I would wager the amount of android users who even know what fdroid is, is < 5%, if not much lower. Getting flagged as spyware or booted from the Play Store effectively destroys any project that relies on funding.
It’s kind of missing the point of having a company shutting down your business without much recourse for objection. I currently have to deal with Google on a matter, and the lengths I have to go through to even get a response is ridiculous. And this is on their ads platform, so technically I am their best kind of client who brings in money.
And there is no alternative, that is the monopoly.
> If the app can't be in the Play store anymore, there is no point in continuing supporting this app because about 99% of the users download the app from the Play store.
And some more context:
--- Begin quote ---
The balance
The few euros I receive in return for what's being offered and the fun of developing things are no compensation for the thousands of questions I answer every month, for unfair Play store reviews and for stress about unclear Google requirements.
The verdict
I have not reached a conclusion yet, but the question I am asking myself is why I would continue with the project. Maybe it is the moment, with a sick girlfriend, but I currently don't see it.
Alternatives
GitHub only version: 98% of the audience will be lost.
Strip down the app: more bad reviews
Paid support: more bad reviews
Stop answering questions: more bad reviews
Bad reviews will shift the balance only in the wrong direction.
Core problem
Google. There is no sensible way to appeal in case of bad reviews or alleged violations of Play store policies.
People. They are generally pretty demanding and on the other hand everything should be free.
Myself. An old and grumpy developer, who maybe should retired.
I think we're reaching a point where because of the unreliability of the two major platforms there may be a path for developers to go the Youtuber route and start Patreon to fund development. You already see this in certain genres of games (notably adult content) that are typically just hidden on stores.
I can certainly understand the reasons behind simply abandoning ship at this point. If it's not worth it, it's not worth it.
My only hope now is that Thunderbird on Android will approach the quality without adding any heinous anti-features.
I suggested that in the forum too. I support quite a few developers through patreon, paypal subscriptions or Github: Calibre, a lot of mister devs, Karabiner Elements (Tekezo), Scummvm (Eugene Sandulenko)
From what I've seen from comments of supporters on patreon, the community tends to be much nicer to the dev than typical forums. It's always strange to me that people who don't want to pay tend to be the worst when it comes to support and politeness.
> From what I've seen from comments of supporters on patreon, the community tends to be much nicer to the dev than typical forums. It's always strange to me that people who don't want to pay tend to be the worst when it comes to support and politeness.
I would say that it is rather that only a small fraction of people pay, and those are usually the most satisfied users anyway to be willing to pay for the additionnal features. The platform has little to do with it.
Oh yes, I don't mean that's specific to Patreon the platform. It's just that in my limited experience dealing with a not that popular opensource software and dealing with support for an old school shareware back when that was a thing, the most entitled, the least friendly and the most aggressive emails were all from people who didn't donate, didn't pay or didn't contribute to the code (in the case of my opensource project).
And once you help them, they're not necessarily going to donate either or try to help in any way (a big percentage of those problematic users have the mentality of not paying for software ever). So filtering support to only supporters is a good way to stay sane as a developer and stop dealing with negativity.
It would certainly be nice if at least their feedback was a bit more meaningful and explained the actual problem, and not just a vague category that they thought most closely fits the issue.
Part of the problem as well here is that the alleged policy violation doesn't gives enough information for a developer to even figure out what behaviour they're seeing, let alone where in a complex app that feature is.
Then, secondly, when their automation gets it wrong, or there is some misunderstanding over something, there's no ability for the developer to actually have any kind of meaningful or substantive discussion - if you can't work out what the issue is, based on their incredibly high level description, you're out of luck, as you won't get any meaningful intelligent or personal response from anyone - expect templated, automated emails that are not in any way addressing the message you sent.
The author has every right to stop accepting the uncalled for abuse from users and drop development and support. I hope he can direct his attention to things that give him joy instead.
Please read his comments. He is overwhelmed and I wouldn’t be surprised if he even felt abused. Users (especially free tier) can be (more often than not) nasty towards developers.
If it he doesn't want to "feel abused" maybe he should not have been shipping people's contact lists off to a third party without their knowledge or permission while claiming to be a privacy-oriented application?
Google are vile. Decisions like this should always be appealable to an independent tribunal, the way that employment disputes are.
I'd go so far as to suggest that app developers are de facto employees, on that note: a recent ruling in the UK against Uber suggests that those who rely on such platforms are entitled to protections. I'd suggest that could apply here, too.
In the UK we have a category of "worker" which is between self employed and employed. I strongly suspect the fact that google play is the sole marketplace for most apps has an effect that brings people into that definition. It is about whether or not a business is captive, and whether it relies entirely on one platform for its customers. These things are what got GMB their victory over Uber in the employment tribunal.
What is happening with Google? Seems there have been quite a number of
"Google broke it" stories flying around - or am I just seeing
confirmation bias as my negative experiences of Google increase
daily. Search is awful. It can't deliver mail reliably. Is Google
broken inside and turning into a hostile entity?
In my anecdotal experience, there have been a few outrages a month over something Google has f-ed up on HN for years now. I'm not too happy with them, either, but you also have to factor in Google's size - at a billion users, they're bound to have a lot of unhappy ones, even if they would be perfect.
Lastly, HN has been successfully used for contacting Google support in the past, so this also increases the number of posts.
>also have to factor in Google's size - at a billion users, they're bound to have a lot of unhappy ones, even if they would be perfect
Sure, but the things that Google does to make some of their users unhappy and the total lack of recourse Google makes available to them are decidedly far from perfect. That some people are going to be unhappy no matter what is beside the point.
They are the other big player. So of course things happen there as lot of entities or nearly all of them actually deal with them. Doesn't mean their decisions or products aren't getting worse for users.
> Doesn't mean their decisions or products aren't getting worse for users.
Or at all, relatively. It can take only one heavy impact issue and the public will not care how large any of the numbers are and well things generally go (or, conversely, how poorly, i.e. coal power). Of course with a company at Google scale, there is gonna be a lot more than just one heavy impact issue in no time, and any human only has to really conflict with one of them to be thrown for a loop.
