sitting there waiting for their phone to ring - they're huge businesses operating in hundreds of countries 24/7/365 handling probably millions of interactions with "customers"/suppliers every year with all sorts of different processes and policies in different jurisdictions.
On Hacker news we hear about someone falling through the cracks in the system every couple of weeks, but we don't hear about all of the bad actors/viruses/malware getting blocked/removed from the app stores or cloud vendors everyday
There are people out there whose strategy is "throw enough shit and something will stick" who are trying their hardest to publish their malware as much as possible every single day and it's (IMHO) frankly something of a success/miracle that we've not seen any more major abuses of the app stores and cloud platforms.
People on HN complain bitterly about the potential for ad networks to distribute malware, but then get mad when FAANGs ban accounts that are linked to bad actors. Sure it is sad that some people are innocently caught in the crossfire but what are the FAANGs to do? Damned if they do, damned if they don't?
The economies of scale say that the larger companies can better afford to hire representatives per client tahn the mom and pop stores can. If Google were to have as much staff - proportional to their amount of products [ie apps that they are making money off of] - as a mom and pop store did, we'd be fine.
In fact, if they had even a thousandth of that, we'd be fine.
1. I remember when it was in style to be a Google fanboi. Those days have gone as Google became more evil.
2. I had two GMail accounts closed on me for no obvious reason. Both were eventually reopened, but one several years later because I got enough media attention to get their attention.
3. I know one company that lost all their mails because their paid App Engine account was closed on them. I know another company which lost its biggest customer when the CEO's personal Gmail account was suddenly closed. And I know two other people who has lost access to all the stuff on Drive.
Considering that each problem is a real disaster for the person experiencing it, and that you don't hear about such stories with Microsoft, Apple or even Amazon.
The fact is, that even though you only hear the horror stories, there shouldn't be so many of them that you here them all over. I am just one person, and I trust Google as much as I trust the Chinese government.
I sympathize with this guy, and I feel sad and awful every time I read about something like this, because all I can think is man, this could happen to me any day.
It also serves as a very unfortunate reminder of a couple of things:
1. Just how incredibly important it is for us to be able to use the platforms of the future as we see fit. We look at app stores and think well, this is good, right, applications are vetted and you can be sure that everything you install from one is fine. Except malicious applications still get through (see e.g. https://threatpost.com/google-play-removes-22-malicious-ligh... - not a singular incident), it's applications that could be a threat to Google's position or its business don't.
If users could download and install applications as they wish, as it was the norm twenty years ago, having a developer account removed wouldn't be much of a problem. Curating and reviewing applications may be a good way to keep malicious ones away from non-technical users, but who we trust to do the reviewing is equally important, and Google is about as shady as it gets.
2. Google's abysmal support (which is not limited to this particular case!) is no coincidence: small developers are too small to count, and, as applications became commoditized and got cheaper and cheaper, there are too many of them for the loss of one to be important in any way. Sure, Google's PR may insist they value every developer but their actions speak for themselves. Customer support, for any branch of their business, is so bad it makes PayPal look helpful by comparison.
3. Ultimately, that the standards of every company are the standards that its users hold it to. It speaks for itself that Google's "appeal" process (if one can call it that way) is so incredibly useless that the only way to actually appeal it is to produce enough rage that -- out of fear of bad PR, not because that's how you work with customers! -- someone will actually look at this.
I hope this gets sorted out real soon -- and that we all think twice about which platforms we support through our work. Both Google and Apple are what they are because mobile developers publish their applications there and not somewhere else -- both of them would be nothing were it not for the app developers' work, as seen in, say, Windows Phone. Granted, Android and iPhone are where the most users are, so it's where the big money is -- I'm sure no one writes Android apps because they're evil (ok, some people do; but not everyone). But most companies in this space could afford to invest in more free platforms, like the Librem 5, which would work in their own benefit, even if not right now.
Edit: oh yeah, one more thing.
I've seen Google trying to wiggle out of situations like these by saying that well, this was outsourced, so maybe the guys this was outsourced to did some shady stuff, it's definitely not Google's fault, they have no control over that.
Yeah, well, the outsourcing industry is older than Google is, and it's also responsible for virtually 90% of the applications on the Play Store (how else do you think applications end up costing 99 cents?). If a company can't come up with a review process that can accommodate the software outsourcing industry, in 2019, that's beyond laughable.
Google is not just an ordinary company though. It is so dominant that its basically like Google is effectively its own government but with no public oversight or legal recourse.
I think instead of relying on these giant monopolies we should built open platforms on decentralized technopolies.
My adwords account was terminated after 7 years of inactivity for some violation regarding how I used my original $100 free credit to experiment with click metrics. I got a similar letter when I appealed. I didn't realize it until a couple years after it was terminated when I wanted to promote a self made product. I have to use someone else's account now to run my ads. It feels excessive.
I have the same issue and it happened already more than 10 years (!) ago by now. Indeed there is no possible way to get adwords enabled again after such a termination.
I am going to assume that the problem is Google once again using an automated, AI powered system that's designed to prevent abuse. Only it's too draconian - if not downright faulty - and punishes innocent devs but that Google has decided that's an ok trade-off because the system prevents enough abuse and is much cheaper than employing more human beings for their abuse prevention efforts. So what if 10% of all abuse patterns are false positives - they have millions of devs lining up to be part of the Google Play ecosystem.
Google has similar problems with automated, AI powered systems at Adsense, Adwords, Youtube, GCP etc, and the constant abuse and total lack of communication they've put their customers through has had many of them abandoning these platforms.
Meanwhile, their poor treatment of customers keep reinforcing the notion that Google simply cannot offer the level of customer service people need to run their businesses, and that's one problem they can't code or AI themselves out of.
Being shocked about this happening in 2019 in either Apple's or Google's app store represents an incredible lack of even cursory research on the author's part. Unless the author shares specific details showing that the ban of the associated account was inappropriate, my reaction is: good, glad you got booted.
If one of the people you chose to associate your account with was previously a bad actor or involved with one, there's no reason to give you the benefit of the doubt because you have at least demonstrated bad judgement. For years people have been playing a game of whack-a-mole where when one account gets terminated they pop up with another. Since your entire business apparently depended on the app stores (a bad idea to begin with) being in good standing with them is therefore vital and it was incumbent on you to vet the people you were in business with. (i.e. sure, be in business with them if you choose. But if you decide to associate your single point of failure business account with them and they fail to disclose that they were associated with something shady in the past, your beef is with them not the app store)
The way I read your comment is that you've somehow managed to internalize being treated like crap by large organizations, and you expect others to be as sanguine as you are about it. Luckily, this is not the case. Many people still have a sense of dignity, of what is right, and what is unacceptable behavior, and express their discontent when mistreated. And hopefully they will continue to do so despite the unkind, unwise, and ultimately self-defeating voices like yours that preach unthinking self-abasement as the correct reaction to an automated rebuke from the powerful.
No, I was not accepting an argument that came across as 'our account was terminated and we have the RIGHT to be reinstated because this new account has done nothing wrong' In many other types of businesses it is rather common to be judged by the company one keeps. Given the importance of the app store account to this business, it seemed rather critical to keep it in good standing which would include vetting those they associated with it.
I admit that I was judging the story by the details that weren't included as I found the omission of them as the most relevant. Perhaps the flagging of the account in question was in fact wrongly done but it seems incumbent on the author of the article to make that case which they did not, in my opinion.
Here's the thing that really annoys me about this whole topic: I'm not a fan of the direction the app stores have gone (either as a user or a developer.) I'd much rather be reading and participating in discussions about what's going to disrupt them.
You are asking people, possibly non-technical people, to do thorough background check on each prospective associates and past associates of prospective associates. The not feasible nor reasonable.
I'm suggesting a business person conduct themselves like a business person. While I understand that they might have been enthusiastic and inexperienced, there is a reason things like contracts and due diligence exist in the world. Businesses of all sorts, generally run by very non-technical people, need to do background checks on people in key positions all the time to avoid exactly these sorts of issues. For an app store based business, anyone associated with the app's account is in a key position.
