The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it. My company has a half dozen stories like this about Google in the last year alone.
Know what Google is doing to its AdSense partners on a massive scale? They wait until your site has just under the earnings when they have to write you a check, then they terminate your AdSense account for “policy violations”.
I’m taking about AdSense sites that have been running for years with very little traffic, accumulating a few pennies a day.
They suspended a client of ours who was spending $40k a month on Google Ads with a two word explanation of “policy violations”, and steadfastly refused to explain any reason why. Our client was perfectly reputable, ran multi million dollar ad campaigns on television and radio, and was FDA approved.
When what Google has been getting away with finally comes to light... well, let’s hope it does come to light and they pay the consequences.
Both the App Store and Google Play stores I think are basically illegal monopolies. I should be able to install whatever app I want, without having to jailbreak my phone and deal with warranty nonsense from the manufacturer. Just like my computer, which I can also install whatever software I want on it.
Both the mandatory fees, and the review policy are terrible. Both Apple and Google could just as easily "recommend" an app as "safe and following best practices" rather than banning them from the app store. And still, many apps get through the nonsense, which has been real joy for scammers and possibly illegal money laundering:
Personally, as an iOS user, I do not want the App Store opened up at all.
Currently, I can go to the App Store, install any app, and be about 99.9% confident that the app will do me (or my technologically illiterate mother) absolutely no harm.
This is something I value highly, and am happy to pay the “Apple premium” for.
I don't want to live in your locked-down Disney with the death sentence world.
That's fine for you to want it, but don't impose it on me.
I want freedom and liberty to do what I want with the devices I own. I want to develop without fear that these two megacorps can shut me down on a whim for developing something against their ideology.
The web isn't like that. Windows wasn't like that.
Today we live in a Fischer-Price future land where everybody has to wear gloves because we might get burned. I hate what we've become. I want to go back to the world before smartphones and Apple and app stores. The open web. Before Facebook and Google became big brother surveillance operations.
Yeah, and it was an absolute disaster. Until very recently (Win7, roughly, or perhaps Vista) near every Windows install -- unless it had been locked down by an administrator, or maintained by a power user -- was an absolute cesspool of malware and outright spyware. The average Windows machine was literally unsafe to use.
That's fine for you to want it, but don't impose it on me.
Essentially what you're asking for is a return to the world where some of the most common consumer devices in the world could only be safely operated by power users. Except it would be even worse today, since smartphones are so much more essential and offer so much more information about us (biometrics, location services, mics, cameras, etc) that can be harvested and exploited.
I (a power user!) sort of miss those days too. It's not like I ever had malware.
But in general, that wasn't working.
What do you think about compromises (like macOS, and Android) where non-blessed software is disabled by default, but can fairly easily be sideloaded?
The problem with this is that you'll always have exceptions, and eventually you have enough of them that users become accustomed to blindly hitting "Accept" to any permission dialogs.
If you keep a child out of the kitchen because the stove is hot, you'll protect them burning themselves, but you'll also prevent them from learning how to cook.
If people don't get the opportunity to fuck up, you arrest their development. Stupid software users then becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Users will become dumber than they ever were before, and therefore more and more reliant on software developers to do/make everything for them. In my cynical moments, I suspect this is all intentional... Imagine if the fast food industry were throwing their weight around to promote the idea that children should be kept out of kitchens.
I think your reasoning here is flawed. People do not all need to develop skills in all aspects of life.
By keeping someone from experiencing physical violence you may prevent them from learning how to defend themselves, but by many this would be considered a fair trade.
I believe the same is the case with limited control over technology. Most users do not care to learn, and would opt to actively avoid the opportunity to learn if the associated danger was removed for them.
In my opinion the best option is to remain in the current state by default and have a more obscure 'power user' option that could be enabled within the OS itself.
I like your car engine analogy; car's have the same level of widespread use as computers, yet I would wager a large percentage of people would struggle to perform much in term of car maintenance. Anecdotally, I know a multitude of people who have no idea how their car engine works, so much so they would not know how to check the oil level.
As a further point, drivers are (with edge case exceptions) not kept away or locked down from performing any work on their vehicle, yet in most cases they would still prefer to pass the responsibility on to a trusted professional.
This is a nice thought, but based on my experience helping non-technical people with malware and related issues, it's rare that they learn from those experiences, and instead delegate to the nearest techy person to help them fix it. So if people are going to act that way in either case, I would selfishly rather the software just prevent them from doing stupid things in the first place, before I get that call for help.
I don't know how workable this is in reality. Most software needs some kind of interoperability to be useful.
- Network access
- Direct hardware access (such as games accessing the GPU)
- Sharing data to other software
- Consuming data from other software
- etc.
As we've seen, we wind up needing to turn a bunch of these on for most software, and while it's certainly better than giving them carte blanche over the entire system, a handful of these permissions are enough to work some skullduggery.
Most software does not "need" network access, it just ends up being used for telemetry, serving ads, and checking for updates you probably don't need anyway.
> Direct hardware access (such as games accessing the GPU)
"Direct", meaning they need a context handle and some shared memory to get composited by the OS. Still, I'm honestly not sure why this isn't a solved problem today. Why are GPUs not virtualizable the way CPUs are?
> - Sharing data to other software
> - Consuming data from other software
Software can be grouped together and allowed to talk among eachother within a certain context without giving any given piece of it the ability to burn the world down.
You'll have a hard time convincing me that taking control away from users is a better solution.
I would think that manually granting (or revoking) specific permissions on a per-software basis equals more control, not less!
I agree that users need full control. I also think a few decades of personal computing have shown us that the defaults should be pretty safe and therefore restrictive.
Users should have to jump through a hoop or two (perhaps as simple as `sudo enable-expert-mode` in a terminal, or some such) before being able to shoot themselves in the foot.
I think that one of the reason's we're behind on this is that major players aren't putting R&D into usable clusters of user managed permissions and tools for both power users and average users to manage and introspect them is precisely because they've found a way to both shirk the responsibility and exploit their users with an App Store.
Windows wasn't unsafe to use, Internet Explorer and Outlook Express were unsafe to use. It had nothing to do with a lack of app stores, and more to do with the fact that ActiveX controls were allowed to run rampant on a machine, and that they could install themselves with a single dialog box that nobody ever paid attention to, and sometimes even bypass that.
I mean, even with an App Store, IE would have been pushed hard, just like Edge is now. And it still would have been a buggy mess, and people would have still been infected...
I can't believe I just defended Windows here...
I fixed hundreds, maybe thousands of machines infected with malware back in those days. Switching users to Firefox and a safe e-mail client nearly eliminated all of their issues.
I remember plugging my windows box directly into my internet cable modem around 1999. My printer started printing dick pics (that I had not asked it to print) -- I had not even clicked on Internet Explorer.
I wasn't a computer person back then. But I quickly learned about SMB file and printer sharing being wide open.
PC Manufacturers literally installed said malware and spyware, which is what Android phone manufacturers do today. How is it a disaster if it is the past and current eco-system. Windows 10 comes with built in spyware and malware now.
> What do you think about compromises (like macOS, and Android) where non-blessed software is disabled by default, but can fairly easily be sideloaded?
I think that's exactly what the vast majority of people advocating for sideloading are proposing. At least it's what I'd propose.
Android trivially lets you sideload apps downloaded from anywhere on the internet you wish. Apple not so much, but that's Apple.
The vast majority of customers want an app store with tighter controls, and both Google and Apple provide it. There are a hell of a lot more complaints about these app stores not being locked down enough than those in your camp saying that they don't want it locked down at all.
> The vast majority of customers want an app store with tighter controls, and both Google and Apple provide it.
Tell that to the millions of people who installed Fornite mobile outside of any app store.
Most people don't care where their software comes from at all.
The reason there are complaints about the app store is because both Apple and Google are capricious and inconsistent with their application of their rules, and have no problem pretending their strict rules need to be enforced, but then allow apps that break their rules with adware or spyware on their app stores.
> ...both Apple and Google are capricious and inconsistent with their application of their rules...
this got me thinking. how is that handled by a democratic system of government? with an independent judiciary, of course. we need an independent, third party App Court! we need a powerful organization that can referee and literally force Google and Apple to put an app back in their stores.
The vast majority of users have no strong opinions on the matter of software package distribution. They take what's given to them.
The vast majority of users are perfectly fine with the Windows experience of dodging fake download button ads, unticking bundled McAfee installs, having no automatic update mechanism, etc (which is still more or less the default even on Win10).
They only start caring when they can't do something they want to do. They rarely think about the "how".
Ignoring the windows store, this is really more of a "let developers handle their own updates" situation. The vast majority of modern windows software updates itself directly or through a loader (steam, etc). Windows developers can easily tie into distribution services that offer update mechanisms. The default user experience is not 'no automatic updates.'
>The vast majority of customers want an app store with tighter controls,
Most people I've talked to don't even realize you can allow apps to be sideloaded on android. Most people don't even really look at their settings menu other than to change backgrounds and stuff.
I mean, at least on the latest phone I bought, I had to go to the build number, tap on it a bunch of times to get to the developer options, scroll down through a bunch of options that likely look terrifying to the average user until I found the option allow apps from outside sources.
When I tell people they can do this, or I tell them about f-droid or show them things on there, they tend to be kind of shocked that you can do that and usually want me to teach them how.
I've noticed a lot of people for the most part are kind.of scared to really dig into their devices without being told it's ok, but as soon as they know it's not going to destroy everything, they usually start trying to dig deeper.
The easy walled garden approach I find really stops people from wanting to learn more about what their devices can do and gives kind of a false sense of security, there's plenty of garbage and unsafe stuff in app stores and honestly, I use almost as much diligence downloading from there as I do from random places on the internet. A lot of people don't read reviews or bother even looking at permissions before the get something from the store and end up filling their phones with garbage anyway.
What are 10 crucial things that you need to side load on Android? I keep hearing about "all the customization" that you can do on Android vs iOS and I wonder exactly what is it that is life altering, or even 20% more efficient in the use of the device based on this, versus stock Android or stock iOS.
Well, I've personally got f-droid, newpipe, both Facebook lite and messenger lite as I was not able to install them based on where I live through the play store. Both of those are far better on battery life, and messenger lite lacks ads. I also then use f-droid to install as many apps available both there and the play store as I can because I prefer to avoid Google's services as much as I can. I use apkmirror sometimes to get older versions of apps if i dislike the updated one.
Customers choose from the options that have been marketed at them.
What the "vast majority of customers want" is a lazy, pessimistic, terrible way to invent the future. Where's your imagination and ambition for the way things could be? Have you forgotten that we have choices far beyond just "what Apple and Google give us" and "nothing"?
Do you think we would even have Apple and Google if everyone had your "take what the market gives you and like it" attitude?
* It's only imposed on you if you want an iPhone
* That said, I'm generally sympathetic to caveat emptor, as well as the idea that the provider of the OS should be spending gobs of resources on proactive protection against apps they don't even know are malicious yet. I also don't see why there can't just be a secondary app store where apps don't get the same level of scrutiny and that fact is made very, very explicit. Call it Caveat Appstore
Software has security bugs, and enough people are evil that you will get burned with that approach. I’m a professional in this space, and I really can’t tell whether some random app is going to be evil or not; how is a non-techie supposed to figure it out?
The real problem is that Google’s been unable to either secure Android or prevent malicious apps from showing up even given their locked-down store.
* webapps -- we tried this (iPhone v1) and they were awful. The web keeps improving but apps have consistently been years ahead.
* native software -- still too difficult to secure reliably.
We haven't really been suffering from fragmentation. We've essentially consolidated down to two platforms. You can also develop for the web or use a cross-platform framework.
Not really sure what you see as flawed. The app model has been wildly successful.
Your ideal state of Internet / Tech companies is definitely in the minority contrasted to overall expectations the broader population has put on these devices and services.
Yeah, we get it, you're smart. I'm smart. Most people here are smart. But protections still matter.
What you're saying is I don't want to wear a seatbelt when driving my car. Sure that is your choice - but I think it is a very foolish one.
>What you're saying is I don't want to wear a seatbelt when driving my car.
As others have said there may be more apt analogies...sticking with the car theme, it may be closer to a market where you buy a Ford and then you can only fill your Ford up with Ford gas from a Ford gas station.
That market doesn't exist for clear cut reasons, but if it did you can bet Ford and other car manufacturers would claim the same thing, that limiting Ford owners to using Ford gas is for their safety, if Ford owners started putting gas into their Ford from a 3rd party, there could be all kinds of harmful additives or other quality issues with the gas that will damage the Ford. Of course Ford won't mention on their tax to "Ford gas suppliers" (of 33%) for access to the Ford car market.
I worked in the computer printer industry a ways back. The printer companies tried to make this argument with respect to blocking generic ink cartridges from being used on their printers. They argued that they needed to limit to the manufactuerer's cartridges to guarantee a good user experience.
The scary thing is that these companies aren't simply being disingenuous - they earnestly believe this.
A company takes for granted that they are good actors, and that their customers' interests are perfectly aligned with their own. With those assertions, increasing their control can only mean a better ability to make things good/safe/simple for their customers.
But that is an authoritarian delusion. Because real difficulty arises out of cross-party emergent complexity - illegible and unmanageable by any single entity. And the road to hell is paved with good intentions. This is blatantly obvious when you, as an individual actor, eventually end up at odds with whatever authoritarian scheme they've implemented - wishing to do something simple that you've personally judged as good/safe, but it's impossible to convince that centralized controller to understand / approve it.
In the real (multi-actor) world, we acknowledge that interests diverge on either side of a transaction. Someone who has bought a printer is then an individual participant in the ink market. Someone who buys a pocket computer wants that computer to act for their own interest - not for it to be beholden to the whims of the company who made it.
Unfortunately, always-on communication, the difficulty of reverse engineering, and overbearing copyright law have allowed these companies to double down on overarching control rather than allowing reasonable demarcation points. Apple could straightforwardly create an app sandbox that would allow running fully untrusted code with fine-grained capabilities, unilaterally design it to not have the vulnerabilities that the Web continues to have (eg fingerprinting), and allow sideloading after appropriate warnings. And lest you think I'm being partisan here, the same exact thing applies to Google's general insistence that sideloaded apps are less safe.
But it's much simpler and more lucrative to double down on authoritarian control until they're forced to create those demarc points, either by direct legislation or by consumer demand - eg if this recent censorship trend eventually pushes them to prohibit secure communication apps in their central stores.
Bad intentions are not necessary to build an authoritarian system. All it takes is enough good-intentioned people being unaware of the system they are building and their role in it.
I know I read articles about that (much like the right to repair articles with respect to CAT heavy machinery), was there any legal action against any of the printer companies you know about? If I recall the outcome correctly I believe the printer companies lost the fight, but I don't know/remember if that was voluntary or court ordered.
As it relates to printers/cartridges unlike my car manufacture/gas hypothetical or the app store, I could potentially see certain IP (from patents to trade dress) rights that may actually help the printer companies argument (but again I think they backed down anyway).
I've been using a little multifunction brother laser printer and convinced my sister to do the same in college and those are the only printers I've used in a long while that don't give me issues.
The only other printers I used that never gave me issues were the high end laser printers at University.
If you want to stay with cars, it’s like Google saying when you buy their car, you are only allowed to go to 6 pre determined destinations in their vehicles.
Some people find comfort in the lack of choice, since they know the drive won’t be “dangerous”, but for the rest of us, we want to make the choice of destination ourselves.
We simply want the choice to open our options without these companies punishing the consumer over making a choice with a very expensive piece of hardware we own.
This scenario still doesn’t prevent Apple and Google from providing their tightly controlled closed garden of choices for those that want it that way, but for the rest of us, we get our freedom back.
> If you want to stay with cars, it’s like Google saying when you buy their car, you are only allowed to go to 6 pre determined destinations in their vehicles.
It's more like, when you buy a car, you are only allowed to go to Google-approved destinations. You are allowed to submit a new destination for consideration, but ultimately google can decide if you are allowed to go there or not.
In this analogy it sounds like google is a bus, which is... fine? Maybe not for you but what’s wrong with busses for those who don’t care about flexibility?
And there are only two bus companies, most consumers have never seen a car, and the two bus companies have a lock on the technology and supply chain and aren't interested in promoting cars because cars would jeopardize their business models.
FWIW Apple devices can still download apps from multiple versions back (my ipad mini can download apps on ios 9), developers might just set a minimum OS requirement if they use certain new APIs.