People are just really bad with big numbers and very empathetic with individual cases. The later is actually a really cool feature in humans, but it is an issue when it conflicts with the former.
That is all not to say that Google is doing right, here or in any other set of cases. You decide. I just noticed that the way people arrive at their judgement often suffers from the aforementioned dynamics.
Among other things, what's happening with Google is the same thing that happens with Facebook and Apple and so on. They got too big, and they don't care, so there are few to no humans involved in human-facing, human-affecting decisions. Humans don't scale well or cheaply, so they automate. Things go sideways as a result. No one cares, because they're too big to have to care about this anymore, and they've switched into parasitic extraction of revenue instead of caring.
And, of course, because they're so huge, any problem that affects a "tiny fraction" of their user base affects a whole lot of people.
They have the resources to not have these problems. That's the bit that should be leading to barbarians at the gates, but, isn't.
> They have the resources to not have these problems.
I'm not sure they do have the resources. We're talking about companies with a user base larger than literally any country on Earth.
The basic problem is that these companies are taking on problems that nobody should ever take on. "Mass curation" is not a problem that can be solved by anyone, and not a thing that should be attempted by anyone. This is why we need personal freedom and not global gatekeepers.
Well I said X because it doesn't really matter. I'm very confident that my argument is true for X=100, and it's probably true for notably smaller numbers. I don't need exact statistics to know that it's much much less than 3.5 million.
And this isn't about a deep check for every single update, this is about deeper checking in case of blocks and bans, which happen at a much slower rate.
Of course as the number of apps that are coddled or given special treatment gets smaller, the easier it gets to coddle or give special treatment to apps. But how does that help the Play Store overall? How is it fair that a few developers are given special treatment, while everyone else still suffers from the same arbitrary rejections?
Besides, the small decisions are collectively impactful too. Take 3 million apps, and add up all of their users. Multiple smaller apps may collectively have more users than 1 larger app.
It feels like giving special treatment to more famous apps is just a strategy for Google or Apple to avoid bad press, without making their stores much better.
> It feels like giving special treatment to more famous apps is just a strategy for Google or Apple to avoid bad press, without making their stores much better.
That's what they do now. I'm suggesting a massive expansion on what apps they treat better, because 'famous' is a very small group.
And I'm not saying they shouldn't treat all apps well. It's just that it's less clear how much that would cost.
What's clear right now is that they aren't even trying.
Also we probably shouldn't have 3 million apps to start with. I bet a lot of those are below even the lowest reasonable quality bar.
Have you ever heard of fake competition? That's exactly it.
1. Have evil corp MS
2. See people getting negative vibes about it
3. Create a "don't be evil" corp
4. See people flee there
5. Close the cage.
It seems like they are the worst example of the stereotype of a software developer. They make out that they are the best examples of technical prowess but not only are they not but they also have no people skills.
Just tried reporting a bug on Android Auto and the submit button is disabled with no error message or tooltip.
I guess their model is to do stuff for "free", don't really provide any useful customer support and keep your costs down. If people don't like it, they are in the wrong and are free to go elsewhere.
Eventually "free" loses its value when everything else is done so badly.
The AI dream we dreamed of is actually this kind of nightmare in ignorant hands.
If you are a false positive for Google bots, then you're toast.
Your ad income will vanish, you app will be forgotten and even your very email and associated data underneath is on the brink of lifetime ban.
This is the very essence of Google. If you are big enough as Google, you can swing a huge f* you gesture to the whole world of software developers.
"Don't be evil" - yeah right.
The very first thing Google makes use of their fat cutting-edge language models is banning ordinary people from the whole ecosystem for their tiniest fixable mistakes.
Google scales evil before they scale good. Always have been, always will be.
We as little software developers don't have any significant resource to sue the hell out of Google and they can get away with this pure evil every single day.
Did you actally read the thread? His rage-quit feels actually quite tragic right now. Additionally to the insane problems with Google and the PlayStore-enviroment/ecosystem, his girlfriend is currently sick, and taking care of her is his priority.
I'd find it more appropriate if the (current)top-comment doesn't casually criticize some simple looks of the app as if nothing. I mean if somebody's drowning right now next to me, I don't want to hear commentary about how shitty her/his shoes look like. Well, you didn't choose to be top-comment right now for everybody to see this like on a silver plate, but to everybody else... In real life I'd suggest: maybe discuss this on some other day.
I like the UI, it works well is easy to configure and gives me everything I need. I tend to dislike new UIs that have hidden defaults, are not configurable enough (because users won't understand) and focus on form over function. FairEmail is great because it's super useable and gets out of my way when I want to do anything.
Yes he does sound stressed out, I have done similarly drastic things when I felt like he does. Going cold turkey is sometimes the only way out.
But saying that "annoying" is a very cold understated way of describing Google's actions.
I'm in awe of the work this guy has put in. Google I would hope amongst their developers would recognise that this is an important useful project.
The developer himself it appears could handle the negative comments but they clearly ground him down [1]:
> The few euros I receive in return for what's being offered and the fun of developing things are no compensation for the thousands of questions I answer every month, for unfair Play store reviews and for stress about unclear Google requirements.
Note: the stress comes from the unclear Google requirements.
If you do have any access to the Play Store (you're one degree of separation closer at least) then please ask them to find out what's going wrong.
In that thread he commented that this happened before. Having your "landlord" lock you out on multiple occasions with no clear communication about why is a lot more than simply "annoying".
He may have other sources of stress in his life, but those don't mitigate Google's ownership of killing the app.
"If the app can't be in the Play store anymore, there is no point in continuing supporting this app because about 99% of the users download the app from the Play store."
So your employer is the _main reason_ this guy is giving up.
Also you defending your employer in this thread, given the context, is highly insensitive. Makes you look bad, that's why you're getting downvoted.