What is it about an app store-based business that is supposed to make them immune from these realities?
I actually just got my Google Ads account suspended because I forgot to update my billing address before adding a new card.
The suspension was for "suspicious billing activity", tried appealing twice with the correct billing address, and was told the suspension is final (some automated email) both times.
They won't take my calls because the account is suspended, which leaves me not being able to advertise on the #1 service to do so.
It's completely unacceptable, especially for a business in their position. One tiny mistake leads you to a lifetime of suspension to a service vital to almost any business.
Why not open a new account, or release a new copy your app using a different namespace? I mean it is an inconvenience, but we aren't exactly as powerless as is described in the article.
Unfortunately not, because it could succeed long enough for their business to get some success, hire people, have assets, debts, responsibilities, customers, and then Google cuts off their oxygen.
Of course, Google could do the same to ANY of us who end up depending on them. The only real solution is whatever makes you not significantly reliant on Google.
Google Play is not a monopoly! It takes one checkbox in Settings to open the floodgates to any app (or app store) you want, and device manufacturers (such as Amazon) can ship their own app stores pre-enabled if they want.
Actually, alternative app stores can make use of that as well. The installer app needs to be installed as a system app with proper permissions, and it will them be able to background install apps on demand just like Google play does. The F-Droid Privileged Extension[0] does just that. While you need to be rooted to add/register such apps, that's not a problem for device manufacturers.
If you open an APK it prompts you to go right to Settings and enable it. Actually easier than installing Firefox on a brand new Windows Surface, which requires an MS account to enable unknown app sources.
The problem with this starts with the word "we". How do, for lack of a better word, "we" get some kind of authentic sense of we-ness going in this modern age of increasing social atomization? Here's how I do it... when I'm not busy hacking away on the next generation of (potentially planet saving) general computation[1], I am performing my solemn duties in the real world as "the peace guy"[2].
They're regulated. The problem is that our threshold for bad monopolistic behavior is that customers suffer, and it can be damn hard to prove when it's indirect, like in this case - how much do customers suffer from not having access to the app in question? But even then, when you aggregate all that across the entire store, I'd say that there's that aspect as well.
Back when our anti-monopoly legislation was first introduced, that wasn't the case - monopolies were busted just as well because they did something anti-competitive, even if that was presented as benefiting their customers (and even if it really did, short term).
Regulation isn't a silver bullet. Maybe a little bit for certain things. But, You'll never be able to develop enough rules to make sure everyone is treated fairly.
the best way out of this is to educate users and start getting them to use other search products. we need more diversity of choice.
- Having friends inside google does not help (I suppose at some level they can, but L5/L6 engineers aren't enough)
- Creating a new account with a different credit card does not help. Subsequent accounts they can link back to you will also be banned
- I haven't found a solution yet, except for keeping all of my new projects outside of google (no google analytics, no google search console (which obviously still allows your site to be indexed) no gsuite. That way if I never need google advertising, a co founder can pick it up and google has no way to trace the company back to me.
no gsuite is probably key - I'm thinking of terminating all my gsuite accounts simply due to no desire of having my business basically be terminated due to some stupid algorithms maintained by google's idiots.
Keep G Suite, but buy your own domain (whatever.com) so you are in total control. If they ban you, just change DNS records to point to zoho or some other provider.
Which is good practice anyway, just in case of an outage, or someone hacking your account, or whatever.
But I agree, too risky. Just stay away from Google. Cons outweigh the pros, for me personally. The only thing I used it for was sheets, docs and gmail. LibreOffice is more than adequate for me, and far better than the Google alternatives.
On the plus side, they are helping you remove your dependencies on Google! If you ever decide you’re done with them it’ll be easier to cut them out of your life.
Don't hold your breath, you're not the only one. They claimed I clicked on my own ads which was never the case, of course there is no way to appeal. They stole my money because yes, they still owe me money, these punks sent me a 25€ voucher to buy ads, like it solves anything.... I will never ever trust them or rely on any of their services like the Google Cloud Platform.
Google settled a case like yours for $11m on the grounds that it would be too expensive, after four years of fighting, to prove they didn't steal your money lol.
My wife's paypal account has been suspended for 10 years now, for some utterly ridiculous reason I've long forgotten. After a year of trying to persuade them to un-suspend it, we gave up.
When I was in college I ran a forum that got some decent traffic. I put Google Ads on my site and after a few months had enough money to pay for school books. I went to cash out and they suspended my account claiming click fraud and stole the money.
This is how google has always operated, and it's one of the reasons why their near monopoly on advertising is horrible for everyone.
Exact same situation here. I don't need Google Ads so it doesn't really affect me, but I'm terrified that some day in the future it will come back and kick me in the ass somehow when some algorithm (sorry, "AI") decides that it has some significance so I get kicked out of email, YouTube, Maps, Google docs, etc
I also had my account suspended due to a failed payment method.
I was just exploring Google Places API to see if I could integrate it with a side project. The signup process claimed that it only needed a credit card to "prove that you're a financially capable human," which makes sense (and it also said that it would not charge your account until you gave it express permission), so I happily agreed. Despite this claim, Google apparently requires an active, chargeable card at all times, from account inception until you die. Failure to do so will result in terminating your account.
Whatever, let them terminate the account. Google's public favor is in a tailspin, and I can get the data I need from FourSquare at a fraction of the cost.
It's worth mentioning that GDPR gives people rights to allow them to appeal automated decisions, and receive a clear explanation of how the decision was made:
I'm not sure if it'll help for the author of the article, as Google's decision is clear, just their logic in unfair, and I assume they are talking about a business, not a personal, account.
> One tiny mistake leads you to a lifetime of suspension to a service vital to almost any business.
This really is where Google might be too big...
Since Google is such a force, and they don't have time to support or help people/companies lost in the algorithms, maybe competition is the only thing that can solve this because most companies are too small/medium for them to care.
Lots of these systems are probably well intentioned and risk averse by default, but in the end have too much influence on the market as a single point of failure.
Highly concentrated systems with single points of failure that fail on a large scale are bad, but even worse is highly concentrated systems that randomly get in an error loop but too small to correct, only here it is small/medium companies stuck in that algorithm purgatory vortex.
>One tiny mistake leads you to a lifetime of suspension to a service vital to almost any business.
One sometimes needs a lawyer to deal with the complexity of government laws. It seems like soon there will be a small thriving job market for "googlawyers" -- people who will earn they bread and butter by getting through the Google's bureaucracy.
> I had created a Google Developer Account simply so I could pass on the login details to my app developers who uploaded and updated the app via my account each time.
Sounds like one of those developers was previously banned for violating ToS and Google suspects the author is the same person with a new account trying to evade the ban. Instead of sharing login details, the correct thing to do is add a user and give them permission to upload. Not let them pretend to be you.
The situation sucks but Google's action seems reasonable? Like they can't just let people create new accounts to evade bans.
This is also what I find most infuriating. One should at least be able to receive compelling evidence of what lead to the banning decision, and get a fair chance to dispute it.
I understand Google doesn't want to give bad actors information that could help them avoid the counter-measures, but the side effects on people who are innocent or make minor errors are too severe. They could make the whole process lengthy, and require proper, detailed authentication to make sure it's different persons & companies each time - that adds enough cost to deter bad actors from using the "appeals" process, but it would save honest people from the frustration.
Reminds me of how gaming accounts are frequently banned for automation or similar cheating, only to pull at heart strings saying they were hacked and that they themselves did not commit the cheating. With VPNs and similar tools it can be difficult for the moderator to know for sure so bad actors take advantage of the situation. As a result you get a painful margin of error the is difficult to reduce without significant changes to the system.
I'm not on Google's side, look at my post history, but there are always two sides to a story.
My experience comes from a specific niche: MMORPG botting which using an automation script to train/goldfarm for the account while the player is not at the computer. This is coupled with a large amount of account scamming/hacking such that it is fairly reasonable that someone might have stolen your account and botted on it for their own gains.
So far 99% of the people I have seen complaining about their account being suspended were unwilling to read the ToS, even less to try to comply with them.