Then should it not be possible for the smart folks here to fork Android and provide a linux style experience on top of phones that run Stock Android OS? Can you do that with target hardware like a Pixel or Samsung or Motorola phone? The App store then becomes github, gitlab, or an apk you get from anywhere. Right?
AFAIK integrating an android fork with the hardware on modern devices is a LOT of work and usually done by the hardware manufacturers themselves (and this layer is not shared openly). These folk https://itsfoss.com/open-source-alternatives-android/ have tried or are trying to do related things.
There's no reason the App Store can't hang around, we just want the ability to sideload. Comparing it to not wearing a seatbelt is a straw man, as it's more like being able to use your car however you like without the manufacturer's say so.
I agree with your desire to side-load. My only caveat I would apply to that is to put some super really scary warnings to the user (as they will be no longer within the security of the walled ecosystem). I don't want users to accidentally side-load something because someone told them to, and not be aware of the extra risk the are potentially introducing.
There's a limitation on the number of apps you can sideload (3), and each app auto-expires after a short period (7 days) of time and needs to be re-provisioned.
How are app stores the only means of providing reasonable security? They already fail at that job. A huge number of apps, including popular ones, request as many permissions as they can.
In what world do I want a transit app listening to my microphone?
There isn't anything that precludes security in an app store-less world. If we sat for an hour, we could whiteboard a number of technical solutions that could be engineered.
- apps still require signing
- implementing a stricter permissions / ACL model
- continuously scan devices for malware or bad heuristical behavior
- publish a list of misbehaving apps that can be subscribed to and automatically scrubbed
- semantic sets of app permissions. Gallery apps don't get microphone, contact, or location data.
We could easily engineer for a distributed world. The problem is that Apple and Google want complete control. Playing gatekeeper gives them authority, and they get to take a large rake of any money being made.
Don't make excuses for their model. They're bad actors that have abused their monopoly powers.
>What you're saying is I don't want to wear a seatbelt when driving my car
I don't think that is a good analogy in this case. It's more like he's trying to do a repair on his car, and he wants to be able to use some cheap parts sourced from elsewhere but the manufacturer has made it so only their parts will work. Sure, maybe the parts that don't come directly from the manufacturer will blow up my car, but I'd still have the freedom to choose than be locked down by some massive corporation because they say they're keeping me safe.
Don't strawman this argument into a conversation about intelligence.
This is about personal freedom. Not wearing a seatbelt can put others at risk for injury liability. Installing an app will not do that. Let's stay on topic. And while we're at it, you and I both know that majority opinion has never been strongly correlated with truth.
> Not wearing a seatbelt can put others at risk for injury liability.
Wow, I'm surprised that has never occurred to me before. I guess that to most people, such as myself, the trade-off is so obvious from a personal safety point of view that we don't think too deeply over it. This is a great point.
There is a difference between installing some sketchy third-party app from an apk provider and installing an app that simply doesn't meet Apple/Google's community guidelines.
Yes and no. You can get a ticket in at least some US states. (In practice, unless you get pulled over for some other reason, you can probably get away with it essentially all of the time.)
> That's fine for you to want it, but don't impose it on me.
Who imposes this onto you? I have a great idea for you if you dislike the App Store: Don't buy an Apple Device.
Turns out Apple doesn't owe you shit. Oh, also the same "get off my lawn" libertarian viewpoint of yours can be claimed by Apple. They might want the same liberty (to do as they like with their platform).
I wonder if there were distinguishing factors which make these cases unique.
Like the fact that Microsoft had 90%+ desktop market share and was using it to shoe-horn an unrelated inferior product with powerful network effects into dominance.
Whereas Apple has no monopoly and in fact their overall smartphone market share is falling.
Let Apple compete how they want to compete, as long as there are viable competitors. Of which there are several.
To look at the smartphone market and how far it’s come in the last 10 years and decide this is a space which needs anti-competitive enforcement action from the FTC is abusing monopoly law to obtain a political outcome.
I'm not the person you replied to, but I suppose they mean competitors like Samsung, Motorola, Huawei and so on. It depends on whether you see a competitor as someone owning an app store or someone selling a physical device.
I'm not sure "home markets" are really relevant for global entities like multinational companies.
Who are the viable competitors? It is Apple and Google/Android right? Everything else is the equivalent of Bing competing with Google Search. Keep in mind another MS defense was there is Mac and MacOS, we even build a IE for MacOS, therefore, we can't be a monopoly.
>To look at the smartphone market and how far it’s come in the last 10 years
Maybe there is a thriving competition in the smartphone OS market I am unaware of, but I thought maybe in the last 10 years the market went from MS, Blackberry, Apple, Google/Android...to more a consolidated market and effectively Apple and Google/Android.
The political outcome is interesting, I haven't heard that before, what exactly are the politics involved with wanting Apple to allow a 3rd party app store?
Why are the only options for installing apps "Strict App Store" and "Open App Store"? That's a false dichotomy. Let apple have its app store but remove the restrictions on installing apps from outside of it. If I want to install an apk directly from a publisher's website I should be able to.
Yes of course. Programs on windows also can use the full set of windows APIs and Services and not pay microsoft. It's not actually a developer using those APIs the consumer is using those APIs through an application and the consumer has paid for those APIs and Services by buying the phone.
How do you manage battery life when multiple apps need to keep its own persistent connections open to its own home server for push notifications? How do you explain this to end users, when even tech-savvy people assume bad-faith when it's pointed out that many APIs are cloud-backed, forgetting the most obvious example of a cloud-backed API that is provided?
Or, how does the mobile OS vendor perform any kind of spam protection at all on push notifications if they have to open their notification gateways to absolutely anyone? (I'm not suggesting they're doing a great job of it now, but think about what happens when they lose the most effective stick - being kicked off the platform - that they have)
> How do you manage battery life when multiple apps need to keep its own persistent connections open to its own home server for push notifications?
Apple already has extensive experience in this area with macOS.
> Or, how does the mobile OS vendor perform any kind of spam protection at all on push notifications if they have to open their notification gateways to absolutely anyone
Do they? They could just as easily require that apps outside the App Store provide their own push notification infrastructure.
You act like these things are impossible to overcome.
And you pretend like Apple isn't already earning money from this. Apple is already charging people for the iPhone. People keep saying they are a hardware company. Are they really?
> Apple already has extensive experience in this area with macOS.
macOS runs on platforms with persistent power and/or significantly larger batteries. The power drain caused by persistent connections is negligible given the size of the battery.
> Do they? They could just as easily require that apps outside the App Store provide their own push notification infrastructure.
This was one of two options - allow apps to manage their own push notifications (which requires apps to maintain persistent connections to external servers) or open up the gateways to anyone (which doesn't). I can't think of a third option, but I'm open to suggestions.
> You act like these things are impossible to overcome.
Nothing is impossible to overcome, but most things require trade-offs. In this case, I see the trade off being battery life vs spam (and that's only if you open up the platform, which is the other trade off - open vs closed platforms)
> People keep saying they are a hardware company. Are they really?
If you've paid attention to any apple earnings reports in the last 2 years, they themselves state they're trying to pivot towards services over hardware, specifically because the hardware market is no longer a major growth market.
Android devices with comparable performance characteristics and battery life feature larger batteries than comparable iPhones.
Arguably, iPhones are too thin and light and should be thicker and heavier and thus could have bigger batteries. This doesn't help anyone who already has a phone (and iPhones remain supported for up to 5 years after release - that's a long tail)
>Currently, I can go to the App Store, install any app, and be about 99.9% confident that the app will do me (or my technologically illiterate mother) absolutely no harm.
That's the problem though. That last 0.1% is difficult, and Facebook (which, if your technologically illiterate mother doesn't have it installed, many others do) has been repeatedly shown to do harm to their users. Yet they're still on the apple app store.
Except for those applications which have a "free period" of some days then charge $10/week and uninstalling the application does not stop the subscription.
How do you define "absolutely no harm"? Cause a lot of them are clearly misleading about what they do, what permissions they require. A lot of games are clearly geared to be addictive and get you to spend money on their "free" game.
I have found an app on the App Store which pretended to be linked to a cryptocurrency dealer and tried to force me to buy a 40€ in app purchase by abrutly and repeatedly asking for my fingerprint to remove absent ads.
The app was indeed a scam by a random chinese dev impersonating a company he was not related to by using their brand as app name and their logo as app icon.
a: Let me install from elsewhere if I want, like Android does (and I love)
b: have more transparency in the back end processes of the store and better appeals. Right now it's very arbitrary and capricious. Yes they have a published set of rules, but they're enforced and interpreted in a very unpredictable way.
Which sounds fine until your mom hears about this cool App Store from her friend on Facebook, downloads a bunch of crap, and winds up at the Apple Store with Apple having to fix damage caused to her phone. I’m a little less sympathetic with the repairability stuff, but when it comes to the App Store, daddy Apple is doing a job that I want them to do, and changes here are not to my benefit and would make me less likely to buy the product.
I feel like my life would be a lot easier if I just got my parents and in-laws using Chromebooks. I don't like sacrificing family members on Google's altar, but the ecosystem really just fits their use cases.
I've considered something like Solus-based laptops for them, but I haven't gotten around to testing out a configuration yet.
> winds up at the Apple Store with Apple having to fix damage
What is this nebulous "damage"? If an app escapes the sandbox and totally hoses the operating system, the fix should be basically plugging the phone into a cable at home and waiting say 24 hours to prevent evil maid attacks. If the malicious app manages go further and screw up the "hardware", then that implies a serious security vulnerability and so should be covered under warranty.
A security model based around every bit of code on a device being vetted is fundamentally unscalable. The cracks are really starting to show, with increasing false positives and false negatives.
I'm not sure if you have parents or relatives that call you for iPhone tech support, but I do. Even something like resetting a locked iPad requires a call sometimes. It's crazy.
Now imagine people downloading all sorts of scam apps, having personal data uploaded, ransomware, you name it. And they are going to take that sucker straight to the Apple store if they don't have friends/family to fix it.
Aside from that, I personally view the Apple App Store as a feature and a benefit to me. I don't want another App Store even if it were available.
Any whole device reflash could also easily be done at an Apple store, even in a self-serve manner.
> people downloading all sorts of scam apps, having personal data uploaded, ransomware, you name it
Obviously if you just get rid of Apple's current solution and don't replace it with anything, then those things will happen like the jungle that was Windows. But that does not make for an argument in support of Apple's current solution.
The answer is to address those problems for arbitrary code (eg isolation and fine grained capabilities), rather than simplistically asserting that any code on the device must be "good" and then enforcing a singular top-down regime to assure that.
> I don't want another App Store even if it were available.
See if you still hold this opinion in ten years when large companies have been pushed to ban secure communication tools in the interest of "public safety". The writing is already on the wall.
(My current support load mainly consists of needing to help my dad because app UI elements are designed to be invisible. This is a problem caused by centralized control - banks create their own decommodified apps and want to look hip in the "design" world or whatever, as opposed to publishing a standardized API that would allow creation of independent apps for old people. And the same vacuous "security" FUD gets dragged out to justify that state of affairs as well)
If large companies are banning security tools in the interest of safety that’s a failure of government, and third party app stores will face the same restrictions.
Aside from that, the iPhone app ecosystem is perfect for me. Maybe it’s not perfect for you but I like it how it is and don’t want it to change and I don’t want more people in my family bothering me with tech stuff. If you want custom stuff why can’t you use Android and a Pixel 3 or something? Plenty of other options out there.
If there's an app that can cause damage to my phone, that is Apple's problem for having an exploit in their sandbox and I would certainly expect them to repair the damage
But there's more to the issue than just safety checking. The "App store tax" really is like a tax: it helps pay for developing the platform necessary for the apps to run on. Without that revenue, Apple would have to start looking for other ways of getting revenue -- for instance, selling my personal data.
Apple charges $100 a year which provides some money. Their 30% charge can’t possibly be mostly a tax in the way you’re saying. Don’t they lower their cut of iAPs to 15% after first year? Likely still making a profit on that. What additional things is Apple doing for the additional 15% to 30% at first for iAP subscriptions, or for normal purchases, or for one time iAPs?
I’m not saying Apple is wrong to make as much profit as they want. But to say any more than a 10% take at most (likely less) is a tax to have the ecosystem running can’t be true. Not with the $100 a year on top as well.
Apple has made over $40 billion from the App Store since it launched, and paid out over $100 billion to developers.
The $100/yr developer account fee is an anti-spam measure, not an actually significant revenue source.
Apple and Google App Stores combined currently generate almost $100 billion in revenue per year. This is the biggest and best revenue source available on the planet for smaller developers.
Easy end-user side loading, and third party app stores is a direct attack on this ecosystem and will damage the livelihoods of developers who will have no way to fight against massive increases in piracy that will result.
> Easy end-user side loading, and third party app stores is a direct attack on this ecosystem and will damage the livelihoods of developers who will have no way to fight against massive increases in piracy that will result.
Windows developers seemed to be doing pretty well, even without an app store...
I don’t know what the historical software sales revenues were for boxed software in the Windows desktop era.
But I am pretty sure the vast majority of applications on the App Store in the $1-$10 range would simply not have been possible to monetize in the Windows XP era.
Remember shareware? What percent of people actually paid for that? You think the market was even 1% the size it is now? CompUSA’s best annual revenue was $2 billion and only a fraction of that was software, and only a fraction of a faction of that was anything but enterprise software and big studio games.
And the market for apps on phones was a fraction of 1% of what we have now from the App Stores.
That's basically how "your mom" got 800 different browser toolbars installed. The people who tend to "void the warranty" tend to be the least equipped to evaluate the pros/cons of doing so.
I'm saying the end result winds up being the opposite of the ideal scenario OP's setting up - the people least prepared to evaluate the dangers of side-loading stuff are the most likely to go and do it.
And yet the App Store is crammed with free apps that are basically just vehicles to deliver add and harvest your information.
Free kids apps are the worst, because young children try to play the game and constantly end up steered towards ads that they don’t know how to navigate away from.
I think what these people are asking for is that the App Store be forced to host everything (within reason) and for other sites to provide you the actual curation of what's good. Letting Apple do both is ethically gray right now.
The argument isnt to open the store but to open the phone. You would still be able to only install apps from the store if you so choose. Others would be able to install any app theyd like. Also, app makers that could not afford to go through Apples vetting or developers who have written apps that Apple later decides is good enough to clone - so removes the non Apple version from the store for reasons, would no longer be shutdown completely.
That's hardly a stable solution. It would start out nicely, but some of them would start eating up the market due to network effects. Then turn evil...
If you make network effects harder (e.g. it extremely easy to submit apps to all of them), I don't see this not becoming a competition over price. And security is expensive. You'd have to prevent people search some nice apps on your store, then downloading the same on a different store with lots of shit tier apps as well, if it saves them your 30% tax.
What about an alternate universe where the OS takes on the role of strongly isolating and protecting you from stray apps? I don't know, something like Qubes... Then you don't need the protection that the stores charges you a 30% premium for... (...)
> I should be able to install whatever app I want, without having to jailbreak my phone and deal with warranty nonsense from the manufacturer. Just like my computer, which I can also install whatever software I want on it.
I'm not familiar with Apple, but where do you see this problem in Android? "Allow installation of apps from unknown sources" is a one-button toggle in Settings, after which you can download an apk from anywhere you want and install it without issues.
You do have to fight through some dark patterns that discourage side-loading. But at least you can do it on Android.
Also, it is getting harder to avoid using Google Play Services in your apps since they are putting more Android features behind that iron curtain as well.
What you call dark patterns are ways to ensure users don't accidentally load malware onto their device. They can definitely do better though - I think a good first step would a dialog to choose trusted alternative app stores such that installing apps does not require a separate confirmation step (as is currently the case.)
The Google Play Services moves are unfortunate, but required. Most device manufacturers do not provide updates for Android on time, so any code that is part of Android itself becomes harder to update.
> What you call dark patterns are ways to ensure users don't accidentally load malware onto their device.
They are still dark patterns, that they also have found excuses for those dark patterns does not make them any better. In fact most of the stuff (not just Google's) we see nowadays that take control away from the users - very often in ways that entrench monopolies and the status quo - use "but security" as their primary defense.
And it's a pretty good defense. Say those dark patterns are removed - and loading a .apk from the web on a completely new pixel 3 shows the "do you want to install this app?" dialog. What's stopping any of those apps from masquerading as official Google/banking apps and stealing user credentials? Or what if the app is named "get any app free app store" and, along with providing cracked apps from Google Play, it enrolled your android in a botnet?
