20 people is just a start. I expect it to ramp up and effectively lock out indie developers. This alone would've prevented stuff like Flappy Bird from ever being published.
What if I want to program in Java, not JavaScript? What if I don't want to learn how to work with PWA and instead just want have an easily offline-accessible app? What if I wanted to add in-app purchases?
There's plenty of reasons for apps like Flappy Bird to be on the store.
What if I need to program in Java, not JavaScript (because it is a requirement of the project)? What if I need it to not be PWA (because some of the libraries are native-only)? What if I need to add in-app purchases (because it is our business model)?
Does changing "want to" "need to" make a difference? It shouldn't.
I've had issues with my camera manufacturer's app for syncing photos on Android for years, so I finally built a super lightweight replacement which is faster and more reliable.[0] I used it for a year or so before finally going through the hassle of publishing it to the Play Store.
The app has a very limited audience. In the first month, I've had approximately 28 purchases. If I had to find 20 people to use the app for a couple weeks before I could publish, it wouldn't have been published.
The other question that has come up, is what happens when one of the 20 testers has their account banned? Is the guilt-by-association thing going to apply; would the developer account also get shut down?
Yeah, this is really arbitrary, when I first got started in mobile apps I had one or two users to start with, I didn't know anyone who would help, it was really specialised as it was, catering to a niche market, I just had an idea and I could publish it (to apple in my case).
It didn't do well, but I still sell copies every month, and getting an app on a store considerably improved job prospects after a somewhat drastic change in career direction.
As the article says, it’s likely that the devs who previously would test their apps prior to release had higher quality apps just because they were experienced and skilled devs, not because of an arbitrary number of people testing the app for an arbitrary length of time.
If Google would want to get rid of shovelware on the Play Store, they know what to do - (edit: better) automated + human reviews, like Apple. That would be what would nip shovelware in the bud.
But they’re just trying to outsource the cost of that. It feels like one of those Google initiatives that was started by someone who cared, then got watered down to the point of counter-productivity by MBA logic.
They do have automated + manual reviews. I think the $99/yr developer account is what separates Google from Apple here, along with much stricter policy enforcement on the Apple side.
I have to think that $99 a year keeps away a lot of people who aren’t serious, and maybe even discourages various scams and schemes that depend on flooding platforms with apps scammers know will get rejected eventually in a whack-a-mole fashion.
If your account gets banned and you lose $99 before the scam paid off it’s not worth your time.
I think you underestimate how much scamming pays. It’s much more than $99 per day, so unless Apple blocks the app immediately they’re still making money.
But not all crummy behavior, right? Things like ad-infested basic apps might be discouraged even with the $99. I am talking about apps like tip calculators, daily quote apps, and very basic games like slots that have no chance of being monetized well beyond ads.
What is discouraged is the solo devs making their first apps and the solo devs in poorer countries (but Apple lost those markets anyways). The scams and the useless apps have no problem paying a single 99$ bill.
They could hold funds for new unknown developers for 60 days for good behavior. During this time if you get banned they should seize the entire proceeds to refund to their users.
This would be great but in practice they'll just use third-party ad networks, which pay regardless of Apple's decision. It'll definitely break those pesky inflated subscriptions though.
How about $99 to register plus $10,000 fine + 100% of proceeds of perfidy + termination for certain misbehavior + mandatory presence of someone company or individual present in a country willing to enforce such a provision.
If you want it to really stick make them buy a bond against in such a jurisdiction. After one party has been burned for their 10k they'll find their former partner exceedingly aggressive in recovering their money and none willing to do business.
Furthermore most of such abusive behavior is trivially recognizable based on dollar figures involved, behavior, organic reviews, complaints. In this day and age there isn't much excuse for a trillion dollar company not to have automated 99% of the situation and employ labor to handle the rest.
Can companies actually enforce "fines"? The closest I can think of would be a "breach of contract" penalty, but you'd still have to go to court of file small claims for that. I don't see Apple getting into any of that to improve the quality of the App Store.