I am pretty sure that the review process does mistakes as well, but as always bad actors spoil everything for everybody.
FWIW, I had 2 apps removed from the play store earlier this month. They were all based on the same codebase (different flavors) and were banned for using a forbidden permission (after asking it to the user of course).
I was super surprised since when I coded the feature using that permission, it was legal to use it. The rules have changed since then and I had pushed an update to remove the use of that permission (to be honest it was not that necessary, it just made the UX a bit smoother in one case).
BUT I did not realize that for these 2 apps, I had retained apks in the play store for lower api levels with the faulty code :///
(I use an upload script to gain some time .. multiple apks take a long time to upload for each update otherwise; so I don't see the play store console often)
Still; I was clearly in the wrong.
I just removed the faulty retained apps and was again in the play store a couple of hours later.
In a lot of jurisdictions a contract that you were not able to negotiate properly is simply void.
Sure, a ToS is different, and there's basically an implicit contract when you buy a service, but that doesn't mean that the ToS is all powerful. It can be still unfair practice. (Some jurisdictions have that too.)
Now of course courts can't really force G to do business with you, but as others mentioned they can be sued for damages.
Still, you have to read TOS first to understand which part is definitely enforceable and which part isn’t. Ignoring it completely is foolish for a business.
In my jurisdiction it is assumed people do not read the ToS and any part of the ToS that is not generic boilerplate must be shown separately or otherwise highlighted, otherwise it might as well be food for the shredder.
That plus business can certainly not terminate your business relationship for any reason they like.
Right. Now imagine how it would feel if you made your entire living off those apps, the ban was for life, and they didn't even bother to explain to you what you did wrong.
Many people are in this exact situation. That is why they are upset.
And most people don't see the other side of the coin, which is that millions of bad actors are trying to break this exact system. When you start doing suspicious things like that, you look exactly like the scammers trying to evade bans.
In retrospect it was a mistake even when it was in the ToS.
It needs way too much precautions : warn the user and explain what we do, have them accept the permission, handle the case where some phones need 'phone state' (because no way we ask that one, too frightening and powerful).
If you are not a SMS app, just open the default one (if there is one) with a pre-filled message.
A lifetime ban because they suspect an account was shared is not "reasonable". One person at most deserves a permanent ban, and it's not the OP. A state/national ID card should be enough to clear things up and solve the "can't just let people create new accounts" problem.
> The situation sucks but Google's action seems reasonable? Like they can't just let people create new accounts to evade bans.
It seems like the opposite of reasonable to me. You hit the nail on the head for _why_ this happened but this person now has _zero_ recourse for correcting their mistake.
Yes, they screwed up. They shouldn't have let them do it through their account. But now, because they screwed up, you're fine with the action that they can literally never be on the Google Play store ever again? The largest mobile store with the largest share of phones and you can't be on the store because of this?
> ... they can literally never be on the Google Play store ever again
question: is Google really that good at detecting the relationship between an account they banned, and some other new account created under a different name with someone else's credit card?
i mean couldn't this small business get another credit card under a different name and then create a totally new developer account under a different name -- and keep that all totally isolated from the previously banned account?
is that just not practically possible? if it worked at least initially -- what would they have to lose?
Sorry for the bad Karma but seriously this is 2019. If the OP hasn't seen a zillion other stories like this about Apple, Google, Facebook et al the they clearly have $25,000 to burn so sorry OP but why bother posting this?
If your business model is dependent on someone else's service/store/website/slients then YOU DONT HAVE A BUSINESS you have AT BEST a franchise.
“Why bother posting this?” - that’s easy, because it might hit the front page of HN and someone from Google might see it and actually apply human reasoning to the problem.
How can you not rely on these platforms if you are building an app? You cannot expect anyone to go download .apk's manually. Users are too coddled to do anything different when downloading/installing the app. The real moral of the story is that we are just peasants on these platforms and can be washed away with a flick of a finger. In the end, become Zuck or get zucked.
How can you not rely on these platforms if you are building an app? You cannot expect anyone to go download .apk's manually. Users are too coddled to do anything different when downloading/installing the app.
Then maybe we should start educating users in the other direction. There wasn't this problem before app stores and walled gardens became common.
Educating users? Users follow the path of least resistance. Make anything more complicated, and they will switch to something more convenient. Do you expect users to really be sensitive to the plight of devs?
I use a PC. Amazingly it can host software from many sources. Some of those sources include boxed software I ordered from various retailers, software aggregation and distribution services like Steam, the operating system vendors own proprietary software distribution system and a large number of unaffiliated software vendors that operate their own web sites.
It seems that we had long since solved the 'problem' of software distribution before Apple and Google decided to correct it.
And no, my roughly used and crazily effective PC system is not riddled with malware and viruses despite the claims of walled garden purveyors that insist this is inevitable.
The moral of the story is, don't allow monopolies. Break them down, and be aggressive about it. Don't fall for the "but it's in the best interest of the users" BS.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 348 ms ] threadAlso, why do you need an android version at first? Author says the app is useless without it but I don't understand why
This ban is lifetime unfortunately and you or related accounts are not allowed on Google ever.
There's a historical reading list for law students at http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/library/2013/06/27/AMK...:
> Understanding Freedom's Heritage: How to Keep and Defend Liberty. This list, prepared for young people by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, includes some acknowledged classics and some idiosyncratic choices.
I'm not.
While i think relying on google (or a single platform) is dangerous, these platforms really need to address these issues. While their isn’t much competition, they are really eroding developer trust. Developers may decide to build for an entirely different platform or work on a different idea that is outside mobile. This ultimately hurts app stores and this these platforms.
Short term a small amount of discontent doesnt matter, but it could reach a tipping point.
Good, app stores need to die.
Do you have an alternative trust mechanism that can’t be subverted via, for example, algorithmic voting?
And yet almost weekly I read a new story about malicious apps being found in app stores. Like this one posted today:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl...
Personally I trust things from app stores about as much as I trust random things from the web.
I know you mentioned disabling javascript, but browsers are also a really good example of this. Browsers run your code in a sandbox, and the rendering engine itself is sandboxed in case of bugs. As a result, you can pretty much visit any random website and know that it won't compromise your system - as far as I know, there haven't been any widespread attacks using browser vulnerabilities since sandoxing was introduced (except maybe Internet Explorer, which doesn't really count). The worst that can happen is that a browser tab starts using too many resources or doing something annoying (like autoplaying a video), and you can just close the tab and make it go away.
Wow - no, we do not have the ability to ascertain the overall trustworthiness of a dev, certainly not better than Google or Apple.
Reviews can be faked, and 'how long their app has existed' is not a very good measure of anything. Their T&C's on 'protections' don't mean anything if they are not already trustworthy.
So unfortunately, this is one of the valuable things that AppStores can provide.
* A bunch of reviews from users, very few of which sound fake: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/overcast/id888422857
* Articles about the app from well-known websites: https://9to5mac.com/2018/04/29/overcast-versus-apple-podcast...
* A wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overcast_(app)
* Information about the developer: https://marco.org/about
You could fake all of this, but it would be really difficult and expensive, and probably wouldn't work in the long-term.
It's true that for a brand-new app from an unknown developer, it's difficult to say what their intentions are, but Google and Apple don't really have any more information to go off of than you do regarding that - at best, they likely have the developer's contact information, but you can probably find that yourself as well. Additionally, the nice thing about sandboxing and permissions is that you don't really have to trust the developer in order to run an app. For example, the other day I was looking for a protractor app that would give me measurements in tenths of a degree, and I found this app [1]. Aside from a few reviews (which, as you said, could easily be fake), I know absolutely nothing about this developer - for all I know, they could be trying to steal all my data. But because iOS sandboxes everthing, they won't actually be able to access any of my data or do anything bad unless I approve it, and if I don't like the app, I can press one button and get rid of it. As a result, I can feel comfortable installing the app anyway, even if I don't trust the developer.
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/angle-pro/id750327028
Apple requires people to provide a business number among other things, and they have substantial ability to 'dig in' to a developers background.