> What you call dark patterns are ways to ensure users don't accidentally load malware onto their device. They can definitely do better though - I think a good first step would a dialog to choose trusted alternative app stores such that installing apps does not require a separate confirmation step (as is currently the case.)
Note that since Android P or so, only explicitly whitelisted apps are even allowed to ask for app install. There's a user setting for each. So this is effectively already in place.
"Most device manufacturers do not provide updates for Android on time"
Only because Google lets the device manufacturers off the hook. It's a problem of Googles own invention. Trading away customer security for market share.
Adding: very successfully too, this isn't the first time I hear how you should almost feel sorry for Google that they have to put so much into google services instead of Android, all because of the evil device manufacturers! Nothing can be done no... wrings hands
Maybe it will change a little but now that Huawei happened.
True. And about as helpful as offering a coat to a dead man.
It is not a problem that is retroactively fixable by other means than by what they are doing now.
They could take Android closed source and put a restrictive license on it demanding that timely updates as a condition of use. All that would achieve is that the large vendors will either stick with the old, still free to use, Android or start working on their own systems they would control again - Samsung's Tizen, Huawei is developing their own, etc. It doesn't take much to piss a large vendor like Samsung off sufficiently to jump ship. They aren't married to Android and have plenty of resources to pour into proprietary alternatives. Google doesn't have much leverage there.
The result would be only a market fragmentation, collapse of the app market and loss of market share for Google. That would benefit exactly nobody.
Phone vendors are not interested in system updates - that's a pure cost they don't want to pay, they would rather have you buy a new phone or at least not have to spend money and engineering time on preparing patches.
Everything you said rings true, except the part about proprietary license. That's orthogonal to enforcing updates. That is a contractual issue, not a licensing issue.
Google could for instance not allow the manufacturer to connect to their Google Play store unless the manufacturer played ball.
But where does this all put us? We are OK with crap, insecure devices being shoved all over the markets? What can be done.
> Google could for instance not allow the manufacturer to connect to their Google Play store unless the manufacturer played ball.
Very true but I think the point GP was trying to make was that Samsung is bigger bthan Apple and would have enough influence to get a lot developers to work on its platform instead.
They already have contracts with licensing for the Play Store and other apps. Those are not included with the base images and require a contract to be in place.
I hope manufacturers start adopting Android One widely. It will both take the burden of maintenance off them and make the problem of timely system updates go away for their users.
1. As you stated, Google forces devs to rely on presence of the Google Play Services
2. Devs don't care: I don't see why e.g. Discord should not run properly on MicroG (I get push messages after logging in, but the app itself shows all friends as offline, no servers and a "can not connect to discord" message; from what I found online, it doesn't seem to be intermittent).
3. I wouldn't even know which 3rd party app store to use (okay, besides F-Droid for FOSS and some Google Play Store Proxy)
That time has passed. There's functionality on Android that can only be reliably provided through play services these days (push notifications being the big one).
Basically: Back in the day a ton of apps used their own notification servers, with each one clashing, waking the device up, etc..
Google Cloud Messaging was then set to be the only service that could wake the device up when it was sleeping. Supposedly it batches messages and sends them at optimal times to save battery.
It's not when the device is awake or has a wakelock. But since Android's Doze (basically deep sleep battery saving state) GCM is the only service that can wake it up.
I thought the device wakes up from Doze regularly, and then you can poll for the notifications. The SDK docs sound this way too: "While the device is in Doze, apps' access to certain battery-intensive resources is deferred until maintenance windows"
But it seems these maintenance windows aren't frequent enough (every 15 minutes?) for some apps.
The minimum interval for periodic jobs is 15 minutes. When the device is in Doze mode, the jobs are defered to the next maintenance window. The longer the device remains in Doze mode, the greater the distance between two maintenance windows.
Do you want to use a messenger or any other social media app where the worst case scenario is that it takes 15 minutes for the message to reach the recipient?
Certainly not, so the app vendor is forced to use FCM to display notifications immediately even if the recipient's device is in Doze mode.
If you've an android phone, just count your apps? I did, and expected 8 of my 20 apps to use GCM. MicroG revealed it to be 11 (actually 12 due to "MicroG services core" registering with GCM as well).
DuckDuckGo/Googling for that yields only the site, no review or some 3rd party information if it is safe to use. I mean, as a side-project, I could setup a website that pulls APKs from Google, infests [some] of them with a virus and puts them on a fancy looking website or "alternative app store"-app.
Long time iOS user and I don’t want to open the App Store. If you look at something like the Nintendo Switch’s eShop, you can get download codes from retailers. I believe retailers get some cut from the sale. Maybe apple could open it up in an indirect way.
In the video game console world you’ve never been able to install your own games. I can’t do it with my car infotainment system either and they have a crude App Store.
The FTC Is pretty clear[0] on what constitutes anti-competitive behvior, and a monopoly alone is not anti-competitive. Quote from the linked page:
"Section 2 of the Sherman Act makes it unlawful for a company to "monopolize, or attempt to monopolize," trade or commerce. As that law has been interpreted, it is not illegal for a company to have a monopoly, to charge "high prices," or to try to achieve a monopoly position by what might be viewed by some as particularly aggressive methods."
So under their definition of anticompetitive monopoly behavior[1] (which is actually illegal). They call out that behavior with valid business justification (my own example: protecting their brand) is fine, even if it restricts competition.
Side note: today I learned a new word! "Duopoly" (a market controlled by two players). Monopoly law _does_ apply to duopolies[1].
I don't think that Google's monopoly on the android setup is unwarranted. They both developed the OS software and host an app store where they decide what gets sold in this store - the same way that Apple does or Microsoft does on windows with its windows store.
> I should be able to install whatever app I want, without having to jailbreak my phone and deal with warranty nonsense from the manufacturer. Just like my computer, which I can also install whatever software I want on it.
I don't know too much about how the Apple/iPhone ecosystem works, but in both Android and in Windows you can generally download apps from locations other than the ones specifically sanctioned by Google/Microsoft without repercussions (android does have the setting you manually have to enable first before downloading external APK's). Google definitely does control an overwhelming share of the app download market, but that's because it has marketed itself well, it works well enough that users don't go looking for other stores, and there haven't been too many alternative stores that have sufficiently marketed themselves to general Android users (F-Droid is a cool concept, but the general Android user is more concerned with "getting an app that does x" than "getting an app that does x and the source code is available")
>Both the App Store and Google Play stores I think are basically illegal monopolies. I should be able to install whatever app I want, without having to jailbreak my phone and deal with warranty nonsense from the manufacturer. Just like my computer, which I can also install whatever software I want on it.
I'm on the fence about it. In the ideal world, yes.
In the real world, you get the Windows problem where everyone ends up with 40 toolbars in Internet Explorer and bitch and whine their computer is slow.
"I should be able to install whatever app I want, without having to jailbreak my phone and deal with warranty nonsense from the manufacturer. Just like my computer, which I can also install whatever software I want on it."
I like to think of iOS less like a PC, and more like a Nintendo, with a curated ecosystem of software. (Maybe Android can be Sega :P)
> Both the App Store and Google Play stores I think are basically illegal monopolies. I should be able to install whatever app I want, without having to jailbreak my phone and deal with warranty nonsense from the manufacturer. Just like my computer, which I can also install whatever software I want on it.
Is Google Play doing that now? It used to be that you just had to change an option in settings to "allow third-party software" or something and you could install anything you wanted. It was necessary for the Humble Bundle Android app, among other things. That was years ago, though.
ADB/command line is also not required unless you need to do more than simply install an app. You can open an apk directly on an Android device and be prompted to install it (provided you haven't associated apk files to be always opened with an app other than package installer)
I am not sure if they do regulations like this in our time. With At&t one could argue that this was a regulation that was dealing with a single country; with google & friends one can argue that this is a global thing and that export interests are at stake.
of course the law is supposed to deal with objective reality, and that considerations of context are not relevant here; however I am not sure that this is still true when things get tough.
At least for Google, "safe and following best practices" is really a stronger guarantee than they offer of being in the play store. "has paid us $25 and hasn't yet been caught doing anything sketchy" is it, but I don't think they want to promise safety when they can't deliver.
How would you want them to regulate these app stores? Make it easier for apps to get approved? The reason iOS doesn't deal with as many privacy issues, and malicious apps is because Apple has a strict review process no?
This suggests you do not understand what "monopoly" means.
Apple's iOS model is a feature, not a bug. If you are unhappy with the app rules there, or with Apple being the curator of what's available, then iOS isn't for you.
Not this again. (pardon my sarcasm, no intent to offend.)
There was a point in time when Microsoft was deeply embedding its really shitty and uber insecure Internet Explorer into Windows and causing all sorts of very severe problems problems. If that had continued, the world would have switched to free software. It was inevitable.
But the government stepped in and forced Microsoft to make a just marginally better product, and thus free software never really had its day.
If you want to have an open app store, just wait until Google and Apple become unbearable and people naturally start switching to a more open/free alternative. If you get the government to force Google and Apple to make better software, they will still have a duopoly in 10 or 20 years.
Software companies making shitty stuff, left alone, will die naturally. Capitalism is creative destruction, and all that.
It's true that Google, Apple, and Facebook are now getting the treatment that Microsoft got a long time ago.
But I'm not sure I agree that everyone would go free software if it didn't happen. If anything, I think another company would just come along and build something slightly less crappy but no more open. These days you don't even own the software anymore, it's just a subscription or SaaS.
> Software companies making shitty stuff, left alone, will die naturally.
You could say the same of many industries, and I don't think it's any more correct for software than it is for cars, phone providers, banks, or any number of hated industries. People make shitty stuff all the time, and it sells.
In the U.S., phone providers are protected by the government. You can't compete with them. The government has basically granted them fiefs.
I feel like cars are great. I don't know where the complaint is there. There is an enormous amount of variety in cars. It's really amazing. Definitely a triumph of capitalism.
I also don't really have a problem with banks. There seems to be plenty of options. People mostly just complain about Wells Fargo. It's easy to switch.
Every truly hated industry is shitty because they are a government fief and nobody can compete with them. In other words, regulatory capture/regulatory ownership. Besides phone providers, the one that comes to mind for me in the U.S. is healthcare. Also, TV providers (AT&T/Comcast)---absolutely government fiefdoms. You can't legally compete with them.
If you find an unregulated industry, people don't buy shit. There is competition and people buy good stuff. Clothing, for instance. And almost all consumer goods. Think about all the amazing gadgets and appliances that are available. Computer hardware (e.g. laptops, desktops).
Toyota own the three brands that are the least costly cars to maintain, followed by Honda. BMW’s cost, on average, three times as much to maintain.[1]
I own a VW because I’m an enthusiast, but I drive a Honda because I also need a reliable vehicle.
Some BMWs should be regulated out of existence. Rang Rovers too. I work directly opposite my mechanic and we often joke, when all four bays have BMWs or Rang Rovers in them you couldn’t make one good car if you scarified the other three.
These cars are absolute garbage. VW’s too. They all have terrible reputations.
I don’t mean to imply the specs aren’t good, some of these cars are smooth riding and handle well, but heaven forbid if anything breaks.
If you don't want a BMW or a Range Rover, don't buy one.
People want those cars. They are willing to pay a mechanic to fix them because they like them. And you have the gall to say that they shouldn't be allowed to have them?
You are complaining about the choices we have---which are amazing, by the way, compared to 20 or 50 or 100 years ago---and your solution is to use the government to force people to have fewer choices?
Certain principles are required for the economy and society to function, and you are advocating for the opposite principles.
The existence of garbage brands with terrible reputations that rich people are willing to pay for doesn't mean cars as a whole aren't great. There are of course great brands like Toyota or Honda out there, which most consumers prefer en masse.
I think the car industry is a racket because they frequently have lots of recalls that affect safety, but they often don't admit it freely. (like the Takata airbag incident) Same for requiring car dealerships, and negotiated pricing. Getting a car serviced for a recall then having to wait for months, possibly while not being able to drive your car can be a real problem.
Utilities like cable / internet aren't really protected by the government, in that there is supposed to be competition, but the companies rarely want to compete, so they tend to service different areas.
A lot of banks do a lot of the shady tactics that Wells Fargo does, like ordering deposits and withdrawals just to make sure you get hit with the maximum amount of overdraft fees.
I totally agree with you on healthcare. That is one of the biggest rackets in the US where price fixing is rampant, and price discovery is purposefully non-existent.
Oh, and just to throw one more in, the airlines!
> Every truly hated industry is shitty because they are a government fief and nobody can compete with them.
If you're a monopoly and the government doesn't step in, they are basically granting you a fief over that area.
If you look up the history of car dealerships: the whole dealership system is based on dealers lobbying the government to protect them. It's regulatory capture. The car makers hate the dealers.
There are 2 main kinds of telco in the U.S.: telephone line based ones and cable based ones. Historically, companies got each local municipality or country to give them a monopoly (literally) on one or the other. So yes, the telco industry is a pure monopoly play in the U.S.
Banks: I have no problem with what you are talking about in my personal experience, but you can always switch to a credit union. Basically all a credit union is in practice is a nice bank. That's their niche in the market summed up in 2 words.
> If you're a monopoly and the government doesn't step in, they are basically granting you a fief over that area.
Monopolies don't happen unless the government grants one (either explicitly or implicitly through regulatory capture). A monopoly is not just a giant company with a dominant marketshare. It's easy to compete with those.
Airlines are great. Southwest, Alaska, and JetBlue offer good service at extremely low prices. Aviation travel prices in the US have gone down dramatically over the past several decades. Just don't fly United.
Utilities get special status because it doesn’t make sense to dig up the roads and lay n parallel competing power cables, sewers, water mains, etc. TV companies because the EM spectrum is limited. That makes it an apples-to-oranges comparison with banks, automakers and so on.
> These days you don't even own the software anymore, it's just a subscription or SaaS.
Only if you choose to use that type of "software". Literally none of the software I use is subscription or SaaS, because I make it a point to avoid those things.
Facebook is also a great example. That shit is so absolutely awful, and it's destroying people psychologically. People will eventually learn and get out of it. We will find a healthier alternative and adopt it organically.
But chances are the government will force Facebook to be just slightly less destructive, so that people never abandon it en mass, and never find a healthier alternative.
Facebook will kill itself if left to its own design. They are clearly committed to that path.
Facebook (as in, a social network) is already dead, it's just that nobody pulled the plug yet.
They have no people to expand to, no new opportunities to monetize the platform. All they can do is squeeze out every last penny they can from the existing user base.
What was the last memorable feature that was added? Stories in like 2015? Facebook (the company) has moved on (to Instagram and WhatsApp), users are less engaged, the content is slowly moving away. Nobody creates a new product and thinks "we gotta have a Facebook presence" anymore.
I‘m not so sure about this. Is there any indication or prior example from business history for that claim?
The Apple App Store seems good enough for most normal people. They will even defend having no alternative means of installing software on their iPhones with „Security“.
I'm highly technical -- 30 years in dev -- and I prefer the curated, controlled environment of iOS for my phone because I have zero interest in sysadmining my telephone.
You put scare quotes around security, but Apple's approach really does result in a more stable and secure platform.
You are cherry picking. It might be more secure from drive by hackers but if any of Apples partners (NSA etc) want in you are carrying a big backdoor that by definition is devoid of security.
That's an "if", while Android is literally sponsored by a company that makes money on consumer surveillance, and apparently has a vibrant malware culture, so who's cherry picking again?
I'm not defending Android. I'm just pointing out the platform you consider more stable and secure is likely only so if you are concerned with certain threat vectors more than others.
The threat vector you ascribe to Apple here exists for Google and Android as well, though, so it's not really an advantage of Android's model over Apple's.
>the world would have switched to free software. It was inevitable
The world was in no way thinking about switching, that's just a libertarian pipe-dream.
As to why: the costs of the MS browser monopoly didn't hit either MS or the user, it accrued at website developers and MS's competitors. They had to jump through burning hoops to make their sites work both in IE and any other browser.
In fact, the easiest and cheapest way to develop a site was to go with MS's proprietary tech and essentially lock out Firefox, or any Linux (or Mac) browser. Opportunity costs were minimal as Windows enjoyed a >90% market share.
At the time the hammer came down on MS, things had in fact improved a bit due to web 2.0 and other browsers (ie. Firefox) leapfrogging MS. But it is extremely dishonest to claim the ruling somehow prevented OSS to gain market share, that flies right into the face of facts.
Let's get one thing straight: My comment was not "extremely dishonest."