There are multimillion dollar scams on the App Store[1]:
> That man’s name is Kosta Eleftheriou, and over the past few months, he’s made a convincing case that Apple is either uninterested or incompetent at stopping multimillion-dollar scams in its own App Store. He’s repeatedly found scam apps that prey on ordinary iPhone and iPad owners by luring them into a “free trial” of an app with seemingly thousands of fake 5-star reviews, only to charge them outrageous sums of money for a recurring subscription that many don’t understand how to cancel. “It’s a situation that most communities are blind to because of how Apple is essentially brainwashing people into believing the App Store is a trusted place,” he tells The Verge.
I didn’t know Google reviewed apps manually as well. I thought it was all automated as I’ve not heard of an app not passing. There are even some people who have spoken about automating making and publishing shovelware apps for a time.
It takes a bit of effort even to get an app on public TestFlight on Apple’s side. Plus the fee, which is reasonable for a thorough review.
Anyways, I edited my comment to not misrepresent the Play Store process, thanks.
It's mostly automated but then you will get someone every so often that holds up your release, can only speak by quoting the guidelines, make you decipher their cryptic quote, just to find out that it's about some rule change from six months ago you missed in an email.
It's even more fun when it's a purely administrative thing like updating information in a link on your developer profile, but they make you upload a near identical binary, since the automation has kicked in again and they can't rereview an already submitted and rejected app.
I can assure you, Google does have people review apps.
Our app gets held up fairly regularly, I'm not sure why us in particular, but we have an app that requires our licensed service to use, quite often they'll muck up the registration process with the test accounts we provide (they're one-time) registration, and then hold up our app until we provide more test accounts for them to use.
They also recently took issue with some functionality of our app that they claim existed (but doesn't) and forced us to update our privacy policy to mention it so we can get it through. I know for a fact, said functionality doesn't exist, because I lead the team that builds the backend, but there was just no arguing with them.
I don't really understand how this could stop shovelware. Shovelware devs have the bandwidth to get something tested on 20 devices. This would only stop one man passion projects.
I wonder if its just a way to sell a cloud build and testing service.
At the moment, you can. I have two accounts (by mistake). However, I'm not sure what the purpose of keeping 2 accounts active simultaneously is ... if one is banned, the other will be too (so there is no point in safety by numbers).
In order for this progressive taxing scheme to work they would have to make sure each personal account is unique per person, and they are already increasing the requirements to verify your identification (all Android devs have to verify this information soon).
To get rid of shovelware, Google should just add a search filter that allows filtering for "No In-App Purchases" and "Doesnt show ads" plus a "Costs money (no subscription)". But something tells me thats only good for the user, not the business.
It is so bad that in the official play store app ads potentially for competitors or irrelevant apps will appear before the item even when you search for the entire name of the app. This means that devs are incentivized to buy ads for their own name lest their competitor be listed first and if they don't you might well download malware.
On net the play store is 100% useless because of ads and poor search. The only way to adequately search for apps is by using an actual search engine, even googles, in your mobile browser to find apps and then using the play store solely for installation.
The play store is a product so bad if it wasn't required to install software it would have no users. It is the windows ME of google's product lines. It is so bad that Google ought to be embarrassed to show it off in public.
That will filter out a lot of high quality apps made by single person dev teams that include the option for users to support them through in-app purchases.
That would effectively make it impossible for single/small dev teams to justify making apps for the Play store.
And I don't see why filter paid apps would solve anything. The aversion of the average Play store user to spending money on anything is in part the reason we are in this mess.
12 continuous years working as an Android developer and I've never bothered to personally release an app on the Play store. There is nothing to be gained from it except needing to support it without any hope of making back the cost of developing it.
Ads, I however agree with, are the bane of our time. Except, due to the aversion to paying for apps, it has become the only way small dev teams can make a living.
The change needs to happen on the consumer side for this one. Buy the apps that you enjoy using.
You just need to change your filter rule such that a single iap to upgrade from free to premium version, can be considered similar to a paid app with no iap.
“One person team” is a fairly common phrased to describe such a situation I believe. The “team” is the group of developers responsible for something, which may sometimes only contain one person.
You're technically correct, which, as we know, is the best (/s) kind of correct.