Users have zero interest in this, and nobody has time to do some big investigation into some company for the sake of some app.
The whole point of the app stores are to filter through the crap for us and give us some idea of what's good and what's not.
I don't know why this business got banned. I assume it's due to the outsourced dev they used. I doubt they're technically competent and reviewed the app themselves, so who knows what kind of bullshit the dev stuffed in their or their other apps.
One other thing is that, at least in Apple app store, the review process catches use of private APIs which are in theory harmless but are not considered stable and could cause the application to crash if a minor update changes the way they work.
Excessive resource usage is already pretty easy to avoid - iOS will limit resource usage when an app is in the background, and show you which apps are using a lot of battery power so you can uninstall them. I would imagine Apple could expand this more by showing an unobtrustive notification somewhere with a message like "____ is reducing your battery life, would you like to stop it?"
Regarding private API's, if Apple's position is that third-party apps are not allowed to use them, they should just stop exposing these APIs to other apps completely.
Solving privacy issues is tricker, at least in the short term, although I think this should eventually be handled by government regulation. Assuming we can get fair and well-written regulation (which, to be fair, is a big if!), we could have clearly-documented rules that apply equally to all market participants, and aren't quite as clearly biased based on commercial incentives (although there would still be an indirect effect due to lobbying).
While non-malicious, jailbreakme.com seems to come back once every few years or so.
More so than the repositories that various linux distros use? I honestly think that something like apt for android would be a much better solution - too bad, it will never happen because it would mess with google's monopoly.
But it still comes down to discoverability and trust - you need to know about and trust these alternatives, and you need to change a setting on your device to "allow untrusted sources".
Google Play Protect, for instance, works just fine on sideloaded apps or apps downloaded from other stores.
The distribution and marketing channel don't need to be the same as the trust mechanism. There's a whole anti-malware industry out there that can do the latter, and could easily do as good a job as Google currently do.
How did the rest of us ever live through the 80s and 90s when we had to purchase software from physical stores based on reviews in magazines and word-of-mouth...
More seriously, the PC software industry works well without app stores, download sites usually check for malware to some extent and successful publishers earn trust by not screwing over their users.
Last week, much of Google and Facebook were brought to a halt after Apple revoked their enterprise certificates. While the circumstances justified Apple's actions in this case, the fact remains that even Google and Facebook are largely reliant on another large company. If Apple completely banned all Facebook apps from the app store tomorrow... well, Facebook would probably survive, but it would be a serious blow.
I don't see how you can not be reliant on Apple/Google.
This is the very definition of a monopoly, isn't it? If the government was working properly, it would be ready to break up these companies, as well in other areas of oligopoly such as oil and banking.
> thESE companIES
If it's possible to implement the app as a PWA sure, but then discoverability becomes an issue.
Sadly, App Stores are a natural monopoly and everyone expect them to be fair but they clearly can't.
IANAL. You might be able to invoke some legal means to limit your losses. The associated-account story wasn’t an act of God. You might argue the developers should have known better. I’d suggest buying an hour of a lawyer’s time to see what can be done.
He asks for an app, but lets the offshore "developers" do everything including store deployments. He could take the codes, and take care of the accounts. Heck, he could even study a few hours to understand what's going on the app before submitting.
He just depended on some random company he found on a freelancer website, dumped all the money, then got punished because he let those people take 100% of control.
Good luck with lawyers.
Tl;dr: Cut ties with the app developer, create a fresh google play dev account and deploy your app.
I do agree that Google’s customer support is sorely lacking. If they’re collecting 30% of every purchase, they need to hire real people to deal with these issues. That’s a big chunk of change to collect and not provide any service against.
Edit: While it’s tempting to play the victim, business in the real world also works this way. Businesses can end up tainted by association with sketchy parties or other businesses that act poorly. A good chunk of business is word of mouth and trusting the other party. No one wants to do business with someone untrustworthy.
Google seem to be clear that any new accounts will be banned too.
The OP doesn't seem to know for certain what code is in their app. Is it possible that the outsourced developers they're using could have introduced dangerous code, and have a track record of doing so before? Nowhere in the post does it suggest that the author has contacted them to find out why their account is banned, which seems a little odd given how frustrated they have become with Google for banning them.
At the very least it doesn't seem that Google has thought of a better way to handle the scenario where an honest client relies upon a firm that has within it one bad actor, which seems kind of short-sighted given the heavy-handed nature of their policy - ban and delete someone else's work..
In an ideal world, code review of the app would reveal whether or not there's anything fishy going on. It doesn't seem like anyone has done this - not the OP, or Google. OP thinks their developers must be OK, and Google thinks (based on some past evidence) that they're not. This doesn't strike me as totally unreasonable on Google's part.
But really we should move away from these app stores.
take a huge cut
Exactly. It seems there should be some certain legal "level of expectation" that they will act in good faith for 30% (I'm guessing- I don't use them).
But really we should move away from these app stores
Yep. Which is why I have to guess at the 30%.
I find this whole story very disturbing. I understand Google's need to protect their ecosystem from malicious code, and the desire to ban developers who try to do harm (although I suspect that the real bad actors find work-arounds for the bans), but I can't help thinking that this isn't the way a good (morally) company would behave.
I guess it points to way more developers out there than Google needs in order to have a vibrant ecosystem, so if they burn through some percentage it isn't worth their time. It makes me think of fishermen who fished ruthlessly and perhaps wastefully when the ocean harvest was plentiful. Years later, however, those fishermen face some dire times, with perhaps more ahead, because the harvest is more modest and future harvests are threatened.
That maybe have changed in the last 10 years but I don't think it has. The help on it says
> The remaining 30% goes to the distribution partner and operating fees.
In other words Google is not getting 30%
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
> But really we should move away from these app stores.
Agreed
no they don't; this is not a trial.
It seems to be the issue to me as well.
The analogy given in the article is wrong. It has nothing to do with incriminating you for your neighbors crimes.
I do realize it sucks for Mark but if the reason is indeed that these devs are suspended, the suspension of his app is perfectly understandable.
I had an account representative from google at some point. As soon as I was banned, all my calls were routed to voicemail automatically.
Knowing all these, I wouldn't touch their iOS app with a ten-foot-pole.
Which, to be fair, is by design. The article admits straight up that it's an attempt to get publicity and embarrass Google into reinstating the account. Giving a complete and forthright accounting cuts against that goal, they want to seem as sympathetic and innocent as possible.
And, to be fair, the iPhone set around here is eating it up. Pitchforks are sharpened, torches are lit and the march to the castle is underway.
As to the truth? We really have no idea. I think your theory sounds most plausible -- they hired someone scammy to write the app and Google happened to bring the banhammer down on them while this app was being launched.
With how Google makes the appeal/review process opaque, they might not even know themselves.
Transparency is a major issue here, you cannot even defend yourself because you don't even have access to the "exhibits" or any other kind of details.
I also have another friend who has been banned for life by Google for the Play Store as well by association. Google refused to reconsider on appeal, and offers no recourse for him, a professor who teaches Android dev.
Google's lesson is clear here - don't use their services if you can help it because you expose tremendous liability due to Google's unwillingness to take any.
Also, the author should make sure to publish their app on non-Google App Stores and remind users that they still have a choice.
And for those questioning on why the author is upset if they're still on the iOS store: Android is about 85% of the global market, and about 2/3rds of the US devices.
iOS is this weird dying phone OS that Apple is keeping alive even though there really aren't that many users.
But they can make them really difficult to find.
> iOS is this weird dying phone OS that Apple is keeping alive even though there really aren't that many users.
lol. There are more than a billion iOS users worldwide…
Doing that would be a leg cannon.
I don't think it should be given the priority developers give it, but 15% globally and 30% in the US are a lot of people.
They're also far more eager to spend than Android users.
To attract developers, these platforms make some promises. A "review" process for supposed violations of TOS causing cancellations is always among them. But to me these "reviews" always seem either completely faked or some version of a lowest-level employee simply restating that the algo has made its choice and they are powerless.