You should have not commented this, or even better, you should switch to a company that doesn't suck!
They're not annoying, this is stepping on little people just because you can. It's malicious because the process (i.e. Google as an entity and everyone relevant inside of it) does not care, and quite honestly by trying to go online and saying it is okay you make it worse: Any decision maker is going to see folks condoning it and think "can I go a little bit further next time?". That's how we got to this point in the first place.
It seems like this whole situation and fiasco could be avoided if Google didn't try to automate compliance violations that frequently don't give any information about the violation, then provide no actual ability to have a discussion which leads to clarification or information flow outward.
This legislation is a starting point, but if Google and others flout it, it won't achieve anything. Hopefully someone looks at a way to bring an action against Google under it, and bring some change in how developers are treated.
How would this regulation help in this specific case?
I find I sympathise a lot with both narratives about app stores: it does seem that big mistakes are made and sometimes it seems apps are removed anti competitively but it also seems that there are a lot of apps that are basically malware already and forcing app stores to remove fewer apps would lead to more of it.
Google makes boatloads of money, but somehow they cannot seem to implement a good people-focused review system for whether or not apps are malicious. "But that doesn't scale", I hear you say. They could simply hire more people, that scales fine. It's quite simply that Google has never been a people company and the culture has never shifted from engineering first to people first. It is a shame, because this leads to an ever more shitty experience for the humans using their stuff.
Because they have businesses that scale: dominated by fixed costs with very small unit costs, where twice as many units have very much less than twice as much total cost to deliver.
> "But that doesn't scale", I hear you say. They could simply hire more people, that scales fine.
No, it doesn't. Hiring more people with any given skill set has superlinear costs very quickly (because of supervision heirarchies and increased quantity even before that increasing the clearing price).
Cost scaling worse than linearly is pretty much what people mean when they say, “Doesn’t scale".
How does Apple manage to have human reviewers and engineers you can talk with on the phone about App Store issues? It seems like it scales just fine for them.
Do you contend that they are lying when they include this in their rejection emails:
> If you have a question about your app's review, send us a message in Resolution Center. If you would prefer to speak over the phone, just let us know in your message, and we'll schedule a call.
- you're not talking to a reviewer or engineer unless you are a high tier dev. Bulks of devs could get standard customer support just hearing their grievances out, the same way emails get canned responses.
- devs don't all get access to the same resources or attention from Apple, and your support tier will largely depend on your revenue. I wouldn't expect a long tail app to get much attention.
Interesting. This was with a minor app that has no users and no name brand. Thus I assumed it was standard. Sorry about that, maybe it's more arbitrary than I thought.
If you can't properly do the business, you should not be in the business.
Externalizing the costs and internalizing the profits is basically theft from society.
Other examples of externalizing costs and internalizing profits are companies like tobacco companies and drug dealers externalizing the costs of the diseases their products produce (both costs to the direct customers, their families and economy at large form lost productive capacity) while they take the profits of the addictions they produce, and fossil fuel companies externalizing the costs of destroying the climate while internalizing the profits from those dependent on the form of energy they provide.
Just because a business model 'works', for the definition of maintains a profit, does not mean that it should be allowed. For an extreme and easily understood example, if society tolerated murder, then murder-for-hire services could become quite sustainably profitable, and probably scalable (especially by applying technology to the Slaughterbot model) as many people would like to eliminate other inconvenient people. That does not mean we should allow it.
> If you can't properly do the business, you should not be in the business.
Perhaps, but “it scales” and “it ought to be required even though it does not scale” are not merely different arguments, but different classes of argument (the former factual, the latter moral/ethical.)
The question is the constraints that are applied, and they all overlap.
There is no such thing as a "free market". Every market has constraints ranging from what is physically possible (available materials, transit time, storage space, spoilage, etc.++) to market constraints (what people are interested in making or buying), market conditions (buyers' or sellers' market for what goods/services), and either implied or explicit legal and/or moral constraints.
No market is simply free other than the physical constraints. Every market expects certain standards of buyers and sellers, although those can vary wildly, but the extreme of [don't give your buyer the goods, just kill him and take his money] or [don't pay the seller, just kill him and take the goods] is not tolerated.
The question here is what standards should be required.
I also not here that writing about it, while it is not murdering people, Google is certainly taking the position that it is perfectly OK to murder a customer's business for it's own convenience. Just because that process scales does not mean it should be tolerated.
Moreover, considering the scale of Google's valuation and free cash, I have no question that they could scale up a reasonable level of service so that they are not literally in the business of killing their customers.
The problem is that an inherent imbalance in scale means you have no effective or proportionate recourse when Google break this law. This legislation requires meaningful human interaction with developers, but as many in this thread have observed, developers can't access a human, only automated processes.
That would be costly for Google and wouldn't easily scale, so clearly they don't choose to follow this law. Trouble is that laws are meaningless without enforcement, and someone to advance that enforcement on behalf of the smaller party.
This is exactly where you need regulation. EU can force Google to to create sane policies for removal, or even fine Google when they do stuff like this.
Looks like he's also shutdown Netguard, another Android app from the same developer: https://netguard.me/ / https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.faircode.ne.... I'd never heard of FairEmail, but I've definitely heard of Netguard! It was comfortably the best Android firewall & had 5 million installs or so via Google Play. Ouch.
FairMail is an insanely good Email-App. I have little to compare to, but it's sick how good FairMail is. I'd be surprised if there is something comparably good.
FairEmail and K9 are the only real options on mobile that I know of if you want open source. Comparing the two, I'm much happier on FairEmail though K9 wasn't bad either.
Particularly the link dialog is nice and helps avoid tracking or accidental taps sometimes.
I used K-9 for a long time until I upgraded my phone and K-9 wasn't supported on the newer version of Android so I switched to Faire mail. Has K-9 been updated to support newer versions of Android?
For me, I moved off of K-9 to Fairemail for one reason: OAUTH support. One of my accounts uses Outlook 365 and disabled support for IMAP (and did not allow app passwords).