What matters is actual usage, and while "one person team" does grate on me somewhat, it's in wide usage, and it's understood what it means. So, "sorry, not sorry", but you're wrong.
Words mean whatever the standard usage of them is. You can’t just declare a word to have a certain meaning. This is not my opinion - this is what scholars of language believe about language. The meaning of words changes over time as society finds other uses for them.
I think you just argued that we should go back to shareware. Free to download and then a one-time payment to unlock all functionality. That's also easy to support officially in the store and it's easy to add a filter for.
The problem with allowing IAP to be used for a shareware-like unlock is that there's nothing stopping shady developers from forcing a subscription on you later even though you already paid now. Forgot which one that was, but this kind of double dipping recently happened to a popular baby monitor.
To be fair, even if the payment is IAP, the publisher can still attempt double dipping, by first unpublishing the original app (which to be fair, while user-hostile, has the benefit that they don't have to bother supporting different/new hardware)
Partner wanted to play all the time. I discovered the videos ads were using up all of my prepaid data before the end of each month. I bought the premium version, which was a one-time purchase "back then".
They launched an app revision that had a handful of very noticeable bugs. Then they changed to a new app (rather than upgrade), pushed all the users to the new app, and made the ad-free version a subscription. What do you get for your monthly payment? Well, nothing significant, like you'd expect from a subscription.
In fact, they essentially crowd-sourced their Q&A content by letting users submit feedback when a pair was inaccurate, so users are fixing problems in the content for free.
Server usage?
Not to minimize the daily work of countless devs, but a quiz game is essentially a handful of databases, a dollop of quite straightforward logic, some static UI visuals, and then content scraping to fill the main Q&A database. The logic and UI visuals almost never need a rewrite. DynamoDB is pennies per month per user, and if you're a real POS you can use long advertisements to push away users temporarily when your RCUs/WCUs are getting close to a scale-up threshold, which has the nice side effect of increasing revenue if everyone watches the long adverts anyway.
I guess they expected a percentage of users to bail switching to subscription, and that doesn't cost them a cent. You said it best: shady
That's how drawing apps like Concept and Infinite Painter are priced. Free download, no sign up, several good features in the basic version.
There are IAPs to unlock brushes and other things, and a small fee to buy everything. I believe I paid $15 one-time to get everything for Infinite Painter.
I'm not bothering to make open source apps for Android because they'll be inevitably flooded out by 1000 ad- and microtransaction-infested variants, and I'm not even allowed to distinguish myself from them with my primary feature, "free of that garbage" (IIRC you can't even mention it in the app description, definitely not in the name).
There are enough people happy to just make and maintain a cool thing, but I can't find their work.
I hate "this!" comments, but F-Droid is the thing that keeps me an Android user and makes me a die-hard proponent of alternative app stores (and why I'd use an iPhone if I could get something like F-Droid (with Termux) on it). Even phones with no other app store can install F-Droid, and it has enough good software that I can do most everything I need with only F-Droid.
- FFUpdater for installing browsers (Mull on my phone, Brave on my tablet because keyboard support)
- Termux for all my CLI work
- KeepassDX for passwords
- Syncthing for syncing
- Etar for calendaring
- VLC for media
- Kore to control my media center
- RCX for running local webdav servers (good for hosting Tiddlywiki and FeatherWiki locally on-device with WebDAV-based saving)
- Tiddloid for notetaking when I'm not using RCX instead
- Conversations for XMPP chat with family/friends
- KOReader for ebooks
- MullvadVPN for ... VPN
- OsmAnd~ for mapping, including offline maps
- "Puzzles" and Unciv for gaming
- Trail Sense for navigation/survival
I know this is a laundry list, but my point is that it's a trove of exactly the sort software I like to develop and use. Thanks for mentioning it!
You might like to know that RCX has a new, maintained fork in RoundSync [0].
If you're just running it as a local webdav server, you can just stick with the current version. But if you also use it for the more typical rclone tasks (keeping cloud storage synchronised), RoundSync is updated and fixes some things that were missing in RCX, like cronjobs.