More incriminating is that every time a story starts to go viral, it seems a higher-up jumps in and instantly fixes it. (i.e. they can deliver a "real" review if they want to)
Since you paid them money (which they never refund) and they promised you an actual review if something goes wrong (which they never seem to actually deliver)...How is this any different than selling a counterfeit product? Isn't this legally actionable fraud?
That's why I think it's in the best interests of everyone to support alternatives like Librem, so that no single entity can make such kind of decisions.
Does it matter if it is? B2B lawsuits only get down to the actual law if the parties have a relatively equal amount of money. A small or medium business going after google _after google has shut off their revenue_ is not going to ever win
Yes, Google could likely not handle the legal costs if everyone went after them in court. Much like prosecutors in the US, what Google does is go hard on anyone who tries to defend themselves legally. At the point the calculus a small business has to make is if its worth it to try and get a remedy in court when Google will make sure to push back as hard as possible and likely destroy your business.
(Honest question. I would remember it if I'd heard about that happening, but I might very well not hear about it in the first place.)
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-google-bo...
Personally I think that a definition of "going hard" that encompasses the behavior of all actors in a space is absurd. But you're free to interpret those words how you wish.
The reality of it is that the legal team is a sunken cost to the company. They hire or retain lawyers for whatever's going to happen anyway.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-i-sued-go...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-google-bo...
Another advice: have 1 account per project, invariably of what their tos say.
I think the UK is like the US, and you have to represent yourself in small claims (to avoid wasting the court’s time). A county judge would probably find in the claimant’s favour in 2 seconds if you sent a solicitor…
Ultimately, in-house counsel at an org the size of Google is tasked with making the problem go away. It's easier to do that by burying the opposition in machine-generated paperwork than it is to convince people laterally far away in your org to comply. As a small business, you can't afford to pay for lawyers to deal with all the paperwork, so the bigger side (Google) always wins.
You can't bury a small claims court in paperwork - that's by design. And like others have suggested, if you write the letter in plain language, stating that they should at least look over your case again or it will be taken as bad will by the court, then the legal team might request that this information be provided by the engineering team - who will in turn say ok yeah, this is bollocks. Or they might not and he will lose. Either way, I would at least send a letter indicating such intention.
Even if they did, fraud is a high barrier, it sometimes producing "bad" results that are reversed for PR reasons isn't enough. Given the case here, "A human has looked at the account and has confirmed that the only developer that has ever used it has been banned, this matches the criteria for banning the account" would be a review. (If they really gave the app developers the credentials to the account, that alone might be a violation of the rules? But I don't know how the Play Store backend works in detail)
Businesses treating businesses badly aren't that easy to reign in.
I'd simply ask, can they very publicly offer a review process which is essentially a functionless placebo button or is that misleading enough to subject them to any liability at all?
Google may terminate this Agreement with You for any reason with thirty (30) days' prior written notice. In addition, Google may, at any time, immediately suspend or terminate this Agreement with You if: (a) You have breached any provision of this Agreement, any non-disclosure agreement or other agreement relating to Google Play or the Android platform; (b) Google is required to do so by law; (c) You cease to be an authorised developer, a developer in good standing, or are barred from using Android software; or (d) Google decides to no longer provide Google Play.
https://play.google.com/intl/ALL_uk/about/developer-distribu...
Apple has a bigger market share
Google's customers include advertisers, and they include people paying them for hosting, and people paying them to buy apps, and people paying them to publish apps, people paying them for online services, people buying their hardware, etc.
Their revenue last year was 136 billions. Even if we charitable assume app developers spend 10 billions per annum in aggregate, that's only 10%. Ancillary revenue.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/google-s-...
I read it as saying $31 billion in revenue since Android was released, not in 2016 alone. That was more than 10 years ago.
And of that $31 billion, $22 billion is profit.
Finally, a lot of that revenue came from payments made to Google by handset operators, not app developer fees.
It's got to be about 2 decades since only advertisers gave Google money in exchange for goods and services, since then there are dozens of ways to be their customer.
totally agree. Google has a lot of customers and it seems like a lot of them receive mediocre or poor service, especially app developers.
then again, i've seen other HN posts state that corporate customers also receive mediocre service from Google.
Network effects are causing more and more important things to both expand into great significance and to be dominated by a single company (or pair of gatekeepers, both of whom must be appeased, as in the phone platform.) Your business can be utterly wiped out with no realistic recourse by any of a thousand actions that could be taken at any time by the giant, like an elephant stepping on an ant.
I'm afraid that the only real recourse is to have certain anticompetitive regulations automatically kick in once a business rises above a certain percentage control of access to some market or medium that has become significant. They lose the ability to unilaterally ban, for example, except in narrow cases involving fraud or suspected criminal activity, which will eventually have to be proved to some official. If they fail to prove it, the official will order compensation without the banned party having to fight the giant's lawyers.
In what universe are companies like Google, Apple, ... classifiable as class II common carriers? On what grounds?
This of course can never be true for mom-and-pop. But hell yes it is true for Google.
'We the people / customers / market recognize that it's in our interests for your functions to be centralized (whether through functional necessity, efficiency, etc), however, in return for our granting you a monopoly we demand some say in how you run your affairs.'
The alternative should be, if Google isn't willing to accept that, then they deserve a lot harsher anti-competitive regulation. The GDPR would be the tip of the iceberg, and would continue into preventing their leveraging their size and customer knowledge into new related industries.
Meanwhile say GE could be very huge and produce 50% of lightbulbs but if they decided to be grossly unreasonable people could just stop buying lightbulbs from alternatives. Now if they had created their own bulb-socket standards and enforced them so that only they could produce bulbs that fit into the socket then there would definitely be an abuse of monopoly standard and ample grounds to argue "No you abused the patent and it will go into public domain now as part of the punishment.".
Something I learned the hard way when I first started out in business is to never make your business dependent on a single entity.
Whether it's a supplier, or a publisher, or a telco, or whatever. They are all single points of failure, and unless you're a huge business, one failure can be all that's needed to take you down, too.
Yes, Google Play is effectively the only way to publish an Android program. But it's also a single point of failure, which is why until there is no longer a mobile program duopoly, I don't invest in app companies.
Seems impossible. Assuming you're an internet business, how did you make your business not dependent upon your domain registrar?
If anyone reading this remembers that story, I would very much appreciate a link.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/24/zoho-pulled-offline-after-...
It wasn't an internet business, so I didn't have to deal with those kinds of perils.
But more to your point, I knew a guy who put one on .com, one on .info, one on a county tld. Advertising material rotated through the three. His logic was that it didn't really matter what address was advertised because people just hit a search engine for the brand name. I haven't spoken to him in years, so I don't know how it worked out.
This is a great idea, thanks for sharing
This is in contrast to the app store gatekeepers, where there are effectively two, each serving a non-overlapping chuck of market, and you can't shop around for better terms or an alternative.
Not an ideal situation if something happens with your registrar, of course, but at least there is some possible recourse. The risk of this leading to your business closing is significantly lower.
The biggest one lately comes down to marketplaces and payment processing. For example, if you are running a business selling a physical product, and you are banned from:
- Amazon
- PayPal
Your business is dead. It usually comes down to exposure and payment processing. Some businesses can gain exposure through a variety of channels. But most businesses get the majority of their customers through a small list of channels. That can be Facebook Ads, SEO, Forums, etc.
If you wake up one day and Google de-lists you from organic search, and the majority of your traffic was from SEO, you're dead. You can try refocusing and investing in other channels, but the majority of your potential new customers probably use one or two channels to find your service. So unless you are the only person offering said service, they'll just go to a competitor.
These companies like Amazon, Google, Paypal, Facebook, Apple have become gatekeepers. Try and do any type of e-commerce without using the above services. Good luck buddy!
Many businesses boil down to 1-3 of the above. Losing access to one can be all it takes to go from a highly successful company to a doomed company. And these services will ban you on ToS violations, without ever explaining what part of the ToS you violated. The implication from such a ban is that your business, your livelihood, your life's pursuit is instantly crippled or dead. The implication to them is nothing.
All internet business that needs Google search to get visits? 5% bing doesn't really cut it.