It's opinionated, sure. It's my judgement of the situation.
Second: In my opinion, IE was becoming non-viable for end users for security reasons, and baking it into Windows was making the entire system non-viable. If you can't surf the Internet without contracting multiple virii, it's just not a viable product anymore. Especially for businesses and individuals who have bank accounts, credit cards, etc.
I think Google's sh*tty ways came to light long ago. And they are still doing it.
I'm one of the many, many people that got screwed by Google in a similar way with their Adsense program. A long time ago it was. Back then there were actually people who communicated with you about it, at least that was my experience. But it was still stupid.
I was running Adsense on a website and got a message that I was not in compliance with their policies. I emailed and got a reply that it was because I need to make sure the ads are clearly separated from the content. I replied with a link to their own guide on how to "blend" ads, which I thought I had followed pretty closely. A person replied and said "That's not what we meant". WTF.
Another time on a food blog I had an article with a title that included the words "Chocolate Fetish" and a photo of two fully clothed women pouring chocolate on each other. I got an email that I was in violation of their policies with a link to that page. I emailed back and asked why. A person replied and said it was adult content. Double WTF.
So yeah, it's been stupid for a long time. And now days it's just all automated stupidity. It's pretty obvious - don't trust your business or anything else to Google.
Wow, the "chocolate fetish" case really kicks it out of the park.
Half-serious question, did all those replies come from actual human beings?
Reading the original blog post of this story and other comments here, including yours, I get a vague feeling that the communications on google's part are being done either by some kind of a machine, or by humans that can act like a machine, albeit of rather limited capabilities.
I am quite sure the email replies I received were from actual humans. It's been a while, about 10 years ago I think. If those were machine generated responses they were way more advanced than anything I thought existed at that time. I weaned myself off of Adsense so I am not close to it anymore. But from what I can tell now days you don't get any response at all.
With that chocolate fetish thing my thought was that the people they were using for compliance monitoring must be teenage boys with overactive hormones who see adult content in just about everything. But maybe it was actually an algorithm that matched the word "fetish" with some skin tones in a photo (there were faces afterall) and flagged it. Who knows. Who cares.
> Know what Google is doing to its AdSense partners on a massive scale? They wait until your site has just under the earnings when they have to write you a check, then they terminate your AdSense account for “policy violations”.
This happened to me about 15 years ago when I started using AdSense. I literally had JUST crossed the payment threshold and got canned. What pisses me off the most is that they cancel the whole account and don't pay any money at all, despite making it clear that they can detect the supposedly "fraudulent" clicks from real ones, but they'll punish you by cancelling ALL your payments, rather than just whatever supposed fraud there was.
You know what my sin was? I looked at my site a few times. Didn't even click, just loaded it a few times to see how it looked with the ads.
And yes, the "we don't have to tell you want you did wrong" bullshit is also infuriating.
Two of the admins in our new WoW-guild got banned by Discord for inviting guild applicants (who had submitted forms asking to be invited) to our server.
After a few messages there is phone verification and then after continuing to send out the accounts were banned. Contacting support was just a big 'we confirm the terms of service breach and we so not reinstate accounts'.
Those accounts were in some cases the sole admins of discord communities, and the ToS breach can't have been of anything specified in the ToS, but just falls under 'anything we decide in addition'.
But there is no alternative service people want to use.
That's the price you pay when you rely on someone's free service. It doesn't matter what people "want" to use. Pony up the cash for your own voice chat server and then this won't be a problem.
exactly. people are noticing it with google but its all tech companies where your only point of contact is an email address. paypal, uber, facebook, steam, etc etc -- they all deny service to innocent people on a regular basis with no recourse for them. it reminds me of pre social justice movement. isnt it the business' right to deny service to anyone they want to? like all black people? actually, no.
Recently, my Amazon payments account was banned from doing anything out of the blue. I called the customer service and they said they would forward my issue ot the correct people and I would receive a response on what was going on.
A day later, I receive an automated email stating that they were "unable to confirm my account information" and that "I will not be able to transact in the future". I was given absolutely zero info on why they were unable to verify me or any corrective actions I could take to fix it.
I got banned from a default sub in reddit for the reason "I didn't see that in the article". I replied to the mods with an explanation and a direct quote from teh article, and... nothing. They perma-banned me, and then blocked my account from messaging.
My comment was correct,
but even if it wasn't, it wasn't against the rules,
and even it if was against the rules, their own guidelines say you get a warning first,
and even then, the sitewide rules say that mods should hear appeals. But nah, forget all that. I'm just gone.
This seems unclear. Admins were banned from Discord for inviting people to your discord or were banned for inviting active members of your discord community to your WoW server?
Is the WoW server a bootleg? I'm not a WoW player so not sure what's out there, but I wouldn't be surprised if Discord-the-company was involved in something that might be considered anti-piracy actions.
The other question would be if they were doing something that would be detected as spamming, either for your discord community or the game. If the invites were sent via DM but were the only DM messaging between the admins and users they may well have tripped an automatic detection.
>But there is no alternative service people want to use.
I guess I'm lucky that almost all my friends vastly prefer TS3. Being on servers that aren't self-hosted at the mercy of random bans etc. always makes me uncomfortable.
> Our client was perfectly reputable, ran multi million dollar ad campaigns on television and radio, and was FDA approved.
I’m not trying to be a jerk here, but it sounds like your client is selling dietary supplements which Google has been (IMO rightfully) aggressively removing.
"FDA Approved" isn't a boogeyman term. It means the supplement was in fact reviewed/approved by the FDA, whereas dubious substances come with statements that their claims have not been FDA approved.
The FDA approves that ingredients are “safe” to consume but the label is often used to imply the FDA has approved the ingredient for whatever health claim the manufacturer has attached to the supplement.
It is a boogeyman term not because of what it actually means but how it is leveraged to say something it doesn’t mean.
> The FDA approves that ingredients are “safe” to consume
Only for food and drug ingredients. The FDA has no such process for supplements. They FDA only evaluates supplement products after public health concerns arise from a product already on the market.
"FDA is not authorized to review dietary supplement products for safety and effectiveness before they are marketed.
If the dietary supplement contains a NEW ingredient, manufacturers must notify FDA about that ingredient prior to marketing. However, the notification will only be reviewed by FDA (not approved)"
> The FDA says they cannot be used this way but they are.
1. Where does the FDA say that you can't say "Made in an FDA inspected facility"?
"Made in an FDA inspected facility" is not "Made in an FDA approved facility" nor is it "Inspected by the FDA" and it's definitely not "Approved by the FDA".
2. "Someone is doing something unscrupulous on Amazon.com" Gosh. Say it ain't so.
FDA approval means, specifically, that "the agency has determined that the benefits of the product outweigh the known risks for the intended use." (from ^)
And the FDA makes no such determination for dietary supplements. (from ^)
Touche, wrong word choice ("supplement") on my part.
Taking GP at their word, whatever it was was FDA approved. If the FDA doesn't approve supplements, then whatever GP represented couldn't have been a supplement, which gets back to my original question:
Why is "FDA approved" being treated here as a boogeyman by the parent?
It is difficult to imagine what would be marketed over the internet like this that requires FDA approval and isn't at least a bit slimy. If there's something obvious thing that fits in that category that isn't, no one has mentioned it yet.
> it sounds like your client is selling dietary supplements
The FDA doesn't "approve" dietary supplements, so either the person you're replying to is lying, ill informed (which I suspect), or it's not supplements.
FDA approves certain substances for specific uses. One loophole that dietary supplement companies will use to stamp the FDA approval on themselves is to include one such substance, even if the specific use isn't what their product is being used for.
Another loophole that these dietary supplement companies use is the "FDA Inspected" stamp.
> One loophole that dietary supplement companies will use to stamp the FDA approval on themselves is...
Can you link to a supplement that claims to be FDA approved as opposed to claiming that some included component has been approved for something unrelated, which is not the same thing?
> Another loophole that these dietary supplement companies use is the "FDA Inspected" stamp.
That's not a loophole. That's just preying on ignorance and inattentiveness.
> It took me 20 seconds to find one example on Amazon:
That product in fact does NOT say that it is FDA approved, nor does it say that any of its ingredients are FDA approved. So it is not an example of "stamp the FDA approval on themselves".
> It is a loophole in that they can list "FDA something"
They are making a statement of 100% fact. Their facility was inspected by the FDA. Outlawing saying so would violate the constitution. Notably they are not saying that the product is approved by the FDA.
I agree with you, but if we give the OP the benefit of the doubt, Google (among others like Amazon and Apple) do often ban innocent bystanders when trying to clean up legit problems. The larger issue with Google in particular is that they have next to zero customer support or appeals process. This stems out of their culture (hubris?) of the algorithm above all else.
This adsense behavior isn't even new- they did this to me in 2005! My website had a trickle of ads, just enough to pay for my college books each year. When I went to cash out Google decided it was click fraud and stole my money, with absolutely no recourse.
They're an awful company with horrible customer support. It's frustrating too, because my startup has investors who keep trying to get us to switch to GCP, but I don't think any responsible company would ever make themselves dependent on Google.
Whoa! I actually had pretty much the same experience about 11-ish years ago, in 2008. I completely forgot about that until seeing your comment here; wow, wow, wow!
This happened more than 10 years ago to me too. Actually, my Adsense account is still in a strange way inaccessible while I'm using all other Google services like Gmail.
I tried in all ways to get an explanation why my account was locked down and what I could do to resolve it: without any success.
The whole situation is just depressing because there is literally no way to discuss it in a reasonable manner other than automated canned answers or being ignored.
It was actually for me a mind changing event because it illustrated how the whole "internet is freedom" idea was a really stupid logical construct.
You can't form a class, and you don't have grounds to get anywhere in a lawsuit. You agreed to seek binding arbitration for any disputes relating to adsense when you signed up.
At some point, if essentially everyone is forbidding class action and requiring arbitration clauses, do we just not have rights anymore? At some point a judge will have to recognize that the abuse has gone too far and decide it's unenforceable because companies should not have the power to unilaterally "license" our rights out of existence.
I never been to silicon valley, so my knowledge about it is extremely limited. But last couple of years, I am hearing so many stories from big tech companies - from google to facebook to snapchat to uber - that I wonder if there is a big culture issue in valley based companies.
Once upon a time, C++ was a new language. (Bear with me here.) A lot of small companies popped up with libraries. Then C++ became popular and those companies went out of business because they couldn't afford to provide customer support to their new customers.
Many current tech companies are in the same position. They physically cannot afford to pay for actual support. Instead, they rely on algorithms and things like this article; if it becomes popular enough, it will get handled. The alternative is covert support via Bezos' personal address, for example.
There absolutely is, but they don't want to see it so they never will. (And I mean actually want to see it, no matter where that introspection goes. Not just telling themselves they're the kind of people that would want to see it.)
People that have worked in software at non-fashionable companies outside the region can usually see it, but when people move to the bubble (geographically or mentally) they often get assimilated.
It's hard to talk about, except in person. Online they can swarm any conversation, and they're from the west coast which means they're experts at passive-aggressively tearing people apart.
The way I've put it before, is that a culture issue (in something of a soup of them) is that "people" aren't an "interesting technology" that will, for instance, make HN headlines or provide interesting things for technologists to work on or brag about, so SV companies don't really invest in "people" to solve problems. SV companies under-value important labor roles like customer service, and instead over-value automation and algorithms.
A common argument is that people don't "scale" quite like automation and algorithms do, but we have millennia in expertise in labor markets (humanity survived quite a while without algorithms pretending to be customer service) that we could do much better, if so much of SV wasn't about avoiding and/or entirely shirking labor costs for "shinier" technology solutions.
I think apart from the scale, they view labor as a risk, rather than an asset. The ironic part to me is they're hiring "genius" level talent to create these dummy level algorithms.
That's certainly a part of the irony in how much they'd prefer to hire white collar SV labor than blue collar labor anywhere else. For the average salary of just one PhD in "data sciences" in SV cost of living you could often hire an entire floor of a call/support/service center in some Midwest state. (Though few of those consider labor an asset either, that's a more systemic problem in how the current zeitgeist of capitalism views the entire labor market, unfortunately.)
Of course they wait until a payout to do a deeper analysis. Most sites that sign up are spam and fraud that never earn much. So a payout threshold is a natural way of gating the spending of resources to weed out fraud and junk.
Although if your app is removed from Google Play, they'll happily still display AdMob ads in your app while telling you that you can't collect the earnings because your app was removed from Google Play.
Payout thresholds for Adsense are quite low. But it's right, in these cases they'd have to reimburse the advertisers. They could keep their share for investigation and running the ads but at least the amount that was due to be paid out should be reimbursed.
> They wait until your site has just under the earnings when they have to write you a check, then they terminate your AdSense account for “policy violations”.
I would want any company that is abusing their power to face consequences. However, it wouldn't surprise me one bit to find out that some of these companies complaining about getting banned are legitimately doing something wrong and their only cards to play are hoping for a political reaction, rather than suing Google in court and being exposed for why they were actually banned.
No idea why this comment is getting downvoted. It's like an arms race out there, where every trick in the book is being used to manipulate people and capture their attention.
Few years back I had an option to work on a recommendation system for a large video hosting service used by most media companies. They allowed me to spend two weeks with their engineering and sales teams. It was scary to say the least. The number of companies and layers of infrastructure all just mindlessly optimizing for ad clicks, watching viewers being bought and sold in real time like some kind of mad fish market, targeting of specific groups purely because they are hooked to the content rather than a valid target for the ad etc etc etc. I got out of there as fast as I could.
There is a category of dumb people in the world, who don't have the capacity to understand how dumb they are, nor does humanity yet posses the skills to enlighten them in a timely and effective manner.
Historically this group's stupidity has had localized effects. Today thanks to a global network they are hooked into, the effects of their mindlessness is amplified to levels no one has ever imagined.
At the beginning they do what they are told to do or what people around them are doing. And if they get very good at it and you tell them to stop because its causing issues, they wont. They cant. There is nothing sophisticated, that can be done about them other than cutting access to the network. This will take decades to fix.
When people sit around wondering (and coming up with all kinds of reasons which further obscure things) why they see random, inexplicable events happening all over the world, ask them to take a peak behind the curtain, at the mindless mega machine that is the ad serving ecosystem.
Agreed, this is all a form of weaponized AI being used by the private sector to influence, optimize, and profit. Using AI for these purposes is perfectly fine. But there needs to be a realization of the impact so that guidelines, checks, and balances can be put in place. There can be unintended consequences of these things that the AI doesn't care about since its playing for high-score in the game of attention, views, and profit.
The reason it is being downvoted it is because it is using lazy debating techniques.
Saying that "well but probably there are people that had it coming" does not add anything to the discussion. In fact it diminishes the quality.
The article on the comments are talking about examples of people the affirm having being treated wrongly. If there are other cases of people that have been punished correctly or these cases are lying, then some sort of proof, at least implying that, would be in order.
Sure. But it wouldn't surprise me one bit either if there was an active policy on the part of Google that optimized for profits at the expense of the rest of the world either.
See, if a company can do something for years then the least thing you can do is explain why they've been banned, 'policy violation' is such a great fig-leaf for a lot of trickery that it should be a requirement to spell out exactly what the violation was unless the account was only a few days old and did not have a history of good behavior right up to that point.
If Google wants to hide behind the mantra that they do not wish to tell the world what rules they have to avoid giving spammers an edge then they should improve their enforcement; not to send away the bulk of the complainants without a way to improve or some kind of dialogue.
It's possible that they banned someone by pure incompetence. I've definitely had my fair share of companies provide terrible service by probably just following some automated system as they are told. However, it is also very unlikely that there is a grand conspiracy on their part to ban people to simply maximize profits.
They do provide a pretty lengthy legal contract and terms to developers, which are partially outlined in this article. I think they just realize that the ball is in their court, and if the company wants to sue them then that is when they present the evidence.
I agree that it would be helpful for people that legitimately don't know and may have made some minor mistake to get more information to correct it, and prefer businesses be transparent when implementing their policies, but from a purely legal perspective it makes sense why Google doesn't do this.
> optimized for profits at the expense of the rest of the world
This is literally what each and every company does - P&G could sell me the toothpaste cheaper, but guess what, they want my money. Very rarely a business deal - money exchanging hands - is "fair" to everybody involved. What would you expect, somebody stop trying everything to make money because of the "greater good"?
Ironically you are giving Google to much credit. There is no real way to improve enforcement. At this insane scale, and with the extreme level of sophistication from scammers, and the privacy expectation from users it‘s almost impossible to do more than they are. Someone else said it further up. They can‘t just let employees snoop around in personably identifying data. Nor would you want that, right?