Netguard is essential software for Android, imo. It is the first app I install on Android devices, as the entire android OS is spyware and all the pre-installed apps try to phone home, constantly.
> FairEmail stopping development after Google falsely flags app as spyware
Disgraceful. What kind of mentality a person has to have to take money from the biggest spyware vendor and mark others' work as spyware? Or even allow automated systems, built by spyware vendor, to slap a "spyware" label on anything?
lol have you heard of ... Windows 10? No OS collects more usage data. And no you can't disable it. And if you try, it will re-enable tracking after some updates.
Have you heard of… Google? Search, Gmail, Maps, Android, YouTube, Smart Assistants, home security cameras, thermostats, Chrome, and more, and more, and more.
I’ll stick with my assertion that Google collects 1-3 orders of magnitude more data than Microsoft.
Those are services not OS. And Microsoft services are no different. Difference is that Google is more successful (has more users and services and therefore more data).
People dislike Apple's App Store, but I have always found Googles to be worse. The problem with Google's App Store is if you get caught up in the algorithmic kafkaesque maze, it's very hard to get to a real person to get it situated. Apple has been so much easier to work with in this regard.
I may disagree with an Apple App Store policy or decision, but IME I've never found it kafkaesque. Google's really is a maze.
I recently had an app pulled from Google about a month after its latest update (the app has been in the store for years) b/c I hadn't checked some new privacy box in the UI. I received no warning prior to the take down or when I last submitted, and the take down message didn't even point me in the UI where I could check this box. After searching SO, I was able to track it down. Then the app was rejected for an unrelated reason that required an appeal. I appealed and they simply stated rejection again. I appealed again asking if they actually read the original appeal and received no response. A week or so later the app was back live - and I only knew because I checked.
I had an app taken down 5 years after the last update for a trademark violation in the store listing: a photo of a logo. The app was a logo identification app (basically). So that was utterly hilarious. I never fixed it. I lol’d so hard I didn’t even care.
If just "slightly" is enough to make people move, there'd be more competitive pressure on Google to improve things, and for Apple to catch up or stay ahead. Don't estimate the power of competition.
It's possible to dislike both while also pointing out a shortcoming in one compared to the other. Google could do much much better in terms of customers service; they could start by actually having literally any customer service.
Apple's app store policies are far more capricious, e.g. my company's e-commerce app was rejected because the splash screen displays a shopping cart with a Microsoft Surface in it. We've had many more problems fighting Apple's app store than Google's.
I mean you say that, but having done about ~60 releases for the same app on both platforms over the last three years, google has only once caused us an issue (due to changes in privacy policy disclosure requirements that we had to rectify), whereas Apple has prevented us from deploying at least a dozen times over the same period, several times for issues that they hadn't flagged in previous releases, and sometimes having us wait for up to 2 days for re-review.
I guess it's a matter of anecdotes. I certainly don't have enough data (one + a half apps with countless updates) to make any serious claims. For us google has been more trouble, but I've heard other bad stories about apple too.
I'm freshly frustrated because I'm dealing with a random metadata rejection (on an "internal testing" build! nothing has changed!) just now.
The anecdotal remark is fair, it may just come down to the nature of one particular type of app vs another, but on a personal note, I find things like automated metadata rejections a lot less frustrating than fickle human rejections because I can debug metadata and resubmit to receive instant feedback - akin to fighting with a compiler - whereas with apple some issues require multiple days of back and forth with reviewers while I pathologically refresh the review status page. What I find to be most frustrating is when the reviewer responds with a change request, we fix the build, then the next reviewer rejects some other random thing that wasn't mentioned in the previous review, dragging out the release date even longer. Anyway, fuck em both, cheers!
I think the argument is not that the rules are inherently any nicer, but that there's an actual process where you can find out what you did wrong and fix it rather than just being banned out of the blue one day. (I'm not entirely convinced by this argument, on the basis that I've heard unpleasant stories about Apple changing policies and screwing people over, but it's a plausibly valid argument to make.)
Yeah, I've found App Store rejections to be harsh (functionality is not useful? ok) or restrictive, but always parseable. I even successfully asked the reviewer if a certain change would remedy the issue, they said yes, I resubmitted and that was that. Took about 2 days in all.
Play Store rejections are either an algorithmic mystery or reviewer incompetence. I don't mean reviewer incompetence in using the (maybe unintuitive) app. I mean their internal review UI had some kind of unrelated error and they sent me a screenshot of that.
Their own console UI even sort of urges you to just resubmit with a potentially meaningless change instead of opening an appeal / request.
Feels like it's the worst of both automatic and human review.
> I even successfully asked the reviewer if a certain change would remedy the issue, they said yes, I resubmitted and that was that. Took about 2 days in all.
You're lucky. I've asked them such questions. Most of the time they refuse to respond. Even if they do, there's a good chance you'll get a different reviewer for your next update with a completely different opinion and interpretation of The Guidelines.
It is an alternative. And it is infinitely superior than the situation on iOS where you are simply out of options if Apple does not approve. With Android it might be harder than being listed in the Play Store, but at least it is possible and there are massive communities who do so.
Eons ago, I built an Android app which allowed using high quality photos for contacts. I made the "huge" mistake of using a celebrity photo in one of my screenshots. Lo and behold, few months later, my free with no advertising app got removed from the store and the only way to put it back was to create a new app which would have a new URL and none of the ratings or reviews carried over.
The reasonable thing would have been to send a warning asking to change the damn screenshot, which would have taken me literally 10 second to do.
No more app development for me, not unless I control the distribution channel.
> No more app development for me, not unless I control the distribution channel.
What about something like F-Droid? F-Droid users can even add new repos to source apps from if you don't want to submit it to wherever F-Droid sources from by default.
That said, the culture around smartphones unfortunately was poisoned from the beginning so that normal users are suspicious of anything that doesn't come from the "official" corporate app stores, unlike PCs where they'll download just about anything on the internet, so I do sympathize with swearing off app development.