I've considered it, but I'm not sure if the audience size is worth it and the store used to be so broken that I don't know if it wouldn't be even more frustrating to work with them than it is to work with Google Play.
In particular, I've consistently heard that it takes them forever to update app versions. At least https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/-/issues/2316 seems to be fixed now - it used to require user interaction for each update, which doesn't work when you have dozens of apps (and updating from the notification also had some kind of bug requiring extra manual steps).
Maybe I should give them another try, how is the developer experience nowadays?
It feels like an IAP would be more fitting than an entirely separate app, though -- it'd be a shame to require a new listing just to work around this filtering.
Maybe static analysis could determine whether the IAP unlocked a new feature/functionality or not, feeling into the labelling/filtering?
The developer now has two apps on the play store, still with no paying customers for either of them. The aversion to paying for quality is still present.
Thanks to sandboxing, the paid version would not be able to access data created by the free version, when trialing.
To avoid this problem in the past, authors offered the free version, and then paid unlock as a separate app package. So you could continue to use the original application you trialed, and the unlock package would turn it into the full version.
Unfortunately, this stopped when in-app purchases appeared.
Integrating ads with your app isn't merely trying to manipulate your users in a way that is liable to exploit, harm, disadvantage, or oppose their interests. It is virtually certainly compromising their privacy in a fashion that isn't immediately obvious and opening up a security hole that may be used to harm them further.
The first and most obvious clue that what you are considering is wrong is the fact that you are admitting that if people were presented with a choice they would overwhelmingly opt out of such a system so pervasively that there wouldn't be any money in it at all.
> That would effectively make it impossible for single/small dev teams to justify making apps for the Play store.
This is an inversion of priorities. The dev's profession exits to create useful things for users. The users don't exist to enable the devs profession. If the only way an app can come into existence is through the exploitation and disadvantage of its users then the world would be better off if it didn't exist.
And lo there is another way an app can come into existence: through paying users. Which they don't. The users prefer to pay with their "exploitation" so we have today what we all (as a society) requested.
To me it’s kind of wild we call such products “free”. Like YouTube claims to be free, but it’s ToS prohibit use unless the user pays with their headspace and attention to ads (and really awful ones to boot). If you use an ad blocker and refuse to pay, it will now tell you you’re not allowed to use it. So it’s “free”, but you need to pay to use it. And they will try to enforce it. But don’t overthink it, and repeat after me - “it’s free™” (so long as the dues are paid)
Convincing everyone that content online is free while taking payment for it is one of the greatest sleights of hand of the century. That kind of thing used to be called a con.
> This is an inversion of priorities. The dev's profession exits to create useful things for users. The users don't exist to enable the devs profession. If the only way an app can come into existence is through the exploitation and disadvantage of its users then the world would be better off if it didn't exist.
If that seems hard to chew on try this on for size. Food doesn't exist to demonstrate the art of the chef. Without someone to eat it becomes rot. This doesn't degrade the chef nor his art it defines it.
> 12 continuous years working as an Android developer and I've never bothered to personally release an app on the Play store. There is nothing to be gained from it except needing to support it without any hope of making back the cost of developing it.
As a high schooler it was pretty cool to publish a small game onto the play store and have friends download it from there.
> That will filter out a lot of high quality apps made by single person dev teams
Maybe.
On the other hand, when I see an app that includes ads or in-app purchases, I assume it's a low-quality app by default. Such a filter would be useful to me and wouldn't change my selection process. It would make it much less onerous over having to "manually" filter those apps out (which would make the app store much more useful to me).
I prefer apps that just charge me up front rather than use in-app purchases or ads.
> And I don't see why filter paid apps would solve anything. The aversion of the average Play store user to spending money on anything is in part the reason we are in this mess
If people can find apps that meet their needs which are also free, and free of ads and in-app purchases they should absolutely use those apps. Making it harder for users to find those apps is a much bigger problem than "but I wanted someone to pay me for giving them the same thing!"
The solution for people who want money is to make apps that offer valuable features the free apps don't have, not to make the free apps impossible to find because they're scared they can't compete.