The fact is, as bad as Google is sometimes about user privacy and „borg behavior“. Their adversaries (malvertising, spammers, clickfarms, bot-armies, state actors) are so committed to manipulating humans for money and/or influence, that they must be hindered wherever possible. It‘s the war for attention. And it‘s only going to get more intense.
The problem here is the assumption that scaling up is inherently good and okay, and not being able to enforce good behavior at a certain scale is just an unfortunate and unavoidable result.
If enforcement can't be managed at that scale, things of that scale should be shut down. Platforms are not an inherent good.
I don’t know. Take YouTube. For all its faults, it has enabled countless people to make a living, or helped artists get noticed. I personally feel having the option for everyone to publish content without prohibitive cost or other barriers is a massive achievement.
Sure you could go back to selfhosting. But monetization and, more importantly, discovery will not work that way.
Or we go back to the days of yesteryear with vetted and sanitized gatekeepers (also beholden to advertisers) in place.
So yeah. Until there is a empathetic, nuanced AGI/ASI in charge of policing content there’s not gonna be a good solution. That might take longer than a while.
The problem isn't Google punishing actors they deem "bad".
Many of the banned probably did something most of us (and they) deem "shady".
The problem is Google's complete lack of transparency and super reliance on automation.
Google's defense is that they do not want to give out even one bit of information so theoretically some bad actors could assemble a composite model on how Google banning algorithm works.
Ok, but how about giving some sort of reasonable response and some sort of reasonable appeals process?
Court costs and lawyer fees are expensive, Google the monopoly can afford the best lawyers... So this is crying for a class action lawsuit with the best lawyers. When all is said and done it will be a slap on the wrist compared to Google's revenue. So unless the courts hand out huge punitive judgment it would not do much. And even if they do the parties effected will see a small fraction of their loss. Corporate psychopathy at its best or worst.
It sounds to me like the issue isn't so much with Google then, but that you don't believe the legal system is fair (which I generally agree), but that is a different issue entirely.
The legal system has its own objectives, for instance dissuading people from even coming to the courts, they often enough don't coincide with the objectives of the little man.
Psychopaths and corporations game the system as they have no morality. There isn't all that much the system can do about powerful forces gaming it. For instance car companies calculated that the cost of paying for injury lawsuits was less than recalling defective cars that were killing people. This is gaming the system.
It would be interesting if the courts started finding corporations having psychological disorders and punishing them for it by for instance replacing their upper leadership if found to have certain tendencies which were socially unacceptable.
What would that lawsuit allege? Under contract law, companies have a right to terminate their dealings with others, for any or no reason. Maybe it would be good if there was a law restricting that for these platforms, but as far as I know, there isn't. So I don't see how a lawsuit could be successful.
The claim could be something related to interfering with their business.
"GOOG agreed to provide my company a service that we have reasonably relied on"..."GOOG struck my app for no cause causing my business damage..." and so on.
Though, in-real-life, people who use google services have probably agreed to terms to bar any such claim.
...but its entirely legal (and reasonable) for a business to stop doing business with an entity simply because they feel like it. No matter if they entity was relying on the service or not. It happens all the time.
Except contracts may state otherwise and a court might decide that the "I no longer want to do business" clause is invalid or not applicable. And except in my countries you certainly can't just stop doing business with someone, including a few European ones. Double if the other end is a private customer.
I'm not a lawyer, but it feels like an abuse of monopoly power (Antitrust laws)
Google sounds like they are using their control of the Android store to prevent an application being published that competes with their Google Maps Mobile App, which also offers similar public transport tracking and time-table information
> However, it wouldn't surprise me one bit to find out that some of these companies complaining about getting banned are legitimately doing something wrong
The issue is that they're not being told what they did wrong, which instantly puts Google in the wrong as far as in concerned.
> The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it.
I’m not saying your wrong in this case, but that’s not a very reliable measure. Companies that have the best product can treat their customers like shit. Companies that have the lowest prices can treat their customers like shit. Any company that has a strong competitive offering that’s not based on service can treat their customers like shit.
That's a question more people should probably ask themselves. I screwed around with various ads, affiliate links, and so forth at one point. I fairly quickly came to the conclusion that the small amount I was bringing in wasn't worth having the ads/code/etc. on my site.
I might feel differently if it were a site focused on a particular topic, ads might be relevant to the audience, and the income were material. But, as it was, it just seemed better to keep it non-commercial.
> The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it.
+100 This has been my feeling ever since I first started using the android SDK. Google put the developer very low on the priority list, but, at the same time, the end user is also very low on the list.
The only people high on the list appear to be Google shareholders and the Google employees who work on android.
I sort of understand why search is a near-monopoly: it's free, and there's somewhat of a network effect and a self-reinforcing credibility thing. But what are the barriers for competition to AdSense? Why isn't some other company offering an alternative, like the same thing at a higher price with better support?
> The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it. My company has a half dozen stories like this about Google in the last year alone.
Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to apply to my local general contractors, painters, landscapers, electricians, etc.
> The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers...
Incorrect. The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to identify the number of competitors in that space. Google has at least one meaningful competitor to Android -- Apple -- so it can't be a monopoly.
Anticompetitive behavior would be illegal, except this isn't anticompetitive, since there is a meaningful competitor, Apple, and Google isn't locking this developer into Google's platform -- in fact it's the opposite. This is just merely bad behavior -- also one that could be corrected by the markets.
It's worth noting there was a time where Microsoft was the big bad monopolist, and everyone was clamoring for the government to break them up. In the end, it was deep competition from Apple and Google that knocked them off their throne, not some big FTC antitrust lawsuit.
While you are technically right that it is not a monopoly, it is an oligopoly, a term which implies it is likely to have the same issues as a monopoly while still having an insufficient number of competitors.
The problem compounds when Google and apple are both horizontal and vertical oligopolies.
If I complain that adwords scammed me (in a court of law), they could retaliate by terminating my GCE instances and gmail accounts.
> If I complain that adwords scammed me (in a court of law), they could retaliate by terminating my GCE instances and gmail accounts.
That's different, Google search AFAIK is a monopoly. And an oligopoly by definition are not monopoly. If Google and Apple conspired together to prevent competition, that would be illegal.
But AFAICT, the remedy for the developer is to simply not develop on Android. You're not making a strong enough case here for what would appear to be an argument for government intervention.
“Number of competitors in that space” is not unrelated to “and still get away with it.” If this (monopolistic) behaviour could be corrected by competition, why hasn’t competition with Apple corrected it?
You can't have it both ways. A monopoly cannot exist if there is meaningful competition. Last I checked, Apple was still the #1 smart phone manufacturer.
Anti-competitive behavior would be if Google bought up all the manufacturers in China say. And kicking off a developer off the play store doesn't do anything to Apple as far as I can tell.
> The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it.
The only way of identifying a monopoly is to see if they have (very close to) 100% market share.
What you're talking about is a company with market power. Incidentally, this is also what the FTC regulates. Being a monopoly is 100% legal as long as you don't abuse your market position. And you can abuse your market position without being a monopoly.
Maybe you think that's pedantic, but I think it's an important distinction. Google is not a monopoly - they have significant competition in every market they're in. But they are still very abusive in wielding their power.
I do not think a market share of 90% in most markets is ‘significant competition’, especially when the markup on any non-google phone can easily be 1000%
If you created a startup that grew to take 10% of a global market, would you consider your business to be insignificant?
> especially when the markup on any non-google phone can easily be 1000%.
I'm not really sure I understand. The newest Google pixel and iPhone are similarly priced. Unless by "Google phone" you mean Android, in which case yes apple lacks choice on the low end but 10x is still a bit of an exaggeration.
iOS also has >20% market share globally, while we are arguing about numbers. This gets back to my "significant competition" remark. Are you arguing that Apple is insignificant?
10x is not at all an exaggeration. The cheapest iPhone is $750, and there are dozens of Android phones that cost less than $75. Not good ones, but millions of people do buy them, and for those people Google is effectively a monopoly.
Which competitor do you have in mind? Users cannot install Android on Apple devices and vice versa, your app repository is decided at the moment you buy the device, and I don't see any other competing Play Store. Not to mention - have you ever tried to disable Google Play Services in your Android phone?
I ran a website that I first coded when I was 14-15, then kept improving over the years. It was for amateur electronic music producers to upload their tracks and after a few years there were several thousand active users, generating ~$400/month in AdSense.
One day a relatively famous DJ tweeted a link to a song on the website, and that day alone generated close to $300, so 19 year old me thought he was about to earn his first $1000 in one month from a website! But Google decided to block the account because I guess that spike in traffic was too much, even though it all came from Twitter...
So suddenly I was left with this website I had invested hundreds of hours in, and no way to monetise it. I tried a few other ad networks but they all seemed really dodgy and in the end decided to leave it with no ads.
There really needs to be more regulation in this space.
I also developed a website young (mid teens), which was essentially a "beautiful/unique website ranking" based on visitor submissions and upvote/downvote system. I had the essential pieces done and launched the website, super excited as my first real project.
I decided to toss on Google AdSense to see if I could potentially monetize the website by putting a single picture advertisement on the right side of the website. I was starting to generate some money (small, but exciting for a young developer). I was talking to my high school friend about what I was doing and how AdSense worked. Unbeknownst to me, he later visited my website and clicked the ads repeatedly expecting to make me hundreds of dollars... well, my account was shut down.
I tried to plead my case, Google didn't care at all. I was "banned" and a small fish. Years later (in my early 20's) I considered revisiting the idea of monetizing a site I had for an online community. I tried to appeal to Google again lifting the ban and was denied.
I was effectively banned for life from using Google AdSense as a young teen because of a friend "trying to make me rich" without him knowing the repercussions. I know there are alternatives to Google AdSense, however, Google was the one that payed the best. Still irks me to this day when I think about it...
Nothing. If anything, I'm feeling like we should create bots, browser extensions that repeatedly do this and cause massive havoc on their system until they listen and start figuring out better ways to fix their system. Folks are not fighting back. I'm not into ads and have never cared about using them to monetize, but if I did and they took my money. It's war.
That was part of my argument during the appeal. And like every other report of similar things happening, all I get back in response was some canned copy/paste email from their policies. It seemed very out of my control for something like this to happen and I felt wrongly punished - and for a lifetime!? I can understand "banned for X amount of time" but as a young developer's first offence a lifetime ban seems a bit overkill.
Wow, I tried to add Google Ads to a web community I hand-built built in 2005 and had this exact same thing happen to me. They have my social security number, so ~15 years later I still can't use their platform. I never even float the idea of using Adsense to a company I'm working for, because in my experience the whole thing is just broken.
I remember being confusingly bitter towards Facebook when it became an ad network, clearly selling user data to generate revenue, but it wasn't until this comment that I realize it's because I tried to do it the other way and got banned.
Honestly my big problems with Google as a user are the same as yours: they try to automate their customer service, and the software just isn't even close to being a human equivalent. It's an absolute nightmare.
I understand trying to automate customer service but when you have an alleged human reply with the following after an email chain with nothing more then RTFM, something is broken. Phrases such as "I made sure to include all the information available to me" just make you feel even more worthless.
> Wed, Aug 28, 9:28 AM EDT: Google Play team > I’m not able to provide any more information or a better answer to your question. In our previous email, I made sure to include all the information available to me.
Is there really no other way to monetize except through ads? Sure, there needs to be more regulation in this space, I agree with that. But the idea that ads are the best monetization has never sat well with me.
I understand that it's convenient because you get money without asking your end users for it. But I've always thought of it as "if it seems too good to be true, then it probably isn't" and stories like yours just keep reinforcing that feeling.
And all that's without considering how ads degrade the user experience or help erode the privacy. Every time I have to browse the web without an adblocker, I get freshly shocked at how awful it is.
Sure there is, but most people don't bother for a few reasons:
-Slapping some ad network's code into your site is comparatively easy, and monetizing almost every other way is hard (i.e. "I just want to create awesome content and get paid for it, I don't want to be my own sales department, too, that's boring")
-Even if you do monetize other ways, slapping some ad network's code into your site is, effectively, 'free money' on top of what the site's users are willing to pony up for
-Users have been inured into believing and accepting that covering every possible square inch of civilization with ads is an unavoidable consequence of modern life. So much so that the absence of ads in something that isn't otherwise monetized is suspicious (there's no such thing as a free lunch)
You're forgetting a major one: there's a whole gulf of things that people just aren't willing to actually take their wallet out for. People even scoff paying $8/mo to Netflix while spending hours watching it daily. Good luck taking payments for your little project.
For all sorts of reasons, too: we have been conditioned to think ads = free, none of your competitors ask for money (they use ads, so they're "free"), the modern payment flow is still cumbersome and doesn't support microtransactions, there are all sorts of things like HN that I simply wouldn't use if it wasn't free, your users can't afford it, etc.
One of the worst aspects of ads is how they've mutated our society's relationship with paying for things that we value, but ads definitely fill the void outlined above. Your creation's value to society doesn't have to breach the high threshold of getting a user to take their wallet out.
But just think of all the things you have done on the internet today, all the things you enjoyed doing or thought were worth even a tiny amount of attention, yet how unwilling you'd be to actually send money their way in the current system.
If you take money, you are (in some countries) legally bound to reimburse if shit happens.
And this is something I'd like to see for products that make their money less directly: If it would be legally the same if you paid with personal data, by watching ads or paid with money like any other product Facebook and the likes would be forced to quality management AND stuff like random blocking wouldn't be possible bcs of customer rights.
I wish there was, and I considered charging users but it becomes a lot more complex at least from a technical point of view.
The other big reason for not trying was that the biggest user base was in India, where my website was fairly popular for a number of years. This meant that most of the users didn’t have as much disposable income as average users in western countries.
Ads are annoying, but they are an incredibly easy and effective way of monetizing a popular website really. If they are placed correctly they shouldn’t even impact the ux that much.
Sponsorships possibly through Patreon? User sponsorships in the $1-5 range get a little "I'm a sponsor" bling, companies (or individuals) can sponsor higher perhaps with levels for on-site only ("listen to my new release!") or off-site ads (software, instruments, mics, etc.)
We were banned from the Play Store for violation of their Impersonation policy in mid July after publishing an update. We just got reinstated last week. During the course of the lengthy appeal I had an unshakable feeling I was up against The System™. I still believe I was communicating with a bot and not an actual human being — I refuse to accept a rational human being will behave the way Bob from Google did.
It's such a stark contrast to developing a web app which you can _freely_ publish. When did thing go so horribly wrong?
Maybe the tyranny of the fiefdoms will drive us back towards HTTPS.
Certainly I've heard the question "why don't we do an iOS app and an Android app?" in respect of conference schedules. Usually after people saw the Google IO schedule app.
My response was, now we have HTTP push notifications, we can do everything we need on a website. Most people just want the now-and-next information. And as a bonus, hook an old PC up to a TV and we've got now-and-next on a conveniently located display (the lobby, main conference hall, etc). Not to mention the ease of maintenance.
I’ve been building apps for Windows for over a decade (we used to call them programs or software) and this isn’t exactly a problem there. The problem is strong centralized App Store control, not native app development.
>I’ve been building apps for Windows for over a decade and this isn’t exactly a problem there.
You 300% completely miss my point. Apps ARE the problem. Especially in the "for Windows" context. Now I need to install 30 different apps to access 20 different sites, and another 40 different apps on my other device that's in a different app eco system.
...versus standardized http and browsers. The entire app eco system in their specific walled incompatible gardens is top to bottom is toxic.
And that's not me pulling a stallman. Every fuckin website and company on every device wants me to install their own app. It's tedious AF at best
For decades, developers distributed actual non-web software without having to deal with technical fiefdoms. Proposing the web is an alternative just masks a political/social problem as a technical one.
And will continue to do so because anyone who wants to create a new browser will be locked out of supporting EME by Google as we've already seen happen a couple times. Then once they get rid of the address bar and URLs, the only way to find anything on the web will be through a search which Google happens to also dominate in.
When my app update was rejected, I had the exact same feeling. This can't be a human being, I am talking to a bot. At some point I just gave up, which is still hurting a bit. What did you do to talk to an actual human?
I'm not sure what did it at the end — I literally called the guy a cyborg and asked for someone else to review the appeal. I also filled in all sorts of appeals/forms, even for unrelated things and some even multiple times. I still don't know what did it for us.
It's such a stark contrast to developing a web app which you can _freely_ publish.