F-Droid came to be in late 2010 and I built the app in early 2012. As such, I didn't really hear about F-Droid at the time and I assume the user base would have been very small (but still better than nothing).
I solved this by requesting a new app url from the server, if there is any the app would request the user to install the new app. I even managed to create my own update method.
Having once made this mistake in my teens about twelve years ago, just be glad that the copyright owner didn't pursue you over it, it could have been much worse, and is a lesson learned a relatively easy way.
Yeah, parent should have been laying at least 10 years in prison for such a “huge” mistake. Maybe we need to re-introduce back a death penalty for such serious crimes?
Nobody said they should go to jail. We're saying maybe parent commenter is being a tad unreasonable complaining that their app got pulled and banned "without warning" for commercial use of a celebrity's image.
"I didn't break the law that bad, why was I punished so severely!" is exceptionally immature.
He did not since he mention it was a mistake. The quotes around huge convey the meaning that he admits the error while finding the punishment disproportionate.
And if you bothered to read my reply to them before you rudely interjected, you would see that I shared that experience and consoled them over it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31434328
Believe me when I say that I wasn't "sealioning". I hadn't even heard of the word until today, which tells me you're either younger than I am, know the word, and look for opportunities to use it, or you're overly emotionally invested in what others have to say (hence the "touch grass"), or maybe you genuinely believed that to be the case.
FWIW, I hope your day turns out good too (saw the comment before the edit). I don't go looking for confrontations, far from it. I'm sure we'd get along, after all, we're on the same site looking at the same content.
There's no possibility of controlling the distribution channel anymore. Some think that web is it, but it isn't. Google Chrome is by far the majority browser, and all they have to do is decide that your website is unsafe:
Nothing is absolute. Even in absence of Google Chrome, you still have all cloud services and ISPs abiding by the laws of the country they operate in.
The point is how much control one has over the end to end distribution. My own website could potentially receive a DMCA take-down, but I can just take down the offending content and continue with my life. In case of Google Chrome, I can't recall the last time I came across such a warning and I surf all over the place, hosting all kind of crap. So it's very unlikely.
I work on a cross-platform App used by millions of of people and one day during event that runs on our App google blacklisted out domain as phishing (for all of chromes) because we had too many dots url in the url and too many requests coming into the service to quickly.
So even IF you DO get past the ban-hammer, there is always another ban-hammer just round the corner if you app gets too much traction.
Google is great until you get caught in the web of censorship.
Apple is great on the surface but a hot-mess of bugs under the hood.
Devs at chrome seem more compentant then the devs who work who on webkit. Both just serve to reinforce parent companies positions. The APIs that the parent companies use, most of the time, the rest of the APIs, its anyones guess when they will break release to release.
> you still have all cloud services and ISPs abiding by the laws of the country they operate in.
Those typically have due process and transparency. Google has neither.
> In case of Google Chrome, I can't recall the last time I came across such a warning and I surf all over the place, hosting all kind of crap. So it's very unlikely.
I'm not sure how common it is for chrome to mark whole websites, but they do like to warn on executable downloads that are flagged by crappy artificial stupidity anti-virus vendors who have no incentive to reduce false positives. And by warn I mean that Chrome (and other browsers that let Google gatekeep the web, which is most of them including FF) refuses to download the file and makes it obfucated enough to override that decision that many users think they can't download the file.
Google has been moving in the direction of exercising ever greater control over the web. These little Chrome features aimed at "protecting users" are just parts of it. They control discovery (Google Search), the infrastructure (Google Cloud), the client (Google Chrome), and a very common support channel (Gmail).
The fact that those are theoretically not absolute (some people use Bing, hosting can be on AWS, and Firefox still exists) is beside the point.
In practice, almost any business is damaged to the point of being unsustainable if Google cuts them off.
I'm finding it extremely difficult to have any sympathy for someone who used a celebrity's image for commercial purposes instead of buying some stock photo or hiring a photographer friend and a model.
You're lucky you weren't sued into the ground for damages.
It was a free app with no advertising, so it was not used in a commercial context.
> I'm finding it extremely difficult to have any sympathy
People have sympathy for much worse things - you should perhaps work on your sympathy. Here's something to help you: the person wasn't a business owner for decades and just wanted to help others with similar issues, hence spending dozens of hours of his personal time to build an app to share for free.
I realized I never donated. Usually I do this after using an app for a bit. For whatever it's worth, I feel bad so I will do this now still. If you are in the same situation as me:
I loved netguard, I donated 20 euros a couple of years ago and was thinking of donating again :(
Really pissed at Google at the moment. It's frustrating when one of the main reason I'm still on Android stops development because of the short sighted corrupted practices of a behemoth like Google.
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[ 0.38 ms ] story [ 302 ms ] threadIt still works great even if there is no further development. I much prefer it to the K-9 email client.
The main thing I love is that it blocks all images by default whilst still keeping the email readable.
Maybe in this case, Google didn't act in bad faith, but having such a system in place has a method.
It's something every developer should have in mind before deciding to develop anything on Google platform.
And there is no alternative, that is the monopoly.
> If the app can't be in the Play store anymore, there is no point in continuing supporting this app because about 99% of the users download the app from the Play store.
And some more context:
--- Begin quote ---
The balance
The few euros I receive in return for what's being offered and the fun of developing things are no compensation for the thousands of questions I answer every month, for unfair Play store reviews and for stress about unclear Google requirements.
The verdict
I have not reached a conclusion yet, but the question I am asking myself is why I would continue with the project. Maybe it is the moment, with a sick girlfriend, but I currently don't see it.
Alternatives
GitHub only version: 98% of the audience will be lost.
Strip down the app: more bad reviews
Paid support: more bad reviews
Stop answering questions: more bad reviews
Bad reviews will shift the balance only in the wrong direction.
Core problem
Google. There is no sensible way to appeal in case of bad reviews or alleged violations of Play store policies.
People. They are generally pretty demanding and on the other hand everything should be free.