I would challenge that. iOS Appstore is way more known to charge for apps and have less IAP/Ad financed App. Also, good examples are Steam or other Game Stores - but in order for that to work, you need a refund policy (i.e. have a 30minutes refund period). For Apps with one-time use that can't have a return policy, there could be separate indicators/warnings during purchase.
It was better when apps had a fixed price like in the early 2010s. At some point it was decided that subscription apps were where the money was at, both for devs and for Apple who took a silent cut every month.
> "Without providing an exact timeframe, Google says that new developers with individual accounts (as opposed to new Organization accounts) will be required to test apps with 20 people or more for 2 weeks or longer before publishing to production"
> ... developers with newly created personal Play Console accounts will soon be required to test their apps with at least 20 people for a minimum of two weeks before applying for access to production.
Does this mean that a developer has to recruit 20 users through a special workflow, or the users will simply see that they are 'testers' for a new app?
You add their email addresses to a list of tester accounts, then they have to install the app via the Play Store. So yes, developers need to recruit users (well, Google accounts).
I cannot imagine any sane person coming up with this as a solution to any problem other than "it is too easy as an indie developer to make an app, solve a problem people have, and make it big in the world". Seriously whose ass did this idea get pulled from, and how can this be justified?
My guess is that 2 weeks and the usage pattern of 20 users gives Google enough data points to determine whether the app is just AI generated bot spam. Because I'm betting there's a lot of that at the moment.
Still seems like absurdly high bar for indie devs to clear.
Yeah this is just going to spawn a cottage industry on Fiverr with jobs for "20 people testing your Android app", it honestly reminds me of my county's bureaucrats needlessly adding hoops to a process (which is so they can collect bribes).
Even for a small company of up to 10 people, I doubt many have 20 testing user lying around ready and waiting. Either pay/recruit or everyone get their extended families
BRB, starting up AndroidAppDevTesting.io - faking test users to PlayStore-as-a-Service.
For just $29.95/month we will load your new app onto a fleet of 20 test Android devices and run your Appium or Selendroid test suites twice a day for 14 days.
I mean, it's kinda just BrowserStack or DeviceFarm and an Ansible script, right?
(I'd spend an evening or two setting up a landing page and duct taping that Ansible script onto my Stripe account, but I've got a personal policy of never ever trying to sell tools to developers...)
Developers are some of the worst customers you'll ever have the displeasure of experiencing. We are incredibly cheap and price sensitive, have literally zero ethics around reasonable usage (if they didn't want me to do it they should have stopped me), we're loud and obnoxious with strongly held opinions, think the world revolves around us and our pet issues, and will work tirelessly to make sure you make no money. We're the Karen's of the digital age.
This is a self-callout, I'm guilty of all of these.
I've been selling dev tools and libraries for decades, and all of that exists (it exists with non-dev customers as well), but none of it is so awful that it makes addressing that market undesirable.
Cute but surely those devices, accounts and IPs will all be banned, along with the developer who used the service? I wouldn't play around with my account like that personally.
I bought a t-mobile g1 the first android phone. At the time my school's wifi needed you to log in every time you joined the network. I wrote an app that logged you in automatically. Solved a need I had, I then put in in the app store for $0.99 and sold a few hundred.
I went to a small company career fair for the free lunch. When they saw I had an app in the app store, I had immediate interest and got an internship.
Wait what? So if you have a company, you don't need to test?
Edit: wow, that's how I'm reading it too. If you have a DUNS number, this will presumably not apply to you. So this isn't about quality, it's an anti-spam measure. Crazy.
Well there goes any hope I had of publishing to the Play Store. I don't know 20 people with an Android phone. What's the option here? Beg for random people to install your beta app?
There will be discords for fellow devs to install each other's apps and possibly companies to facilitate it for a fee (e.g., $3 per install + 50c per day of "testing"). Although, if testers have to be in the same market as where the app is to be sold, this could get a bit more expensive.
I wish this applied to existing apps I have to use at work which seem to be upgraded without any testing. Such gems as get an Android version upgrade and can't reinstall app; lose all location information on the app that provides maps of work to do; alerts stop working when graphics on the app are "improved". Sigh.