The difference isn't between webapp and native, it's between publishing on Google's services and doing it elsewhere. Hosting binaries on GitHub or even your own site remains viable, and perhaps we should encourage more users to leave the walled garden this way.
I think a lot of their problems stem from outsourcing most of their customer service to poorly trained and poorly compensated contractors. Plus there seems like there's a firewall between actual Googlers who could make changes and communications from outside customers/devs/etc, and they're so insulated from the outside that they don't know the situation on the ground.
I think a contributing problem is the inadequate features of mobile browsers. It's harder to get to the pages you want to - harder to set multiple pages to launch on start; manage open windows; quickly navigate to apps you use without typing. Sure you can do the latter two things, but it's not nearly as easy as it is on desktop.
This is exactly it! Every time I get a sales email from GCP I bring up all the support issues I have with G in general, such as problems getting ReCaptcha to work. The response is always "sorry, we can't help you at all." Well then, stop trying to sell me your shit when you won't support it.
Yea amazon support on the phone has always helped me out when there were shipping issues. Even when someone literally just ripped open a package and stole the contents, the lady on the phone at amazon was courteous and helped me out.
I had apps removed for not describing them as containing ads because Google at that time was busy undermining the definition by defining basically any link to anything as advertising.
The nasty part with those sudden removal/bans from AppStore’s/ services is that they say:
You’ve violated something.
You’re blocked.
You know why!
Imagine going with that approach to a child...
Without explaining or suggesting the rationale it’s closer to very dark dictatorship instead of providing something closer to a decent legal system where you can appeal and a system that should make justice.
With those companies it’s more like a field trial.
Who would've thought that one day we'd be thinking about the likes of Apple and Google in the same way as Kafka, and one has to imagine many others, thought about the bureaucracy of the Dual Monarchy.
The Google and Apple app stores and support services ought to be regulated as public utilities. Because they effectively constitute a duopoly regarding apps for mobile devices.
That would prevent them from arbitrarily refusing to provide services and list apps in their stores. They could refuse, but only for permitted reasons, and with a clear appeal process.
The Public Utility Commission of Texas has a pretty clear explanation.[0] The top DDG hit was an ancient law review.[1] It's probably outdated, but makes an interesting read.
Edit: I mean, whether you're a residential customer or a business, public utilities (electricity, water, sewer, garbage, police, ...) can't arbitrarily refuse service.
I don't know if I agree that mobile apps are on the same level as electricity and internet connectivity in terms of how crucial they are to be productive citizenry.
The Google and Apple App Stores generate ~$100 billion in annual revenue combined, and growing at about 25% per year. The App Stores are the greatest software distribution and monetization platforms ever created, second perhaps only to “The Internet” as a whole.
Regulating the App Stores as some sort of utility sounds like the perfect way to stifle growth and make it more difficult and expensive to publish on the App Store, which would hit small developers in particular.
Every percentage point reduction in the growth of these stores at this point is basically $1 billion taken out of developers’ pockets.
...until it's your app that has been removed, your company that is going out of business, and the response from the rest of the technological world is, "Eh, collateral damage. Too bad."
I've been reading naval history lately. The thing that strikes me most is that the benefits, such as they are, of war (or in this case, app store review non-support) are collective, but the costs are paid individually.
I mean is this not literally the cost of business? I could think of a few things entirely outside of my company’s control that if happened would just straight up end our business within the week.
> Regulating the App Stores as some sort of utility sounds like the perfect way to stifle growth and make it more difficult and expensive to publish on the App Store
Please explain how you've come to this conclusion, because I can't follow your logic.
It’s well established that regulations increase transaction costs and stifle innovation.
Take FDA regulations for example. The cost of developing a drug for sale in the USA in orders of magnitude higher due to these regulations. In safety critical systems, we pay this cost because the alternative is that people die. However, even still, the regulatory system itself may also be responsible for many deaths, due to viable treatments being either unavailable or unaffordable.
A regulatory framework on software distribution platforms frankly sounds horrific on many levels, but to avoid hyperbole, the most obvious effect would be increased compliance cost to the platform provider, which would be passed on to developers or end users.
Making apps unreviewable, or prohibitively costly to review, or imposing significant liability into the app review process is a recipe for increased cost and decreased growth, simply put.
I think we have a different idea of what these hypothetical regulations would do.
I see it as regulations forcing Google and Apple, as platform owners, to not abuse their enormous power over developers on their platforms. Much like common-carrier regulations.
I don't see how that sort of regulation would massively increase costs to Google and Apple (who are profiting massively off their platforms anyway!)
I also don't agree that regulations on these platforms sounds horrific. I think just about anything is better than the power concentrated entirely at the whims of Google and Apple at the moment. Similarly, I don't think there'd be increased compliance cost to the platform. Regulation isn't always bad (in fact, I'd argue the vast majority of regulation is good, we just hear about the smaller amount of bad bits that slip through).
> I see it as regulations forcing Google and Apple, as platform owners, to not abuse their enormous power over developers on their platforms.
How do you think Apple is “abusing” their power, and what kind of regulation would curtail that? How would compliance with the regulation be monitored and enforced? Would only Apple and Google need follow these regulations, or any software distribution platform, or maybe platforms with a threshold of revenue?
I believe most of what we read about happening to devs on these App Stores relate to automated processes flagging accounts, because it’s not humanly possible to review the quantity of code being shipped through these stores. It’s not abuse to have a imperfect process - to me the term abuse implies the slight was done to some end - with some nefarious purpose.
So when we get into that domain, perhaps it comes down to policies like “App Store subscriptions must be paid for through App Store if they are made in-app and Apple will get its cut”. Some people very strongly think this is “abuse” of their market position. IMO that is their business model and the whole reason they built the entire App Store ecosystem - in order to provide services revenue in the face of dwindling device sales, because the devices are so fast and durable you don’t need a new one every 2 years anymore. IMO forcing Apple to turn off these revenue streams is akin to theft of their IP. As a developer I personally feel like I should be able to offer my own creations on my own terms, and as long as those terms are clearly stated and non-discriminatory the market can take it or leave it.
But if, for example, someone does believe this is a good example of a regulation to curtail an abuse of power by the App Stores — that is an example of a regulation which would cost Apple billions of dollars, and they will certainly attempt to make it up somewhere down the line.
This is always the disconnect between what should be in the regulations and what ends up being in them every time.
All of them start with a legitimate problem and then we get policy that have a wider scope or details even dumber than what the companies are doing (see GDPR fining a small Austrian retail store $4k because they had a single surveillance camera too broadly pointed at a sidewalk). Often pushed for by competition and often only designed for big mega companies like Google not the small ones who would normally replace Google in the future with something better.
Most importantly unlike the companies and their policies which change and die, the regulations live long after the original problem has either faded in importance or every new better company comes around and are forced to jump through hoops because of Google's behaviour (assuming they even try).
Most of humanity would appreciate the lowest-effort 5% chopped off the app stores. There's an stratum of trash there, and if it were even slightly more difficult to publish on the app store, I'd be happy.
I'd suspect a competitor flagged your app somehow. This seems to be a trending dark pattern. Across a lot of competitive platforms - Amazon Sellers, App Store, Play Store - even social media people are flagging content as abusive to hurt competing brands.
Since normal support channels don't work, maybe report this to a bug bounty - this would be considered a type of social hack, right? Someone or something convinced their app review system to flag your apps and eventually have them removed.
From my experience with bug bounties, if it's not on the OWASP TOP10, they'll kick, stamp, scream and fight -- even if you say "I don't want the bounty, I just want this bug fixed".
(backstory: found a bug in Twitter which disclosed DMs. Reported it, Twitter engineer had a raging tantrum on Hackerone, H1 (I assume) mistook his messages for mine and banned me from the site. Found out a mutual was a Twitter engineer, sent him the POC. A few days later, fixed)
I propose a new heuristic called "The HN PR Law" or something to that effect: no response from a company on a negative PR incident should be taken seriously after an article on said incident hits the front page of HN.
Given Google's track record and the ranking of this post, they'll probably reinstate the app within a few hours, and I propose that we act as if they had not - only acting on issues after they have been exposed to a massive audience signals a desire for public positive perception without any actual care for users, and users shouldn't have to go to social media to get their problems solved.
I like Apple's approach. When some scammy dev ran to the press with a sob story, Apple would expose all the shady shit the dev was doing. Sorry, but 99% of these whiney stories are the developer's fault. Don't violate the terms of service, and don't be shady. It's not that hard.
Maybe Google can´t do that because they are the ones doing the scummy thing.
I personally know 2 cases of people banned from Google, in one case they were actually infringement (they made an app using copyrighted characters), and in the other it was the same case stated elsewhere - grandmother clicked repeatedly on the ads thinking she was helping her grandson, and he got banned from AdSense forever.
Only 12 hours between an email and the account termination, with no real interaction and no way to change what seems not to be a serious problem.
That would change the time gap during responsible disclosure, Alphabet/Google is changing its metrics. I mean why only small developers would have to be mistreated.
If they play it that way, Android developers community can also report platform bugs to them - and go full disclosure (report the bug publicly) within 12 hours.
Based on the article even if Google replied you'd still be in line to disclose regardless, this poor developer's appeals were rejected, I'm not convinced a human ever read them on the way down.
'Make game of that which makes as much of thee' is some ancient wisdom. This sort of behavior by Google certainly does justify providing no more than a 12 hour window to Google to fix problems under responsible disclosure. Many in the industry are unhappy with Google only giving companies 90 days with Project Zero as they feel that large corporations should be given preferential and deferential treatment (they are people after all), but when it comes to app developers 12 hours is acceptable? I think not. Those who wish to set the rules must be willing to play by the same.
Everyone in this thread is bashing Google for their evil-ness, but I had the exact same experience with the iOS AppStore: Apple just claimed I broke some policy without further details, but I was pretty sure this was not the case. Upon asking for clarification, they basically sent the same paragraph again. I ended up sending an "update" with some random changes on things related to said policy (without actually changing functionality) and it somehow got approved.
If you think about it, it's impossible to fully check an app for compliance. That's probably why the enforcement appears so aimless and fuzzy from the outside.
The company I work for has banned the use of Google Cloud due to how they treat their Play Store developers, in particular that there never seems to be any human being that you can talk to and find out what you need to do to fix the situation. We do not want the same to occur to our servers or if there is an overflow from Play Store ban to GCP etc.
This is why I moved my clients off G-Suite and onto Zoho. And it's why where possible, I advise people to build clean web-based mobile apps which do not require a "store".
Since we have no practical alternative to Play Store and Apple Store for native phone apps, we'll just have to settle for slightly fewer features and slightly less performance with non-native apps. (And no, sideloading isn't an option. Most users are barely able to install a native app via a link directly to their store.)
For Google, it's simply not worth their time to maintain a staff of humans to prevent these false negatives. They are not committed to the app developers just as they are not committed to their non-government G-Suite clients. They are committed to their primary revenue streams. And the reason they can simply not care about some human losses (stories like TFA) is because they are a monopoly when it comes to Android apps. And while Amazon is not an admirable company at all (based on how it treats its sellers or low level employees), their cloud business seems to have more human oversight - or at least a less heavy-handed automated banning system.
Google's behavior will continue to be profitable enough that they won't change it... for many years, or until the regulators come at them. Since the US regulators are now almost entirely corporate lobbyists themselves, we'll have to depend on the EU to fight it. (And since the EU is becoming corporatized as well, the window of opportunity is shrinking.)
Wow the same thing happened to me[1], luckily I was awake by chance and took action after the first email, scary to think that if I was just offline for a few days my whole account could have been banned with no recourse..
@lladnar does your app maybe have 'Android' in the name? I believe that was the issue they had with mine, I dont even think humans are in the loop at all here to give feedback.
Wow, I can't believe they suspended Mon transit! It's been a while since I lived in Montreal, but it was super helpful back then, showing the next bus times and the number of available public bike system bikes at nearby stations.
Seems like a good time to bring it up again -- 18 years ago my Google ads account was locked for reasons unknown to me. I'm still waiting for an answer on my appeal. Yes, I was one of their first few thousand advertisers. Even back then they treated us like crap when they could have easily had a human review every decision.
We has a small niche product in Google Play, worked 100% offline, so quite secure for the user privacy and so on, had ratings of about 3.7. The service had generated about $30.000 and would have generated another $30.000 in it's lifetime, unless Google had, quite unjustly, taken it out spring 2019. When we tried to discuss about it, we got what we understood was a threat to close our account. Obviously we talked to some person, I wonder if he had been told to treat us like sh or if there was some other reason. Obviously, for the next apps, we are thinking furiously on how to not be dependent on app stores.
Looking at this app, it's an absolute hidden gem of how amazing Android is as well.
The main app can have third party extensions provided just by installing more APKs. This is something I tried to explore quite a few years ago when I last had an Android phone, but seeing such a polished app which achieves it is nice.
My game ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nkcss.shad... ) was suspended because I did not have a link to my privacy policy in the app (required when you serve ads for some reason). My game only shows an ad every other time you abort a game or ask for a hint, if you just play without hints/aborting games, you'll never see an ad. It was up for about 6 months, ~1000 installs, then it was taken offline. I was busy for another 6-9 months, after digging into the reason why it was taken down, I created a privacy policy page, added a link in the app to the page and re-submitted it, then appealed/asked for another review on the play store and admob and after a few days, everything was restored again.
It can be a pain to find out the exact reason, by in my case, after fixing what they wanted to have changed, it was all ok.
Meanwhile your ad network library was mining data in the background (they do that even if you don't show the ad) of users without telling them in privacy policy. You're not the victim in your case.
I checked the 'has ads' when publishing, show it shows that before you install. I just wasn't aware I had to have a policy linked in the app, that's what I'm trying to explain here and how it was resolved in the end...
Would not it be better to make it difficult to collect data (e.g. show a popup asking access to those data every time) instead of just requiring a privacy policy that nobody reads?
I have a strong feeling that this will soon happen to my Play Store account. I did some very lax hobby development many years ago (my biggest app was also transit related!), and my account has basically been inactive with just a few apps. I guess its enough that 1 human somewhere reports my apps for anything and Im gone from the Play Store, which would be a bit sad. I still remember thinking it was so awesome that developing for android was so simple, and free!
This sounds like exactly what you'd expect from a company that is bleeding talent and morale.
Note: I do not have any information that that is what is happening in Google; I'm just saying what my guess would be if I were presented the situation as "these are the symptoms at Company X. What is the problem?"
It's a pretty well tested principle that massive familial wealth usually disappears by the 3rd or 4th generation (because the descendents regress to the norm in terms of ability) and it looks like we're seeing the same at Google.
They've got too little "real" work for the number of hands they need to keep busy, so unqualified people are going back and "improving" the work of the 1st and 2nd generation.
But because of the company's size, it can't hire high risk shoot from the hip revolutionaries (not that they'd want to work at a buttoned up Corp anyway), so it's staffed with safe employees who don't really resemble the cowboys of the 1st and 2nd generations, and hence can't improve the systems any further.
I searched for an error message yesterday and Search removed 18 of the 20 keywords (they are all scratched out as 'missing'). The only remaining keywords were for the platform I had the error on. Thousands of results that were all completely irrelevant. I was completely stunned how something I rely on could suddenly do that. What is the point?
Google's monopoly has gotten to the point where they do not care how their products perform, just so long as the money continues to rain in.
The 'missing' notes are incredibly condescending. Not only are the results irrelevant/incorrect, they also had to arrogantly point out exactly how they are choosing to ignore the user's request.
Amen to that. I got to where I am as a sysadmin by knowing how to filter out keywords to make my search specific. Then Google throw all that away and decide for me what I want to search for. No Google, you don't tell me what to do.
[The Warners try to hide form Dr, Scratchandsniff in
a piano recital, where Tymannini is about to perform]
TYMP: Franz Schubert intended the scherzo
to reflect the struggle between intellect
and the creative process.
TYMP: However, Schubert was simply incapable
of expressing such delicate nuance.
But, thanks to *my* genius,
I will perform this great work,
*not* as the composer wrote it,
but as he *intended*.
DWIM ("Do What I Mean")[1] has always been impossible; it's a fallacious belief that what a user intended is different from what they actually said, and that this intent can somehow be divined form a few words, typos, etc.
> as a sysadmin
It doesn't even require any advanced technical knowledge. Most people understand basic keyword searching. Over the last ~6-12 months, I've seen a wide variety of people complain about Google ignoring their search terms.