I mean it's easy to say and believe that you should avoid those single points of failure, but the real, practical landscape often includes many of them.
What you're bringing up is kind of obvious but also irrelevant.
I'd ask what businesses do they invest in and figure out if those businesses are really less risky. I would posit they are probably not. The risk of having amazon Google or apple being a single point of failure is abysmally small compared to all the other risks out there.
There are many practical single or narrow points of failure a bootstrapped startup or small business may encounter. The real risk to most starting out business is being seen as irrelevant - by the potential customers or search, whether app store or Google.
If a market or medium is too dangerous to enter because there is no realistic alternative to submitting to the 800-lb gorilla, the gorilla's ability to threaten rather than compete must be eliminated.
All businesses have risks. At least these risks you know about beforehand (a <1% chance that your app developer has been shady in past and will get your account banned). This is actually a pretty small risk compared to the >99% chance that the app will sink like a stone in the sea of apps available, never to be seen again, along with every penny invested in it.
The app stores are swamped with apps. Every single one of those apps was some person's dream that they spent significant time/money/effort on - building an app and getting it on the store is not a trivial undertaking. The overwhelmingly vast majority of those apps will never make a cent for their creators.
From Google's perspective, one less app on their app store at this point is probably a good thing.
From the OP's perspective, unless they're seeing significant revenue from the iOS version, writing the whole thing off as a sunk cost and walking away is probably the best plan. Which is ridiculous, I know, but logically true.
Nobody is forcing you to use google products, and they are not a replacement for the real security in a business of loyal customers and employee's anyway. Why anyone ever consider investing in making apps for a phone given the way the market is today I will never understand.
Your second real recourse, if you can't get away from them and at that point this becomes a responsability, is to resist or fight them. In this case, getting some capital together and filing a class-action lawsuit. Another way to resist; make an app that roots the phone and poisions the data-brokers well by feeding them garbage information in a way that is impossible to effectively filter. Charge $5 a year, update the phone like antivirus updates it, have teams that work on popular vs unpopular apps, and before launching a campaign against a large app or investment firms, short the companies stock for added revenue. Invest in breaking the model of a closed ecosystem, which is required for all this spyware and for abusive EULA's to actually work right in the first place.
And when you do those sorts of things, you create a ruckus, and plenty of economic damage. That tends to draw the ire of law enforcement and government, and you will find that is the most effective way to demand new regulations. In politics, its only when you hit critical mass that change occurs.
And the final recourse, which is also a responsability that nobody likes to talk about. Their business addresses of them and their executive management can be found, and there are 17 guns per man women and child in the USA for a very good reason. You really have to fail as a society for violence to be justified and to be the only effective measure; arguably right now we're failing pretty hard if the fertility rates and life expectancy statistics are any measure. Google might not be responsable for that, but they are part of the symptom of a disease.
One could say the moment Google decided instant search was a requirement and began putting people in a bubble so effective that the only way to really survive was to decide free news is fake news. That at that moment violence became inevitable. I certainly hope it isn't.
But it is going to require people begin acting like grown-ups and taking some risks to avoid that. You'd do well to remember that.
Companies like to say they're providing a "platform"; maybe it's time for that to become a legally recognized concept.
The irony's that the mentioned notice was sent to the junk folder by Gmail. (I'm assuming Gmail from the screenshots)
Imagine if the gmail spam bin was eating important renewal notifications and business notices for a company that competes with google, would it still be anti-competitive for Google to make sure gmail's spam filter works right?
So if the message is "use Gmail or otherwise you can lose important messages from Google and then your business gets screwed" ... that's definitely an anti-trust issue.
That said, they should definitely fix this issue.
The issue isn't the ToS. It's fighting Google in court. If fraud is occuring, the ToS will not actually protect you.
You want to know what's keeping Jack Dorsey and Sundar Pichai up at night right now? They both recently openly lied to Congress and can be put in prison at any time for it. A powerful congressperson merely has to decide to act on it. Dorsey has begun walking back Twitter's aggressive deplatforming against the political rightwing because he's scared now, he knows they can get him on lying to Congress. They can get anyone on lying to Congress, all they have to do is get you to testify extensively, then you're fucked. It's why Google didn't want to send their CEO to testify.
The only way to deal with a corporation as powerful as Google is to get their executives in front of Congress or on record in front of federal agents and pin them to the wall. Once they've testified enough under oath, they're effectively in a permanent minefield. They have to be very careful with all related business practices after that.
That works when you have a hot political issue, like election tampering. I doubt it's possible to scare up enough attention for app store bans. The only recourse there is to pursue it in court and or hope some state AG will jump on board.
Sure, one possible lesson is not making your business dependent on such third parties. But if your business involves an app, you're pretty much stuck being dependent on Google and Apple. I mean, ask Facebook about that. And amusingly, Google re Apple ;)
The key lesson here, I think, is the importance of vetting any consultants, developers, etc that you use. In particular, the importance of vetting their reputations with Google and Apple.
And indeed, maybe it's best to isolate consultants, developers, etc from Google and Apple. They do work for you, and then you interact with Google and Apple. And you make sure that everything gets sanitized, in the process. That would protect businesses, consultants, and developers from each other regarding their reputations with Google and Apple.
For many years, I did work for attorneys. But I never submitted anything directly to any court, opposing counsel, or whatever. And I was careful to wipe my identity from any electronic files that would be submitted.
If a decision is appealed and reversed, would we hear about it? If the employee did a proper review and concluded that, yeah, it's legit, for reasons we would agree with, how would we know from only hearing the other side of the story?
This is why actual judicial systems are more transparent. Cases are tried mostly in public. Judges write justifications for their decisions. This allows us on the outside to review what they're doing and understand how it works.
But, the downside is that it's slow, expensive, and there is rarely any privacy.
As in the case of MS back in the day, it can seem like the law is just disinterested, but the law is merely unbelievably slow and equally inevitable. The day some prosecutors can make a career out of taking on Google, they will, and by then Google will be fully on the wrong side of public opinion.
That is pretty damned unambiguous, unless you found as in the case of MS... confusing. If you want to explain what you found “silly” I’m open to reading your perspective of course.
In an extreme example, lets say that a bureaucrat takes an action because they have an unreasonable personal dislike of something. A bureaucratic review of the situation will confirm that the person had authority to act as they did then close the case. The reasoning behind the decision may not be examined at all in the review.
A symptom of things getting bad is that reviews will never seem to achieve anything, because a bureaucracy won't take unauthorised action, so any action is by definition going to pass a review. Very frustrating to deal with that sort of system. This sort of thinking is so screwy that it makes sense for the reviewer to report directly to the original decision maker, because the reviewer isn't supposed to challenge the decision, they are supposed to make sure that the decision was made by the person they report to!
roenxi's law: "In any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy, all oversight degrades to tautology".
We did it therefore it was right otherwise we wouldn't have done it. Case closed.
What we see over and over with tech cases like this is 1) We can't tell you exactly how we figure stuff out because then you'd game it, 2) Things happen based on actions and associations you don't realize are important
This is effectively having somebody show up at your house at random times and punch you in the face.
But, we are told, it's all for the greater good. I don't doubt that the averages work out -- more good is done than evil. I do, however, doubt that such over-generalizing is so much for the greater good as it is for the bottom lines of the tech companies involved.
They are just selling you a low-quality product. You are free not to buy it.
it is not just google that makes promises or benefits from positive user experience, availability of options to end users and so on.
It wasn’t until a few times contacting them and DMing their support team on twitter that I was able to force an actual person to look at the obviously fraudulent transaction and fix it up instantly.
The algorithms suck, if I say someone took money from my account with an email and name that I’ve never seen before then you can’t just say nope not fraudulent!
I’ve also had reviewers push for internal change on my behalf when policy seems poorly applied.
One specific example I can give is I had a link to my website in a game made for kids. They asked me to put a parental lock on tapping the link (e.g “ask your parents to enter the code” type thing). That was a really good addition.
My oldest is going through apps almost entirely by jumping through ads which force you to install the next "free" game.