Myself. An old and grumpy developer, who maybe should retired.
Input is welcome.
--- End quote ---
I can certainly understand the reasons behind simply abandoning ship at this point. If it's not worth it, it's not worth it.
My only hope now is that Thunderbird on Android will approach the quality without adding any heinous anti-features.
From what I've seen from comments of supporters on patreon, the community tends to be much nicer to the dev than typical forums. It's always strange to me that people who don't want to pay tend to be the worst when it comes to support and politeness.
I would say that it is rather that only a small fraction of people pay, and those are usually the most satisfied users anyway to be willing to pay for the additionnal features. The platform has little to do with it.
And once you help them, they're not necessarily going to donate either or try to help in any way (a big percentage of those problematic users have the mentality of not paying for software ever). So filtering support to only supporters is a good way to stay sane as a developer and stop dealing with negativity.
Then, secondly, when their automation gets it wrong, or there is some misunderstanding over something, there's no ability for the developer to actually have any kind of meaningful or substantive discussion - if you can't work out what the issue is, based on their incredibly high level description, you're out of luck, as you won't get any meaningful intelligent or personal response from anyone - expect templated, automated emails that are not in any way addressing the message you sent.
Even more difficult to test this given Google continues to violate their obligation for transparency.
I have donated to this app and I am genuinely happy with Marcel's efforts to add features. Users aren't always the problem.
On the other hand you don't need to put your app there, except for maybe if you want to attract some users./s
This is certainly not "shipping people's contact lists off to a third party". Is there somewhere else this is happening or are you mistaken?
I'd go so far as to suggest that app developers are de facto employees, on that note: a recent ruling in the UK against Uber suggests that those who rely on such platforms are entitled to protections. I'd suggest that could apply here, too.
Google is wrong here, but so is this suggestion. Nothing about publishing on an app store fits the definition of an employee.
They lived long enough to see themselves become a villain.
Lastly, HN has been successfully used for contacting Google support in the past, so this also increases the number of posts.
Sure, but the things that Google does to make some of their users unhappy and the total lack of recourse Google makes available to them are decidedly far from perfect. That some people are going to be unhappy no matter what is beside the point.
Or at all, relatively. It can take only one heavy impact issue and the public will not care how large any of the numbers are and well things generally go (or, conversely, how poorly, i.e. coal power). Of course with a company at Google scale, there is gonna be a lot more than just one heavy impact issue in no time, and any human only has to really conflict with one of them to be thrown for a loop.
People are just really bad with big numbers and very empathetic with individual cases. The later is actually a really cool feature in humans, but it is an issue when it conflicts with the former.
That is all not to say that Google is doing right, here or in any other set of cases. You decide. I just noticed that the way people arrive at their judgement often suffers from the aforementioned dynamics.
This is what happens when you are a monopoly and there are no competitiors in your space. To simply stop caring about being good.
And, of course, because they're so huge, any problem that affects a "tiny fraction" of their user base affects a whole lot of people.
They have the resources to not have these problems. That's the bit that should be leading to barbarians at the gates, but, isn't.
I'm not sure they do have the resources. We're talking about companies with a user base larger than literally any country on Earth.
The basic problem is that these companies are taking on problems that nobody should ever take on. "Mass curation" is not a problem that can be solved by anyone, and not a thing that should be attempted by anyone. This is why we need personal freedom and not global gatekeepers.
And you have to pay to join the store.
What value exactly would you specify for X? And how many apps in Google Play have at least X thousand users?
And this isn't about a deep check for every single update, this is about deeper checking in case of blocks and bans, which happen at a much slower rate.
By definition, those are the most impactful decisions.
And "this impacts a lot of people so be careful" is the mildest and least problematic kind of "special treatment".
Besides, the small decisions are collectively impactful too. Take 3 million apps, and add up all of their users. Multiple smaller apps may collectively have more users than 1 larger app.
It feels like giving special treatment to more famous apps is just a strategy for Google or Apple to avoid bad press, without making their stores much better.
That's what they do now. I'm suggesting a massive expansion on what apps they treat better, because 'famous' is a very small group.
And I'm not saying they shouldn't treat all apps well. It's just that it's less clear how much that would cost.
What's clear right now is that they aren't even trying.
Also we probably shouldn't have 3 million apps to start with. I bet a lot of those are below even the lowest reasonable quality bar.
Just tried reporting a bug on Android Auto and the submit button is disabled with no error message or tooltip.
I guess their model is to do stuff for "free", don't really provide any useful customer support and keep your costs down. If people don't like it, they are in the wrong and are free to go elsewhere.
Eventually "free" loses its value when everything else is done so badly.
If you are a false positive for Google bots, then you're toast.
Your ad income will vanish, you app will be forgotten and even your very email and associated data underneath is on the brink of lifetime ban.
This is the very essence of Google. If you are big enough as Google, you can swing a huge f* you gesture to the whole world of software developers.
"Don't be evil" - yeah right.
The very first thing Google makes use of their fat cutting-edge language models is banning ordinary people from the whole ecosystem for their tiniest fixable mistakes.
Google scales evil before they scale good. Always have been, always will be.
We as little software developers don't have any significant resource to sue the hell out of Google and they can get away with this pure evil every single day.
Props for keeping up the apk though. For everyone using the app I hope it'll live on as fork.
I'd find it more appropriate if the (current)top-comment doesn't casually criticize some simple looks of the app as if nothing. I mean if somebody's drowning right now next to me, I don't want to hear commentary about how shitty her/his shoes look like. Well, you didn't choose to be top-comment right now for everybody to see this like on a silver plate, but to everybody else... In real life I'd suggest: maybe discuss this on some other day.
Edit: Not top-comment anymore.
But saying that "annoying" is a very cold understated way of describing Google's actions.
I'm in awe of the work this guy has put in. Google I would hope amongst their developers would recognise that this is an important useful project.