You guys know you can distribute your app outside Play Store right? Not saying that's a long term business plan for most, but if you are at the point you can't even get 20 people to install, world of mouth can clear at least this hurdle.
As for requirement itself, non-trivial apps that didn't get even this level of testing are likely to be quite broken. Will you really test on different form factors and Android versions / anticipate all user behavior? So I can see the case for protecting basic store reputation, in that anything you download is unlikely to crash right away or drain your battery etc.
What do you base this assumption on exactly? Back in the day I released my first app without even a physical Android device to countless happy users. In the enterprises I have professionally worked we didn't have 20 dedicated testers.
So glad I saw this on November 10 before the deadline. I quickly set up a Play Console account, verified my ID and set up a draft of my app to ensure I'd be in the clear.
Been working on an indie game for the last couple of years - would have been a huge pain trying to find 20 people with Android devices to meet this arbitrary threshold.
Hmm, this will probably create indie devs going around and begging people to test their apps. Finding 20 people is not easy if you are just one person having idea, skills to build the idea but not much else.
I cannot imagine using the play store or the apple store ever again. What hell. This is the true value of Android vs. iOS though: Google can do whatever corporate nonsense Google does, and I can live in my own parallel universe that works for me. Hopefully, Android stays open until other open alternatives emerge. But I think we have several more years before Google could feasibly pull back on AOSP even if they wanted to.
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[ 8.6 ms ] story [ 329 ms ] threadThere's plenty of reasons for apps like Flappy Bird to be on the store.
What if I need to program in Java, not JavaScript (because it is a requirement of the project)? What if I need it to not be PWA (because some of the libraries are native-only)? What if I need to add in-app purchases (because it is our business model)?
Does changing "want to" "need to" make a difference? It shouldn't.
The app has a very limited audience. In the first month, I've had approximately 28 purchases. If I had to find 20 people to use the app for a couple weeks before I could publish, it wouldn't have been published.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.johnmaguire...
It didn't do well, but I still sell copies every month, and getting an app on a store considerably improved job prospects after a somewhat drastic change in career direction.
This sucks.
If Google would want to get rid of shovelware on the Play Store, they know what to do - (edit: better) automated + human reviews, like Apple. That would be what would nip shovelware in the bud.
But they’re just trying to outsource the cost of that. It feels like one of those Google initiatives that was started by someone who cared, then got watered down to the point of counter-productivity by MBA logic.
If your account gets banned and you lose $99 before the scam paid off it’s not worth your time.
If you want it to really stick make them buy a bond against in such a jurisdiction. After one party has been burned for their 10k they'll find their former partner exceedingly aggressive in recovering their money and none willing to do business.
Furthermore most of such abusive behavior is trivially recognizable based on dollar figures involved, behavior, organic reviews, complaints. In this day and age there isn't much excuse for a trillion dollar company not to have automated 99% of the situation and employ labor to handle the rest.
> That man’s name is Kosta Eleftheriou, and over the past few months, he’s made a convincing case that Apple is either uninterested or incompetent at stopping multimillion-dollar scams in its own App Store. He’s repeatedly found scam apps that prey on ordinary iPhone and iPad owners by luring them into a “free trial” of an app with seemingly thousands of fake 5-star reviews, only to charge them outrageous sums of money for a recurring subscription that many don’t understand how to cancel. “It’s a situation that most communities are blind to because of how Apple is essentially brainwashing people into believing the App Store is a trusted place,” he tells The Verge.
The fee is nothing.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/8/22272849/apple-app-store-s...
It takes a bit of effort even to get an app on public TestFlight on Apple’s side. Plus the fee, which is reasonable for a thorough review.
Anyways, I edited my comment to not misrepresent the Play Store process, thanks.
It's even more fun when it's a purely administrative thing like updating information in a link on your developer profile, but they make you upload a near identical binary, since the automation has kicked in again and they can't rereview an already submitted and rejected app.
Our app gets held up fairly regularly, I'm not sure why us in particular, but we have an app that requires our licensed service to use, quite often they'll muck up the registration process with the test accounts we provide (they're one-time) registration, and then hold up our app until we provide more test accounts for them to use.