The reason Apple applied extra scrutiny to my app is because I checked the box indicating "Made for kids."
Any business that is profitable and employing many people but has single point of failure with Play Store can solve this problem by giving Google some money for a more detailed review with an option to submit additional evidence. Say company X gives Google $10K to do this extended review. If the party wins, Google returns the money and reinstates the account else Google keeps the money.
Secondly, a private arbitrage company which may be setup by all big players in the game that can further review the whole process and provide a neutral view of the whether the ban was warranted or not.
I have advocated with most of these large companies to come together and form an open Privacy Working Group which will advice all companies to adopt privacy standards and also help evolve those standards by a widespread industry participation. If we could do it for HTML, Javascript and Web Standards we can do it for Privacy as well. This will also pre-empt government's heavy handed approach to force these giants to adopt standards that might be completely arbitrary like GDPR.
My Google account was entered as a recovery email address by someone else. Most likely because it was a single letter removed from an abbreviation of their real legal name. I got an email informing me of that fact and instantly disavowed any association with the link right there in the email.
What should happen but a year later but Google letting me know that "your Google account [other email] was deleted due to a violation of our Terms of Service that was left unresolved.".
I tried to contact Google, I tried to disavow the account again, no reply and a dead page. My account isn't dead, but I seem to be irreversibly linked (the hypothetical Google term would be 'avowed' I guess, given that the opposite 'disavowal' was in the URI to reverse the process) to a ToS violation severe enough to warrant account deletion through no fault of my own. Simply because a random person signing up for a new account on the other side of the world typoed i instead of u.
For all I know my reputation with Google is so bad that a single click on the wrong YouTube video or a new algorithm with marginally different scoring running on my account will delete it all. I have zero certainty through no fault of my own.
Edit: Could hypothetically be a great way of shutting up political dissidents (and their YouTube accounts) or anyone you don't like. List their email as a recovery address on ten new accounts, get ToS violations on all of them before they get a chance to disavow them (do it while they're likely sleeping maybe) and you're done.
The author of the story said he doesn’t know what the third party may or may not have done and Google didn’t provide an explanation. And I never said my account was shut down.
It feels like the money keeps rolling in through ad revenues, and then spent on developing projects like Inbox, Reader, and 5 chat apps, all of which get discontinued.
Is Google (the company & team) turning into a Dilbert Comic?
That's not a rigorous scientific statement, but it's fairly consistent with my own experience dealing with Google as a startup. Unless you have a back channel via an employee you know, it's next to impossible to get any non-automated, human judgement on your situation.
The part I don't get is... where in Google leadership does this issue get lost on the company's priorities? Of all of the rational explanations I can come up with, it feels like someone looks at the data and either says "nah we don't lose much money from this" or "nah it's not a real problem". Is that actually true?
Could it be something to do with company culture? Something like "if we solve a hard problem by assigning a human to it then we have admitted failure as a technology company". It's a lofty goal but it comes at the cost of betraying the trust of partners/customers when things break, and they seem to break often. Someone in management really ought to be weighing those two things side by side (assuming the cultural thing I mentioned even exists).
And if you don't, than your monopoly should be broken by the government. And Apple's high end garden barely scratches Google's monopoly.
What happens if Google provides support is their average revenue per employee drops from $1.3m to an even million per year or whatever and their profit margins remain immense and that $100b+ in the bank keeps on growing. But it is certainly more expensive than an auto-emailer faking support.
I think that, when you are the gatekeepers to some people's livelihoods, there's some amount of ethical responsibility to exercise judgement. If you can automate judgement, then great, but if you can't, you should probably implement it with humans.
People complain about how they can't talk to a human being about their one specific issue. These companies are not mom and pop stores dealing with a handful of suppliers, just sitting there waiting for their phone to ring - they're huge businesses operating in hundreds of countries 24/7/365 handling probably millions of interactions with "customers"/suppliers every year with all sorts of different processes and policies in different jurisdictions.
On Hacker news we hear about someone falling through the cracks in the system every couple of weeks, but we don't hear about all of the bad actors/viruses/malware getting blocked/removed from the app stores or cloud vendors everyday
There are people out there whose strategy is "throw enough shit and something will stick" who are trying their hardest to publish their malware as much as possible every single day and it's (IMHO) frankly something of a success/miracle that we've not seen any more major abuses of the app stores and cloud platforms.
People on HN complain bitterly about the potential for ad networks to distribute malware, but then get mad when FAANGs ban accounts that are linked to bad actors. Sure it is sad that some people are innocently caught in the crossfire but what are the FAANGs to do? Damned if they do, damned if they don't?
2. I had two GMail accounts closed on me for no obvious reason. Both were eventually reopened, but one several years later because I got enough media attention to get their attention.
3. I know one company that lost all their mails because their paid App Engine account was closed on them. I know another company which lost its biggest customer when the CEO's personal Gmail account was suddenly closed. And I know two other people who has lost access to all the stuff on Drive.
Considering that each problem is a real disaster for the person experiencing it, and that you don't hear about such stories with Microsoft, Apple or even Amazon.
The fact is, that even though you only hear the horror stories, there shouldn't be so many of them that you here them all over. I am just one person, and I trust Google as much as I trust the Chinese government.
It also serves as a very unfortunate reminder of a couple of things:
1. Just how incredibly important it is for us to be able to use the platforms of the future as we see fit. We look at app stores and think well, this is good, right, applications are vetted and you can be sure that everything you install from one is fine. Except malicious applications still get through (see e.g. https://threatpost.com/google-play-removes-22-malicious-ligh... - not a singular incident), it's applications that could be a threat to Google's position or its business don't.
If users could download and install applications as they wish, as it was the norm twenty years ago, having a developer account removed wouldn't be much of a problem. Curating and reviewing applications may be a good way to keep malicious ones away from non-technical users, but who we trust to do the reviewing is equally important, and Google is about as shady as it gets.
2. Google's abysmal support (which is not limited to this particular case!) is no coincidence: small developers are too small to count, and, as applications became commoditized and got cheaper and cheaper, there are too many of them for the loss of one to be important in any way. Sure, Google's PR may insist they value every developer but their actions speak for themselves. Customer support, for any branch of their business, is so bad it makes PayPal look helpful by comparison.
3. Ultimately, that the standards of every company are the standards that its users hold it to. It speaks for itself that Google's "appeal" process (if one can call it that way) is so incredibly useless that the only way to actually appeal it is to produce enough rage that -- out of fear of bad PR, not because that's how you work with customers! -- someone will actually look at this.
I hope this gets sorted out real soon -- and that we all think twice about which platforms we support through our work. Both Google and Apple are what they are because mobile developers publish their applications there and not somewhere else -- both of them would be nothing were it not for the app developers' work, as seen in, say, Windows Phone. Granted, Android and iPhone are where the most users are, so it's where the big money is -- I'm sure no one writes Android apps because they're evil (ok, some people do; but not everyone). But most companies in this space could afford to invest in more free platforms, like the Librem 5, which would work in their own benefit, even if not right now.
Edit: oh yeah, one more thing.
I've seen Google trying to wiggle out of situations like these by saying that well, this was outsourced, so maybe the guys this was outsourced to did some shady stuff, it's definitely not Google's fault, they have no control over that.
Yeah, well, the outsourcing industry is older than Google is, and it's also responsible for virtually 90% of the applications on the Play Store (how else do you think applications end up costing 99 cents?). If a company can't come up with a review process that can accommodate the software outsourcing industry, in 2019, that's beyond laughable.
I think instead of relying on these giant monopolies we should built open platforms on decentralized technopolies.
Google has similar problems with automated, AI powered systems at Adsense, Adwords, Youtube, GCP etc, and the constant abuse and total lack of communication they've put their customers through has had many of them abandoning these platforms.
Meanwhile, their poor treatment of customers keep reinforcing the notion that Google simply cannot offer the level of customer service people need to run their businesses, and that's one problem they can't code or AI themselves out of.