The developer himself it appears could handle the negative comments but they clearly ground him down [1]:
> The few euros I receive in return for what's being offered and the fun of developing things are no compensation for the thousands of questions I answer every month, for unfair Play store reviews and for stress about unclear Google requirements.
Note: the stress comes from the unclear Google requirements.
If you do have any access to the Play Store (you're one degree of separation closer at least) then please ask them to find out what's going wrong.
FairMail is a really good app.
He may have other sources of stress in his life, but those don't mitigate Google's ownership of killing the app.
"If the app can't be in the Play store anymore, there is no point in continuing supporting this app because about 99% of the users download the app from the Play store."
So your employer is the _main reason_ this guy is giving up.
Also you defending your employer in this thread, given the context, is highly insensitive. Makes you look bad, that's why you're getting downvoted.
You should have not commented this, or even better, you should switch to a company that doesn't suck!
They're not annoying, this is stepping on little people just because you can. It's malicious because the process (i.e. Google as an entity and everyone relevant inside of it) does not care, and quite honestly by trying to go online and saying it is okay you make it worse: Any decision maker is going to see folks condoning it and think "can I go a little bit further next time?". That's how we got to this point in the first place.
Notice, the author didn’t say “I will make my apps available for sideloading”
I have removed all my apps from the Play store and I will stop supporting and maintaining my apps. Google won.
If sideloading were such a great alternative for Android, why aren’t most app makers doing it and avoiding Google’s restrictions and 30% cut?
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32...
It seems like this whole situation and fiasco could be avoided if Google didn't try to automate compliance violations that frequently don't give any information about the violation, then provide no actual ability to have a discussion which leads to clarification or information flow outward.
This legislation is a starting point, but if Google and others flout it, it won't achieve anything. Hopefully someone looks at a way to bring an action against Google under it, and bring some change in how developers are treated.
I find I sympathise a lot with both narratives about app stores: it does seem that big mistakes are made and sometimes it seems apps are removed anti competitively but it also seems that there are a lot of apps that are basically malware already and forcing app stores to remove fewer apps would lead to more of it.
Because they have businesses that scale: dominated by fixed costs with very small unit costs, where twice as many units have very much less than twice as much total cost to deliver.
> "But that doesn't scale", I hear you say. They could simply hire more people, that scales fine.
No, it doesn't. Hiring more people with any given skill set has superlinear costs very quickly (because of supervision heirarchies and increased quantity even before that increasing the clearing price).
Cost scaling worse than linearly is pretty much what people mean when they say, “Doesn’t scale".
You can't talk to reviewers on the phone.
No, they do not.
> If you have a question about your app's review, send us a message in Resolution Center. If you would prefer to speak over the phone, just let us know in your message, and we'll schedule a call.
- you're not talking to a reviewer or engineer unless you are a high tier dev. Bulks of devs could get standard customer support just hearing their grievances out, the same way emails get canned responses.
- devs don't all get access to the same resources or attention from Apple, and your support tier will largely depend on your revenue. I wouldn't expect a long tail app to get much attention.
Externalizing the costs and internalizing the profits is basically theft from society.
Other examples of externalizing costs and internalizing profits are companies like tobacco companies and drug dealers externalizing the costs of the diseases their products produce (both costs to the direct customers, their families and economy at large form lost productive capacity) while they take the profits of the addictions they produce, and fossil fuel companies externalizing the costs of destroying the climate while internalizing the profits from those dependent on the form of energy they provide.
Just because a business model 'works', for the definition of maintains a profit, does not mean that it should be allowed. For an extreme and easily understood example, if society tolerated murder, then murder-for-hire services could become quite sustainably profitable, and probably scalable (especially by applying technology to the Slaughterbot model) as many people would like to eliminate other inconvenient people. That does not mean we should allow it.
Perhaps, but “it scales” and “it ought to be required even though it does not scale” are not merely different arguments, but different classes of argument (the former factual, the latter moral/ethical.)
The question is the constraints that are applied, and they all overlap.
There is no such thing as a "free market". Every market has constraints ranging from what is physically possible (available materials, transit time, storage space, spoilage, etc.++) to market constraints (what people are interested in making or buying), market conditions (buyers' or sellers' market for what goods/services), and either implied or explicit legal and/or moral constraints.
No market is simply free other than the physical constraints. Every market expects certain standards of buyers and sellers, although those can vary wildly, but the extreme of [don't give your buyer the goods, just kill him and take his money] or [don't pay the seller, just kill him and take the goods] is not tolerated.
The question here is what standards should be required.
I also not here that writing about it, while it is not murdering people, Google is certainly taking the position that it is perfectly OK to murder a customer's business for it's own convenience. Just because that process scales does not mean it should be tolerated.
Moreover, considering the scale of Google's valuation and free cash, I have no question that they could scale up a reasonable level of service so that they are not literally in the business of killing their customers.
The developer in question is based in Europe.
The problem is that an inherent imbalance in scale means you have no effective or proportionate recourse when Google break this law. This legislation requires meaningful human interaction with developers, but as many in this thread have observed, developers can't access a human, only automated processes.
That would be costly for Google and wouldn't easily scale, so clearly they don't choose to follow this law. Trouble is that laws are meaningless without enforcement, and someone to advance that enforcement on behalf of the smaller party.
Open Source: this is the way.
Particularly the link dialog is nice and helps avoid tracking or accidental taps sometimes.
[0] https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/issues/655
(it was added to the milestone 17 days ago, but also updated today after the Fairemail news)
It's sad to see that the Dev is stopping work on it because they seemed quite passionate and responsive.
I paid for the pro version to support the app and usually install it from F-Droid but I guess losing the exposure of the play store is a huge blow.
There is no replacement, at the moment.
(I lack any knowledge about Android development, so I'm out. ^^)
ref: https://www.reddit.com/r/fossdroid/comments/utz6dr/alternati...
I am very disappointed to hear this news.
Disgraceful. What kind of mentality a person has to have to take money from the biggest spyware vendor and mark others' work as spyware? Or even allow automated systems, built by spyware vendor, to slap a "spyware" label on anything?