They also recently took issue with some functionality of our app that they claim existed (but doesn't) and forced us to update our privacy policy to mention it so we can get it through. I know for a fact, said functionality doesn't exist, because I lead the team that builds the backend, but there was just no arguing with them.
I wonder if its just a way to sell a cloud build and testing service.
They could also do something like a progressive tax, like per year (USD), based on apps submitted:
1 free; 2-5 apps $20 each; 6-10 apps $40 each; 10+ apps $100 each
Nobody is putting out 10 high quality apps per year ;)
In order for this progressive taxing scheme to work they would have to make sure each personal account is unique per person, and they are already increasing the requirements to verify your identification (all Android devs have to verify this information soon).
On net the play store is 100% useless because of ads and poor search. The only way to adequately search for apps is by using an actual search engine, even googles, in your mobile browser to find apps and then using the play store solely for installation.
The play store is a product so bad if it wasn't required to install software it would have no users. It is the windows ME of google's product lines. It is so bad that Google ought to be embarrassed to show it off in public.
Of course them being hard to find on the store, is part of why they don't exist in the first place. Fixing that would help.
That would effectively make it impossible for single/small dev teams to justify making apps for the Play store.
And I don't see why filter paid apps would solve anything. The aversion of the average Play store user to spending money on anything is in part the reason we are in this mess.
12 continuous years working as an Android developer and I've never bothered to personally release an app on the Play store. There is nothing to be gained from it except needing to support it without any hope of making back the cost of developing it.
Ads, I however agree with, are the bane of our time. Except, due to the aversion to paying for apps, it has become the only way small dev teams can make a living.
The change needs to happen on the consumer side for this one. Buy the apps that you enjoy using.
not to put too fine a point on it, but does a single person really constitute a team?
thou, one person does not constitute a team, sorry, not sorry.
What matters is actual usage, and while "one person team" does grate on me somewhat, it's in wide usage, and it's understood what it means. So, "sorry, not sorry", but you're wrong.
https://ludwig.guru/s/one+person+team
The problem with allowing IAP to be used for a shareware-like unlock is that there's nothing stopping shady developers from forcing a subscription on you later even though you already paid now. Forgot which one that was, but this kind of double dipping recently happened to a popular baby monitor.
See this 8y old thread about what EA does on Android: https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3mikbc/whats_...
(Too late to edit)
Partner wanted to play all the time. I discovered the videos ads were using up all of my prepaid data before the end of each month. I bought the premium version, which was a one-time purchase "back then".
They launched an app revision that had a handful of very noticeable bugs. Then they changed to a new app (rather than upgrade), pushed all the users to the new app, and made the ad-free version a subscription. What do you get for your monthly payment? Well, nothing significant, like you'd expect from a subscription.
In fact, they essentially crowd-sourced their Q&A content by letting users submit feedback when a pair was inaccurate, so users are fixing problems in the content for free.
Server usage?
Not to minimize the daily work of countless devs, but a quiz game is essentially a handful of databases, a dollop of quite straightforward logic, some static UI visuals, and then content scraping to fill the main Q&A database. The logic and UI visuals almost never need a rewrite. DynamoDB is pennies per month per user, and if you're a real POS you can use long advertisements to push away users temporarily when your RCUs/WCUs are getting close to a scale-up threshold, which has the nice side effect of increasing revenue if everyone watches the long adverts anyway.
I guess they expected a percentage of users to bail switching to subscription, and that doesn't cost them a cent. You said it best: shady
There are IAPs to unlock brushes and other things, and a small fee to buy everything. I believe I paid $15 one-time to get everything for Infinite Painter.
There are enough people happy to just make and maintain a cool thing, but I can't find their work.
If you're just running it as a local webdav server, you can just stick with the current version. But if you also use it for the more typical rclone tasks (keeping cloud storage synchronised), RoundSync is updated and fixes some things that were missing in RCX, like cronjobs.
[0] https://github.com/newhinton/Round-Sync
In particular, I've consistently heard that it takes them forever to update app versions. At least https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/-/issues/2316 seems to be fixed now - it used to require user interaction for each update, which doesn't work when you have dozens of apps (and updating from the notification also had some kind of bug requiring extra manual steps).