Happens to me all the time now too. Even when I put the phrase in quotes it still omits words or says "search for X, do your really want to search for Y"
But maybe our use cases are the outliers, and the new search is what works for most people.
> But maybe our use cases are the outliers, and the new search is what works for most people.
I think it's a probability problem more often expressed in terms of medical tests / false positives. If a million people search for <word> but 1% of those make a typo and search for <wrod> instead, whereas a thousand people deliberately search for <wrod>, Google's observation of a search for <wrod> is 90% likely to be a typo.
However well-intentioned, this can undermine one of the core, original features of a good search engine like Google: deriving value from the "long tail" of esoteric (and often very technical) quests for information.
Sure, correcting typos, I wouldn't hold that against them. However, when they intentionally scratch out search terms for no apparent reason and show extremely vague matches, it's completely useless. I was searching for a specific error message that was causing my MacBook to freeze on login. Instead, the only two terms Google preserved were 'mac os'. First result was Apple's own page on the OS. Every result was entirely useless. Fine, if there's no actual result for this error message, tell me, but don't make me scan through a page full of irrelevant links and make me figure out myself why they're irrelevant.
The real problem here is that Google does this even when we use double quotes and the verbatim option :-/
I switched to DDG a while ago, -it is about as good as Google now, much thanks to Googles own effort ower the last decade to nerf its own search engine.
Since they are now about equal I use the one that doesn't track me and doesn't support Google.
I've been using DDG for about half a year now, most of the time it does its job, but just yesterday, there was a case where I had to run back to Google: Searching for the "Ship of Theseus" with the words "ship replaced part by part" on Google lead me straight to the Wiki article, whereas on DDG...
Not sure if they're using a statistical (DDG could never compete, too few searches performed) or an algorithmic (DDG could, in time, get this far too) pattern to achieve correct results.
EDIT: It's about the tenth result on DDG, the last one to show before having to click to load more results. Not bad, actually.
Google maps, Wikipedia and other sources apparently spell it Suliven [1], and a Google search for that, without quotes, returns it. Searching for "sulliven" (in quotes) finds a few (possibly mis-spelled?) references to the mountain (and some other things, mostly people named Sulliven.)
Funny cause I have just started to notice that as well, BUT I am mainly a DDG user that resort to using Google search in case I cannot find something satisfactory on my preferred search engine.
Speaking about YouTube, I think it might be recommending through other videos that you might have watched/liked that are not related to either, but somehow other users have watched/liked as well. So instead of having a relation A-B, it is now a relation A-C <-> D-B, you and the other users have watched/liked C and D, therefore you might want to watch B.
Yeah YouTube's recommendations don't really strike me as being based on comparison of the content or themes of the videos, but based pretty heavily on what other users have watched.
To be fair, codifying video into clusterable features is a lot harder than audio. But when you have Google levels of money I'd expect a bit more progress.
We should all make a concerted effort to get people to stop using Google Play. There are multiple websites which offer apps, including ones where search can be automated. The default "app management app" should be something which is based on multiple source, independent of each others and not Google controlled.
I realize that might be very hard; and if you're logged into a Google account on your phone (which you really shouldn't be!) it's very tempting to use Google Play, so what I suggested requires either self-discipline or rooting devices to make them not default to Google Play. On the other hand, maybe the US sanctions against Huawei might actually make that a viable option? Time will tell.
Personally, I use APKPure instead of Google Play; they have an app of their own. Not the best solution - and certainly doesn't solve the article author's problem - but at least I don't have worry about Google's heavy-handed tactics so much.
This is my personal nightmare as a android developer, and knowing google it's not a matter of "if" but rather "when".
(Google did remove my app from store once for not providing a link to a privacy policy document, abruptly, with no warning and notifying me post-factum, reading other horror stories I consider myself lucky)
Google has lost any connection to their once oh so brightly glowing halo. As a developer I am steering clear of Google Cloud partly because of all their crappy way of dealing with humans. AWS and Azure just make more sense down here in Melbourne as well.
I have a very similar story. I had an AdMod ad running on my free app, and all of a sudden the account was deleted in a few hours just before it was time to get my earnings. Google had no responses and were unreachable and I just gave up.
After this I found this has happened to 1000s of people and I realize how massively powerful this company is and they're using AI/bots to make decisions. I've now moved away from Google as much as I can and I warn others of their monopolistic practices and lack of care toward customers.
What we have is a giant GAN - google's AI trying to spot the real bad actors from not, against the bad actors AI trying to fool the google AI.
I suspect your experience is a sign that the bad actors are getting the upper hand and one of the problems in this space is human intervention can't really scale against machines.
It could be a fight for survival for these companies whose huge market cap is based on the enormous scaling benefits of automation - however if it turns out that the automation processes can't successfully scale once automated fraud is taken into account then the only solution might be to descale the operation - making them vulnerable to traditional companies.
> Sun, Aug 25, 05:21 PM EDT: Google Play Team > After reviewing your appeal, we have confirmed our initial decision and will not be able to reinstate your developer account.
I think I might of missed it but, did they even appeal? The hell is Google doing saying they did if they didn't? I would sure hope this is some sort of grounds of defamation or some related law, claiming someone said something they didn't even say is pretty awful. I wish people would start suing the hell out of Google for their obviously ridiculous hostile behavior, looks like we have dozens upon dozens of companies that could band together too.
Google's App Store is failing miserably with both Type 1 (false negative) and Type 2 (false positive) errors. As a result, malware gets allowed in while reputable developers get kicked off.
And there's apparently no (real) appeal process. Once the robot decides it doesn't like you, you can't change its mind and it won't tell you why.
These problems are eminently fixable. But Google's app store desperately needs competition, some antitrust investigations, and probably some hefty class action judgments. Without those, Google has absolutely no motivation to fix the mess. With those motivations, Google could fix this overnight.
I don't really see any mention of it, but do you at least have some idea of what may have triggered this issue? I see that your open-source Android app is serving ads. I'm also curious why your app isn't on F-Droid?
Seems it wasn't on F-Droid because it uses some Google Play Services (for maps, ads, location, etc), and nobody took the time to make a fork without those non-free dependencies.
We need something like "tenant rights" for online marketplaces in addition to legal protections similar to what happens with evictions. This will not be solved voluntarily by the "landlords."
Earlier after certain amount of backlash Google employee reading HN used to help. Now I think this is also banned/discouraged by Google. Google New policy: Let's just ignore these type of posts and let it disappear from front page in few hours. What option developers or user's have ?
Shun Android or Google services. I think for vast majority of developers and Users this not an option.
Okay, what if I can bribe someone that works for Google reviewing apps to terminate a competing app? Folks were bribing T mobile employees to steal phone numbers so they can empty bank/crypto accounts. Folks were bribing employees that worked for background checking services to pull data so they can perform identity theft. I imagine folks that review apps for Google are not highly paid and since they rarely reply to you. Most app developers just quietly go away when such things happen.
Guilty until you prove yourself innocent. It's efficient, but unethical and immoral.
Requiring large entities such as government or monopolies to consider you innocent until proven guilty in a 3rd party controlled system, such as a court, is a fundamentally important check on power.
I'm guessing some lawyer at the Montreal transit authority decided to report that app for violating some kind of intellectual property. And, due to Google's consistent cover-their-asses policy (of Youtube fame), they decided to shut down that app.
For what it's worth, I use this app on a daily basis and haven't found any deceptive behaviour. It's pretty annoying that now I have to download the APK from his website instead of the Play Store, so thanks for that Google.
Mobile developer myself and I'm scared that this will happen to me, too. I have a >600k downloads open source app on the Play Store and I got 2 warnings for other apps within the last 8 years on the store without any explanation or what so ever. The non existent communication from Google really stinks.
These "Google suspended my account" stories are all similar in that Google always refuses to provide any details about the supposed violation. Is there a good reason for this reticence, or are they intentionally vague just so you have no way to defend yourself?
Came here to suggest publishing the app on F-Droid as it is FOSS. An alternative is make a PWA instead of an app. Those cannot be banned by an 'App Store' (read: walled garden with one lunatic dictator being the gardener).
PWA = Progressive Web App ---"progressive" seems to mean it uses some relatively recent additions to browsers to make the app feel more like a native app.
"Progressive" in this case means it uses progressive enhancement: it'll work even if your browser doesn't have those additions (though QoL won't be as nice), and it also uses responsive design such that it's just as useful on desktop as on mobile.
Viewing mostly on desktop, I hate the new twitter and wish the old one was back. It's a bunch of javascript moving things around instead of a plain old web page (how is twitter's content complex enough that it can't just be static html?), and due probably to some combination of privacy settings i have usually says "There has been an error try again" when i follow a link to a tweet, requiring me to hard-refresh the page (at which point it works).
I wonder if the GDPR covers this under the right of explanation (if it happens to someone in the EU), or was the decision made against a non-human app who has no rights to violate?
That strikes me more as the "100% literally correct" wording common of technical people, rather than the "just about honest enough that it's not fraudulent" wording that you seem to be suggesting. I think his app is genuinely not deceptive.
Low friction and no support ejection from app markets seems to be a necessary cost of the low-cost, low-friction entry that they allow, and the fact that action against app developers to recover costs due to abuses isn't easy. If we had more upfront costs (both directly to market operators and in surety bond) it would be practical to have a lot friendlier process in the event of apparent violation. But then, we'd have a lot fewer devs even able to get into app stores, and the vast majority of non-abusive developers would experience this as a pure burden. The few that get caught up incorrectly in policy violation scans would benefit (assuming they weren't kept off the market in the first place), and it would be more abstractly fair, but I'm not sure it would be a win for consumers or developers on the whole
Which isn't to say it shouldn't be done: fairness is important, too. But there is a cost.
I'd be more then happy to pay a fee if it means an actual human, who actually had access to all the case information, would actually review the appeal and provide a detailed personalized account of my crimes.
As a bonus, if my appeal is found to be genuine and my account reinstated I'd like that fee refunded.
That’s an interesting approach - not only do you not want to pay if you get the best possible result, you want to financially incentivize them to find something wrong!
Yeah, the perverse incentives of it is “pay if you want to challenge a violation” that get even worse if it is “get a refund if we agree with your challenge” are why it pretty much had to be “pay up front to get into the store”.
Even were the store owner perfectly honorable in performing initial and appeal reviews, the perverse incentives would lead to a perception of unfairness.
I have a very similar problem with Google's Chrome store. I have a small open-source extension. Recently they started to send me notices that it is in violation of their policies. All my attempts to figure out what exactly I am doing wrong failed. I emailed multiple times. Finally, they just removed it from the store.
So where does this stuff place Google in the moral spectrum?
Obviously Good stuff: Firefighting, EMTs..
working on cancer research, Doctors without Borders..
NASA, Nat'l Park Service..
EFF, Mozilla..
the electric company
$genericStartup, $genericFortune500
drone programs
Google (?)
telemarketing
patent trolling
being Chapo's IT guy (voluntarily)
running phone scams targeting old folks
Obviously Bad stuff: running ransomware on hospitals
I mean, it's a big company, but stories like these are hardly unusual. I feel like bad customer service is maybe a feature by design.
Automated ban-bots are probably unavoidable. What's evil is automated appeals, they almost invariably deny them. On Quora anybody can report anyone for harassment. And anyone does. You get a BNBR notification (Be Nice, Be respectful) and a little link to appeal.
Recently someone posted pretty clear proof of Quora employing an automated appeal denial process when they got denied an appeal for a comment praising another user.
I don't know what the answer is here. I'm sure the EU or California will take the lead on the issue when it finally hits their Overton window.
Our company had ~15 Google accounts shut down the other day due to apparently the content of our emails being flagged by some kind of automated curation system.
This happened without any warning.
The problem was rectified within 30 minutes of the incident occurring because we contacted support immediately. As soon as they looked over it, we were back online, so it can't have been too serious.
It feels like Google take internal company policies and apply it to all their customers.
Anyway, I'm glad I don't have my personal stuff hosted there anymore.
Valve held a tight leash on Steam for years. Games and apps had to be approved by Valve, and what they allowed was, at the very least, subjective.
After a while it began to gradually let go of control. Nowadays, there are just a few things that might get blocked and I haven't heard any more stories about developers who got blocked.
Funny thing is: Valve is privately owned, and Google is a public company. One should expect it to be the other way around.
While I'm sure that buried in the TOS you can be banned at any time for any reason, and the sheer volume of apps they referee makes things difficult to have humans manage. The "right" thing to do here would be to at least provide some sort of substantiation of your assertion that it violates policy.
-App is asking for more permissions than it needs
-App is violating privacy
-App is direct copy of/ mimicking Core OS functionality
-App is using non opensource code
etc.
They obfuscation of the reasons for the ban seem to me to be one of the following
1) laziness
2) malice
3) fear that it would somehow expose the methodology for finding the policy violations and create a cat and mouse game.
It seems like mobile development is becoming less and less an attractive platform to spend my cycles. There are basically 2 markets with millions of apps that already implement your idea in some form or fashion that are free or cheap. Meanwhile being a Luddite and writing enterprise code for business has consistently paid more each year I've done it.
I'm developing a consumer facing service right now, and it's stories like this that steer me away from expending the effort to develop as an Android and iOS app. At least on the web we're not (entirely) beholden to a single company that can unilaterally remove you with no recourse.
That does not explain why Goog doesn't treat people like humans.
If the app developer has been in good standing for years, and has a popular app, why not send them more information as to why they are in violation? And give them some time to fix it.
Because they're not using humans to do the reviews anymore. They're putting bots on the frontlines, then using humans to (maybe) handle appeals.
But those humans are probably undertrained, underpaid and have zero context for each of their 1k cases, so they default to accepting the bots judgement. Which in turn feedback to the bot, justifying it's actions.
Does matter, even if they used bots, The bot would detect something. The bot would go through some rules to determine what it would flag. The bot should report on it.
We detected something suspicious about your ads.
We detected that you're abusing the battery life.
We detected adult contect.
The code is probably in place to do that, but it probably errors out and no one who needs access to those logs has access or knowledge of them, and the humans handling appeals are probably siloed off from the bots and devs, so they think things are fine, and the devs think things are fine, since no one is complaining.
It might depend on popularity and download count. I am sure if there are some issues with Facebook app, they won't have to talk to a bot and they won't be banned in 12 hours.
Yeah, there's a bit of a fog around this. He sets it up very nicely and gets the sympathetic emotions going and kind of sneaks in "4 similar apps" were the cause of the account suspension. I have no doubts that MonTransit is above board, it looks great, but about those other "similar apps"... no detail provided
The notifications are that he violated the ‘deceptive behavior policy’. His appeal is that he is willing to change his behavior.
A reasonable question would be how his app is violating the policy. But he does not ask that, his appeal is that he was not given the chance to clean up his act, so he just should get 1 strike. Which suggests that he is aware how the app is violating the policy.
As far as I understand, author's account was blocked, but not necessarily related to app in question. Author said that there were other apps, one "not being in production", and didn't mention what those apps did.
That's why I don't want to even go into mobile development - pretty much the whole market is gated by two oligopolists who have random capricious policies and can - and do! - destroy thousands of hours of your work without even properly stating a reason and without any recourse. You work for years, you put your thought and love into something, you release it, people are happy to use it - and then some (probably severely underpaid and overworked) anonymous, or ever worse, a mindless misconfigured ML routine, pushes a button and poof! - it's all gone. That's an insane world to live in.
Hi all,
I'm the developer of the app in question.
I have regained access to the Google Play Console.
Working on publishing the new apps.
More details in updated Medium article.
Thanks
am i the only one skeptical here? the guy put 5000 hours and is paying for advertising but the app is totally free? he doesnt say anything about what could have been flagged as deceptive.
Perhaps there is room for new companies that provide quasi-legal services that vet apps before they are sent to the play store, to make sure their customers apps are in compliance. Ideally their experience seeing many apps would help them understand what gets removed and what doesn't. In cases like this, where the developer gets a notification about non-compliance, they would also take the app down ASAP so the developer can work things out before Google removes them from the store.
One golden rule of businesses (or any investments) is that you should not put your eggs to single basket. With development of mobile apps you just do it, you are totally in mercy of a couple of gatekeepers, like it or not. I would rather focus on recognising and mitigating these risks, and make sure that you do have alternatives. Do not buy into some corporation's promises of not to be evil. They all are. Sorry you had to learn it in hard way, but better late than never.
It honestly amazes me that people didn't think this wouldn't happen. When you have a company own a market, they simply dictate on a whim who gets access to it.