I’m kind of inclined to give MS the benefit here.
I’ll stick with my assertion that Google collects 1-3 orders of magnitude more data than Microsoft.
Microsoft is a the world's largest spyware vendor because Google gives their spyware away for free.
I'm sick of buying especially software and soon as the developers is bored or won't get rich they abandon it ot Jack up the price.
I think using Apple as the reference here is the wrong kind of baseline shift.
I recently had an app pulled from Google about a month after its latest update (the app has been in the store for years) b/c I hadn't checked some new privacy box in the UI. I received no warning prior to the take down or when I last submitted, and the take down message didn't even point me in the UI where I could check this box. After searching SO, I was able to track it down. Then the app was rejected for an unrelated reason that required an appeal. I appealed and they simply stated rejection again. I appealed again asking if they actually read the original appeal and received no response. A week or so later the app was back live - and I only knew because I checked.
I have almost as many apps sideloaded in my phone as apps from Google's play store.
I'm freshly frustrated because I'm dealing with a random metadata rejection (on an "internal testing" build! nothing has changed!) just now.
Play Store rejections are either an algorithmic mystery or reviewer incompetence. I don't mean reviewer incompetence in using the (maybe unintuitive) app. I mean their internal review UI had some kind of unrelated error and they sent me a screenshot of that. Their own console UI even sort of urges you to just resubmit with a potentially meaningless change instead of opening an appeal / request. Feels like it's the worst of both automatic and human review.
You're lucky. I've asked them such questions. Most of the time they refuse to respond. Even if they do, there's a good chance you'll get a different reviewer for your next update with a completely different opinion and interpretation of The Guidelines.
Apple allows none of that. As a hobbyist I find Google to be much more reasonable, paying 25$ once vs 100$ a year for a dev account.
Getting my Apple dev account was such a horrible process, I had to talk to at least 6 people and it took months.
I'll just pay Cook's ransom, guess I have motivation to develop something new if only to justify the dev fee.
That's not really an alternative as only a few nerds will jump through these hoops. The app is as good as dead if you are not in the stores.
Of course not nearly as much, but discoverability in the Play Store is already a mess.
Hell, you can point them to a GitHub artifacts page.
At least it's an option.
The reasonable thing would have been to send a warning asking to change the damn screenshot, which would have taken me literally 10 second to do.
No more app development for me, not unless I control the distribution channel.
What about something like F-Droid? F-Droid users can even add new repos to source apps from if you don't want to submit it to wherever F-Droid sources from by default.
That said, the culture around smartphones unfortunately was poisoned from the beginning so that normal users are suspicious of anything that doesn't come from the "official" corporate app stores, unlike PCs where they'll download just about anything on the internet, so I do sympathize with swearing off app development.
Google has that covered too with their "Google Safe Browsing" crap.
"I didn't break the law that bad, why was I punished so severely!" is exceptionally immature.
It's only commercial use if I made any sort of profit from it, which I didn't. So nope, not commercial.
Touch grass.
Jumping down the throats of others is a negative trait, but I'm not going to call you names or tell you how to be because I'm not a control freak.
I posted this earlier today too around the same time: https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/app-5-0-fairemail-fully-f...
Believe me when I say that I wasn't "sealioning". I hadn't even heard of the word until today, which tells me you're either younger than I am, know the word, and look for opportunities to use it, or you're overly emotionally invested in what others have to say (hence the "touch grass"), or maybe you genuinely believed that to be the case.
FWIW, I hope your day turns out good too (saw the comment before the edit). I don't go looking for confrontations, far from it. I'm sure we'd get along, after all, we're on the same site looking at the same content.
Stay healthy and happy.
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/99020
Sure, users could choose to proceed if they know they want to, but the likely outcome is that you will lose 95% of them.
The point is how much control one has over the end to end distribution. My own website could potentially receive a DMCA take-down, but I can just take down the offending content and continue with my life. In case of Google Chrome, I can't recall the last time I came across such a warning and I surf all over the place, hosting all kind of crap. So it's very unlikely.
So even IF you DO get past the ban-hammer, there is always another ban-hammer just round the corner if you app gets too much traction.
Google is great until you get caught in the web of censorship. Apple is great on the surface but a hot-mess of bugs under the hood.
Devs at chrome seem more compentant then the devs who work who on webkit. Both just serve to reinforce parent companies positions. The APIs that the parent companies use, most of the time, the rest of the APIs, its anyones guess when they will break release to release.
Those typically have due process and transparency. Google has neither.
> In case of Google Chrome, I can't recall the last time I came across such a warning and I surf all over the place, hosting all kind of crap. So it's very unlikely.
I'm not sure how common it is for chrome to mark whole websites, but they do like to warn on executable downloads that are flagged by crappy artificial stupidity anti-virus vendors who have no incentive to reduce false positives. And by warn I mean that Chrome (and other browsers that let Google gatekeep the web, which is most of them including FF) refuses to download the file and makes it obfucated enough to override that decision that many users think they can't download the file.
Example: http://dege.freeweb.hu/
The fact that those are theoretically not absolute (some people use Bing, hosting can be on AWS, and Firefox still exists) is beside the point.
In practice, almost any business is damaged to the point of being unsustainable if Google cuts them off.
You're lucky you weren't sued into the ground for damages.
It was a free app with no advertising, so it was not used in a commercial context.
> I'm finding it extremely difficult to have any sympathy
People have sympathy for much worse things - you should perhaps work on your sympathy. Here's something to help you: the person wasn't a business owner for decades and just wanted to help others with similar issues, hence spending dozens of hours of his personal time to build an app to share for free.
https://email.faircode.eu/donate/
IBAN DE31 1001 1001 2620 6925 85 - name Marcel Bokhorst - description FairEmail
Really pissed at Google at the moment. It's frustrating when one of the main reason I'm still on Android stops development because of the short sighted corrupted practices of a behemoth like Google.