Maybe I should give them another try, how is the developer experience nowadays?
Maybe static analysis could determine whether the IAP unlocked a new feature/functionality or not, feeling into the labelling/filtering?
The developer now has two apps on the play store, still with no paying customers for either of them. The aversion to paying for quality is still present.
To avoid this problem in the past, authors offered the free version, and then paid unlock as a separate app package. So you could continue to use the original application you trialed, and the unlock package would turn it into the full version.
Unfortunately, this stopped when in-app purchases appeared.
The first and most obvious clue that what you are considering is wrong is the fact that you are admitting that if people were presented with a choice they would overwhelmingly opt out of such a system so pervasively that there wouldn't be any money in it at all.
> That would effectively make it impossible for single/small dev teams to justify making apps for the Play store.
This is an inversion of priorities. The dev's profession exits to create useful things for users. The users don't exist to enable the devs profession. If the only way an app can come into existence is through the exploitation and disadvantage of its users then the world would be better off if it didn't exist.
Convincing everyone that content online is free while taking payment for it is one of the greatest sleights of hand of the century. That kind of thing used to be called a con.
That statement just oozes entitlement...
As a high schooler it was pretty cool to publish a small game onto the play store and have friends download it from there.
Maybe.
On the other hand, when I see an app that includes ads or in-app purchases, I assume it's a low-quality app by default. Such a filter would be useful to me and wouldn't change my selection process. It would make it much less onerous over having to "manually" filter those apps out (which would make the app store much more useful to me).
I prefer apps that just charge me up front rather than use in-app purchases or ads.
If people can find apps that meet their needs which are also free, and free of ads and in-app purchases they should absolutely use those apps. Making it harder for users to find those apps is a much bigger problem than "but I wanted someone to pay me for giving them the same thing!"
The solution for people who want money is to make apps that offer valuable features the free apps don't have, not to make the free apps impossible to find because they're scared they can't compete.
It was better when apps had a fixed price like in the early 2010s. At some point it was decided that subscription apps were where the money was at, both for devs and for Apple who took a silent cut every month.
> "Without providing an exact timeframe, Google says that new developers with individual accounts (as opposed to new Organization accounts) will be required to test apps with 20 people or more for 2 weeks or longer before publishing to production"
> ... developers with newly created personal Play Console accounts will soon be required to test their apps with at least 20 people for a minimum of two weeks before applying for access to production.
Does this mean that a developer has to recruit 20 users through a special workflow, or the users will simply see that they are 'testers' for a new app?
Still seems like absurdly high bar for indie devs to clear.
Even for a small company of up to 10 people, I doubt many have 20 testing user lying around ready and waiting. Either pay/recruit or everyone get their extended families
For just $29.95/month we will load your new app onto a fleet of 20 test Android devices and run your Appium or Selendroid test suites twice a day for 14 days.
(I'd spend an evening or two setting up a landing page and duct taping that Ansible script onto my Stripe account, but I've got a personal policy of never ever trying to sell tools to developers...)
It feels like there is a story there. Care to share?
This is a self-callout, I'm guilty of all of these.
I went to a small company career fair for the free lunch. When they saw I had an app in the app store, I had immediate interest and got an internship.
As organization’s name, type, size, detailed address, phone number, and website.
Edit: wow, that's how I'm reading it too. If you have a DUNS number, this will presumably not apply to you. So this isn't about quality, it's an anti-spam measure. Crazy.
I wouldn't call it "begging", but essentially, yes, this is what I've always done.
As for requirement itself, non-trivial apps that didn't get even this level of testing are likely to be quite broken. Will you really test on different form factors and Android versions / anticipate all user behavior? So I can see the case for protecting basic store reputation, in that anything you download is unlikely to crash right away or drain your battery etc.
And I believe Android 14 will bring even more updates here but I don't remember exactly what it is ..
Been working on an indie game for the last couple of years - would have been a huge pain trying to find 20 people with Android devices to meet this arbitrary threshold.
https://f-droid.org