It's the same with Steam. The more you move to the cloud, the more you give companies control over your goods and services.
Phones should've remained open the day they were made. You should never been banned from administrative control of your device.
This kind of story makes me favor a blend of the policy proposals of Andrew Yang and Elizabeth Warren. We recognize that the current automated economy has hurt the little person (Yang), but, at the same time, recognize that a few super large corporations have created this situation (Warren).
So, I propose that all US residents receive $1000 a month directly from Google.
The timing is pretty brutal and outrageous but other than that, unless there are indeed no violations of the policies, I have no issues with an app getting kicked out.
It is hard to have any opinion on the accuracy of these strikes though, since almost all the times devs believe that whatever they do is legit.
It's pretty easy for the developer to believe "whatever they do is legit" when they aren't shown an example of how they violated the policy.
Could you imagine a world where a traffic cop pulled you over, issued you a ticket, and when you asked what you did wrong they said "You violated the policies regarding safe driving and expected behaviors".
Your license is now revoked. All the information required has been provided to you.
So maybe you are a terrible driver who deserves to lose a license, or maybe you just did something like parking in front of a mail box, a behavior you would adjust if you realized it was against the rules.
No one should be expected to have a perfect mental map of the extremely long terms and conditions agreements and how they map to every real word situation.
Google could improve devs relationships for sure, but these are pretty clear.
FWIW, I had several strikes as well, because of a permission used by an unpublished app on a beta channel :/. The whole process of getting the account reinstated was pretty easy in that case.
I am kinda curious to scrape the op app and look at what might have got them in trouble, I might give it a go if I have enough time.
By scrape I meant that there are some sites allowing to download apks from Google play
They usually cache the apks for a couple of days so that would have been a way to download it.
And after that, I would have looked at the app manifest (it contains all the permissions that the app might want to use, so there might be some interesting stuff there) and maybe use it.
I don't plan to look at the bytecode for shady behavior .. that's not my forte and I am not interested enough to spend one week looking at bytecode.
edit : I have just opened the article again to get the app package name .. looks like it got reinstated.
But no comment of the author as of why it was removed.
So, with the US tradewar on China, the big Chinese companies are forced to roll out an os and app store. They cater to a large internal market augmented by a large market in India.
The sanctions could potentially kill Android, I'm thinking. At least with how Alphabet is "curating" it.
The problem is multi fold, its completely ridiculous on them banning this app and letting thousands of piracy apps (free movies, live streaming ) etc etc.. Guess there is a genuine bias from AI to scrap out the actual apps that actually helps people legally than the illegal ones..
I think, they are already banning many of the malicious apps. As nobody cares about those apps, these removals don't make any news and therefore it seems google is not punishing malicious apps.
You ensure service by signing a mutual contract where breaking the contract hurts the party that broke it. Expecting the same from the one-sided agreement you sign with Google is like believing in the Easter Bunny.
I know there are several people in this discussion advocating for regulation... but surely there are legal remedies for this? Why not just find a way to make them liable for this?
I run a paid Google Chrome extension - I'm terrified there's going to be similar stories for Chrome extensions since this year Google introduced a review process.
good pitch post, nice to see google dev account responding on twitter and maybe some escalation, but reading the post -- did you even consider what the deceptive behaviour might be even if barely a case for it?
Mimicing functionality from other apps? Does STM or whatever transit in Montreal have an official app?
While it's good to have competition and variety in the market for transit apps etc, seems like a lot of municipalities would tend to have an 'official' app these days or recommend preferred ones, so maybe there's a push as far as app store etc to go towards the official ones and maybe the STM reported you or someone downloaded and was mad it wasn't the real one etc etc.
Sorry I didn't see your app before it got taken down/am not familiar with it but reading your post and started to wonder. No offense. Transit apps and public service sort of space for apps is a tricky space in modern day
The real problem isn't that Google may have an opinion that the app is deceptive or not, one that we may even share if we knew all the details. The real problem is that the app developer doesn't even know, and had what appears to have been roughly a two-hour window to nominally fix the problem before being booted off the service.
If all the Google programmers who're here at HN started working elsewhere nothing significant would really happen. Google would continue to operate the same way. Except maybe making it to the front page of HN would stop functioning as an ad hoc appeals process for Google decisions.
That's what everyone says about bad places. That's what they always say when asked to do terrible things.
There will be people they could hire, but it wouldn't be anyone that would get invited to conferences, and so on. Nobody that would make Stanford proud.
People who work at Google know they are working for a terrible company doing terrible things (there are plenty of those...) but those programmers, every single one of them, is able to easiliy work somewhere else. It isn't like they are warehouse workers slaving for Amazon.
Just got banned by a dozen of "thought leaders" on Twitter for saying the same things about people working for Facebook and all these "poor souls" who just got fired by Apple after it was leaked that they were listening in on Siri conversations.
If you can get hired at a software division in Google, Facebook, or Apple, you can get hired anywhere else.
Be honest. You just care more about money and prestige more than you care about doing scummy work.
Google has a new policy to not rock the boat, including snitchin on anyone who might be.
Probably not that large of a group of people that both read hacker news, read this exact article, even care about such things, and work at google. At a company of that size, they are maybe fancy cogs, but still replaceable.
Amazon warehouse workers also have the option not to work there. Amazon is not forcing them to be there and Amazon does not owe someone a job any more than any other business owes jobs to random people.
>Amazon warehouse workers also have the option not to work there.
A, the evergreen, "since nobody puts a gun on your head, you're free to work elsewhere".
Some people don't understand that limited job options, lack of skills (or money to increase them), need to feed a family, etc, are also "guns on the head".
To understand how much, consider than people can sell their bodies (for sex), or even get into slave-like servitude with no pay, just to get something to eat. Heck, in poorer societies (and even western countries, not more than a century ago) people would even sell one or more of their kids to help feed the others (and of course, would send their 8-14 year old kids to work).
Just because something is better than dying of hunger doesn't mean it's a "free choice" option. It's just, like avoiding getting shot from someone "holding a gun to your head" the best of shitty options.
I basically agree with you, but it's not Amazon's duty to solve that problem.
In fact, by providing one more job option, they are helping slightly.
It's the same as this old classic: Nike builds a shoe factory on a small island with subsistence agriculture and pays people almost nothing to make shoes. And people castigate Nike for that. But Nike hasn't done anything evil. They have given people one more option. If subsistence agriculture is better, people can go back to doing that instead of working in the shoe factory.
I have family members who literally have to take whatever job they can find because their options are severely limited, even if those jobs are really bad and no job at all would probably result in homelessness. Some people really don't have the option to "not work there" and it seems rather callous to suggest that.
> People who work at Google know they are working for a terrible company doing terrible things
I work at Google, and I don't think it's terrible. Neither do most of my coworkers. There are things I wish were better, and things I'm working on improving, but overall I think Google's impact on the world is strongly positive.
> overall I think Google's impact on the world is strongly positive.
I think the exact opposite, which is why I've went to great lengths in an attempt to de-google my life, but google still forces itself on me through stuff like recaptcha.
Maybe google once had a positive impact once, but not anymore. Now google just kills products, forces tracking on people who don't even use google themselves and pushes adverts in front of us, while de-monitizing Youtubers and pushing its political/social justice agendas.
The fact that you and your coworkers don't see the problem just highlights what the people up-thread were saying and is the big part of the problem.
> Google's impact on the world is strongly positive.
I couldn't disagree more. Google doesn't make bazillions of dollars because they provide us with live traffic on maps. Google has significantly enabled and actively driven the mindless consume-everything-all-the-time culture with all the horrible consequences for our mental-health and the environment.
The world would be a much better place without the ones like Google, Facebook and Amazon.
I work at Google because they pay me money that I can donate [1] and I wouldn't work here if I thought that was making the world worse. [2] I left Google in 2017 to work for a startup I thought was more positive than earning to give [3] and then I rejoined later that year after the startup didn't pan out. [4] I'm open to arguments that I should be doing something else with my time!
If you think you can solve it, come apply for a job at Google.
This kind of thing is a seriously hard thing to police in a fair and reasonable way. Real spammers have become very sophisticated, and separating them from good users is very very difficult. Many bots steal real human accounts for their nefarious behaviour. Human review of accounts doesn't help much either - you simply can't allow a human to delve through a users mail/photos to see if they are a bot or not.
>If you think you can solve it, come apply for a job at Google.
Parent poster isn't advocating the "fix it from the inside" route, he's advocating you leave.
>This kind of thing is a seriously hard thing to police in a fair and reasonable way.
It's so "seriously hard" that you had to use a different example that's more favorable to google's position (identifying a bot user without data access) in a thread about a different topic (your distaste for manual, thoughtful app reviews)?
I had an on-site with Google last year and didn't quite make it in.
Since then I've noticed HN has an aggressively negative opinion on Google's general affairs, and most of it makes sense on the surface. It almost feels like I dodged a bullet.
But comments like these shine a completely different perspective. The OP's story is extremely frustrating but it doesn't seem to stem from a lack of care, in your eyes.
If someone were really motivated to solve problems in that area, do you really feel they would be given the time to explore it? I get the impression these sort of projects would be underprioritized.
> If someone were really motivated to solve problems in that area, do you really feel they would be given the time to explore it?
Yes. Beware though - some parts of the issue might be more political rather than technical (eg. Team A wants user accounts banned for violating XYZ policy, while Team B has other data which shows those user accounts aren't bad, but can't share the data with Team A because that violates privacy terms).
For issues that are purely technical (for example, the automated spam detection system has a false positive on an obscure but legit library), any Google employee can send a pull request to fix it, and in general your pull request will be accepted and deployed.
Not having worked at Google yet, but having plenty of experience with other big companies: things are not black and white. There is no "evil" per se, it's just a shit load of conflicting interests, different priorities and different pressures at play: nobody wakes up in the morning and decides "I'm gonna fuck up this webmasters day today for the sake of it". It just happens that some innocent people end up in an unfortunate corner case of a tool trying to protect against scammers.
I can totally understand how in a flagging tool with a false positive rate of 0.01% some innocent publisher got caught by mistake, and got its app banned. Is that publisher important enough so it's worth manual review time? What's the risk to expose the internal heuristics to make EVERYBODY happy? Oh, wait, you can't make EVERYBODY Happy.
I can tell you this shit happens EVERYWHERE. It's just the way the law of large numbers works against you. If you want to make ALL your customers happy, your only choice is a bespoke dev type of thing, because you then to deeply cater to your each customer.
It's the same shit everywhere, and you're interested in working on large bits, it doesn't really matter where you go. Google, FB, Amazon, everywhere you're going to have people that are unhappy with your product/service/decisions. So if it's the same, why not go to the ones that pay better/got more perks/look best on your CV?
This is not about making everybody happy. This is about completely wrong behaviour: You can suspend scammers fast, but if you also catch legitimate developers with your scam protection you have to have processes in place to give 1. valid explanations why 2. time to react, at least retroactively 3. a legitimate possibility to appeal. Google does none of that, fixing that process is possible and has nothing to do with a law of big numbers or the difficulty of making everybody happy. The adsense scam Google is running, if the description provided here is correct, is just fraud.
Both is just Google being evil.
> nobody wakes up in the morning and decides "I'm gonna fuck up this webmasters day today for the sake of it"
You can be sure that happens as well in every organization of that size. It's just another reason you have to have a proper appeal process in place, not the automatic dismissal system Google has.
How do you know who is a legitimate dev and who is a scammer posing as a legitimate dev, to know when to work with someone, or to withhold information that would expose secret filters that you use?
Mind, it's not that this dev got one app banned, he got ALL of them banned. There is an appeal process when you gone one banned, but he got multiple violations. He got all the violations in a span of hours, so he got unlucky to be a corner case that the regular appeal process no longer works for him. So you might argue that the appeal process is not flexible enough, but then the question is what would be flexible enough? So no matter for how long you're tweaking it, you're gonna have corner cases that will make people unhappy.
On the adsense scam, I hear the reports, but I've not seen Google lose in a small-claims court yet. Given the amount of money Google makes on there, I doubt that the revenue from running such a scam would even register as a blip, never mind the reputation hit they would take should it be ever proved true.
> [...] to withhold information that would expose secret filters that you use?
It makes no sense to me that these filters are such a secret. Either you are doing something to deceive your users or you are not. Are you advising that we should just blindly trust an opaque set of rules that a giant corporation, whose interests are not aligned with our own, can use to ban anyone with no oversight at all?
Play Store developers are not users - they are customers for the Play Store product. Nobody is forcing them to develop for Play Store; or to use Ad Sense or any other Google product.
When you're starting your relationship, it's very clear (in the ToS) that they can reject your apps or terminate the relationship however they choose. If they would start quitting developing for Play Store because of these opaque rules, perhaps Google will listen to them. But reality shows that this problem doesn't happen often enough, so the opaque filters work as intended.
So yes, I advise that, if you don't like the rules of Google, don't go play with them. It's the only thing that can change the rules of Google. (and FB, Amazon, etc).
When I said "users", I was referring to their rationale for killing off this developer's account and applications. One of the cited policies was Violation of Deceptive Behavior, which referred to users.
> So yes, I advise that, if you don't like the rules of Google, don't go play with them. It's the only thing that can change the rules of Google. (and FB, Amazon, etc).
If you don't like the rules (or their behaviour when supposedly applying them), you can also:
1. Criticize, explain why the behaviour is bad and spread the word about it. This is what we are doing now.
2. Regulate this kind of behaviour out of existence.
>> How do you know who is a legitimate dev and who is a scammer posing as a legitimate dev
If you cannot discern the two you shouldn't offer a service that claims it can... And if you do nevertheless, the operators of the service should at least acknowledge that errors happen and offer the possibility of a recourse
Nobody said it was easy to solve these issues without collateral damage.
The point being raised is that when you become a statistic, you have no recourse. Sort of like "we don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company"
If this were some small fledgling start-up, that is to be expected. It costs money to get things right for everyone.
But this is a huge, profitable, mature company. And one that is playing a key role in our society. They must hold themselves to a higher standard than they are now. Or else, in the end, society will make them.
How about Google stops using dark patterns in order to dissuade users from using alternative app stores or side-loading then? They can police their own app store any way they feel they have to, but then let's foster the culture of having multiple places to install applications from.
> building the dystopia my children will have to deal with
So you want other people to fight your ideological battles. If this would be 4chan I'd tell you that those programmers are "not your personal army". But have you considered that those people are actually happy to be building this dystopia and they think building it will advance their own children? And what you might construe as "evil" they would see as "advancing the future" and making the world a better place?
Kidding aside, don't you think a bit presumptuous on your side to go and simply ask people to stop working where you don't like them to work, as they might be owning you something?
A more fair course of action would be you to go out and build a better working place, one that doesn't build said dystopia, one with better perks and reputation and pay, and those programmers working at FB / Google would actually WANT to quit said companies and come work at this better place?
Just because the company is doing shitty things doesn't mean that every engineer does.
Plus, imagine how it could work in reality. You finally got your place at Google. You know what the company is doing. And at some point you are asked to work on one of these grey things. What do you say, that it's immoral? If so, where exactly do you draw the line? Who is to decide what's still acceptable and what not? You've known for years that Google is tracking everyone. Moreover, most of it is perfectly legal. In any company, whenever you say "no" to your manager you need to have a solid ground. I can't imagine anyone even starting such a conversation.
"Unfair" has a funny way of becoming (or retroactively being) "illegal," especially when you are talking about a consumer-facing monopoly. Who knows, long-term, you might be doing your boss a favor.
True, but Goog would be like Boeing, Weyerhaeuser, the government, Geico, etc. Each have 1000's of programmers, but no one works for them unless they have to.
Certainly SW luminaries wouldn't. But the pay is good.
To be exact, Google did not “delete” the app. It cannot even do that. It removed the app from its own app store. The fundamental problem is that Google’s own app store is perceived by many users to be the only way to install Android apps.
Are there any ideas about how to convince users to use other app stores?
Know what Google is doing to its AdSense partners on a massive scale? They wait until your site has just under the earnings when they have to write you a check, then they terminate your AdSense account for “policy violations”.
I’m taking about AdSense sites that have been running for years with very little traffic, accumulating a few pennies a day.
They suspended a client of ours who was spending $40k a month on Google Ads with a two word explanation of “policy violations”, and steadfastly refused to explain any reason why. Our client was perfectly reputable, ran multi million dollar ad campaigns on television and radio, and was FDA approved.
When what Google has been getting away with finally comes to light... well, let’s hope it does come to light and they pay the consequences.