If one of the people you chose to associate your account with was previously a bad actor or involved with one, there's no reason to give you the benefit of the doubt because you have at least demonstrated bad judgement. For years people have been playing a game of whack-a-mole where when one account gets terminated they pop up with another. Since your entire business apparently depended on the app stores (a bad idea to begin with) being in good standing with them is therefore vital and it was incumbent on you to vet the people you were in business with. (i.e. sure, be in business with them if you choose. But if you decide to associate your single point of failure business account with them and they fail to disclose that they were associated with something shady in the past, your beef is with them not the app store)
May you get what you desire.
I admit that I was judging the story by the details that weren't included as I found the omission of them as the most relevant. Perhaps the flagging of the account in question was in fact wrongly done but it seems incumbent on the author of the article to make that case which they did not, in my opinion.
Here's the thing that really annoys me about this whole topic: I'm not a fan of the direction the app stores have gone (either as a user or a developer.) I'd much rather be reading and participating in discussions about what's going to disrupt them.
What is it about an app store-based business that is supposed to make them immune from these realities?
The suspension was for "suspicious billing activity", tried appealing twice with the correct billing address, and was told the suspension is final (some automated email) both times.
They won't take my calls because the account is suspended, which leaves me not being able to advertise on the #1 service to do so.
It's completely unacceptable, especially for a business in their position. One tiny mistake leads you to a lifetime of suspension to a service vital to almost any business.
He is still banned today
Of course, Google could do the same to ANY of us who end up depending on them. The only real solution is whatever makes you not significantly reliant on Google.
Probably not enough to matter, if you are only looking at the UK.
[0] https://gitlab.com/fdroid/privileged-extension/
[1] See: https://linuxontheweb.org/desk.os
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=the+peace+guy
Back when our anti-monopoly legislation was first introduced, that wasn't the case - monopolies were busted just as well because they did something anti-competitive, even if that was presented as benefiting their customers (and even if it really did, short term).
https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol81/iss5/6/
Everyone has the right to revoke consent at any time.
Additionally, why do you believe Google is a monopoly, and in which line of business?
the best way out of this is to educate users and start getting them to use other search products. we need more diversity of choice.
- Having friends inside google does not help (I suppose at some level they can, but L5/L6 engineers aren't enough)
- Creating a new account with a different credit card does not help. Subsequent accounts they can link back to you will also be banned
- I haven't found a solution yet, except for keeping all of my new projects outside of google (no google analytics, no google search console (which obviously still allows your site to be indexed) no gsuite. That way if I never need google advertising, a co founder can pick it up and google has no way to trace the company back to me.
Why, so Google can pull the rug out from under me at the least opportune moment?
But I agree, too risky. Just stay away from Google. Cons outweigh the pros, for me personally. The only thing I used it for was sheets, docs and gmail. LibreOffice is more than adequate for me, and far better than the Google alternatives.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/adsense-lawsuit/248135/
This is how google has always operated, and it's one of the reasons why their near monopoly on advertising is horrible for everyone.
It was 10 years ago, and I have tried to make an appeal about it but always with the same response.
I was just exploring Google Places API to see if I could integrate it with a side project. The signup process claimed that it only needed a credit card to "prove that you're a financially capable human," which makes sense (and it also said that it would not charge your account until you gave it express permission), so I happily agreed. Despite this claim, Google apparently requires an active, chargeable card at all times, from account inception until you die. Failure to do so will result in terminating your account.
Whatever, let them terminate the account. Google's public favor is in a tailspin, and I can get the data I need from FourSquare at a fraction of the cost.
https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/article29/item-detail.cfm?item...
I'm not sure if it'll help for the author of the article, as Google's decision is clear, just their logic in unfair, and I assume they are talking about a business, not a personal, account.
This really is where Google might be too big...
Since Google is such a force, and they don't have time to support or help people/companies lost in the algorithms, maybe competition is the only thing that can solve this because most companies are too small/medium for them to care.
Lots of these systems are probably well intentioned and risk averse by default, but in the end have too much influence on the market as a single point of failure.
Highly concentrated systems with single points of failure that fail on a large scale are bad, but even worse is highly concentrated systems that randomly get in an error loop but too small to correct, only here it is small/medium companies stuck in that algorithm purgatory vortex.
One sometimes needs a lawyer to deal with the complexity of government laws. It seems like soon there will be a small thriving job market for "googlawyers" -- people who will earn they bread and butter by getting through the Google's bureaucracy.
PS. Jokes aside, it's a sad state of things.
Sounds like one of those developers was previously banned for violating ToS and Google suspects the author is the same person with a new account trying to evade the ban. Instead of sharing login details, the correct thing to do is add a user and give them permission to upload. Not let them pretend to be you.
The situation sucks but Google's action seems reasonable? Like they can't just let people create new accounts to evade bans.
I understand Google doesn't want to give bad actors information that could help them avoid the counter-measures, but the side effects on people who are innocent or make minor errors are too severe. They could make the whole process lengthy, and require proper, detailed authentication to make sure it's different persons & companies each time - that adds enough cost to deter bad actors from using the "appeals" process, but it would save honest people from the frustration.
I'm not on Google's side, look at my post history, but there are always two sides to a story.
So far 99% of the people I have seen complaining about their account being suspended were unwilling to read the ToS, even less to try to comply with them.
I am pretty sure that the review process does mistakes as well, but as always bad actors spoil everything for everybody.
FWIW, I had 2 apps removed from the play store earlier this month. They were all based on the same codebase (different flavors) and were banned for using a forbidden permission (after asking it to the user of course).
I was super surprised since when I coded the feature using that permission, it was legal to use it. The rules have changed since then and I had pushed an update to remove the use of that permission (to be honest it was not that necessary, it just made the UX a bit smoother in one case).
BUT I did not realize that for these 2 apps, I had retained apks in the play store for lower api levels with the faulty code :///
(I use an upload script to gain some time .. multiple apks take a long time to upload for each update otherwise; so I don't see the play store console often)
Still; I was clearly in the wrong.
I just removed the faulty retained apps and was again in the play store a couple of hours later.
So... a sane human being? Someone who can't afford to spend literally hours reading legalese and trying to figure out what it means?
Sure, a ToS is different, and there's basically an implicit contract when you buy a service, but that doesn't mean that the ToS is all powerful. It can be still unfair practice. (Some jurisdictions have that too.)
Now of course courts can't really force G to do business with you, but as others mentioned they can be sued for damages.
That plus business can certainly not terminate your business relationship for any reason they like.
Many people are in this exact situation. That is why they are upset.
was it related to SMS?
In retrospect it was a mistake even when it was in the ToS. It needs way too much precautions : warn the user and explain what we do, have them accept the permission, handle the case where some phones need 'phone state' (because no way we ask that one, too frightening and powerful).
If you are not a SMS app, just open the default one (if there is one) with a pre-filled message.
It seems like the opposite of reasonable to me. You hit the nail on the head for _why_ this happened but this person now has _zero_ recourse for correcting their mistake.
Yes, they screwed up. They shouldn't have let them do it through their account. But now, because they screwed up, you're fine with the action that they can literally never be on the Google Play store ever again? The largest mobile store with the largest share of phones and you can't be on the store because of this?
Absolutely unacceptable.
question: is Google really that good at detecting the relationship between an account they banned, and some other new account created under a different name with someone else's credit card?
i mean couldn't this small business get another credit card under a different name and then create a totally new developer account under a different name -- and keep that all totally isolated from the previously banned account?
is that just not practically possible? if it worked at least initially -- what would they have to lose?
If your business model is dependent on someone else's service/store/website/slients then YOU DONT HAVE A BUSINESS you have AT BEST a franchise.
And then it might get resolved well...
a) all businesses are dependent on others
b) even an individual is dependent on others
It’s usually smart to have a backup plan, but sometimes the backup plan can only be: deal with it when-if it arises.
Then maybe we should start educating users in the other direction. There wasn't this problem before app stores and walled gardens became common.
It seems that we had long since solved the 'problem' of software distribution before Apple and Google decided to correct it.
And no, my roughly used and crazily effective PC system is not riddled with malware and viruses despite the claims of walled garden purveyors that insist this is inevitable.