Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

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'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.

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.

"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].

* [0] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a... * [1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

> 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")

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 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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

However it would be nice if Google at least made an attempt to explain to people why they are banking them. And an appeals process.

Right now this is basically the wild west with if sherif says it, it is reality. We need more of a due process.

> 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.

Still bitter about it.

Lord Acton

source: https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/absolute-power-corrupts-...

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.

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.

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.

Does Google credit the advertisers when they cancel click-bait websites/apps?

I know Google has a refund process that ad buyers can try to use if they have evidence of fraud.

However, does Google pro-actively do refunds when they cancel fraud sites/apps?

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.

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.

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?

We are rapidly heading to "Computer's Don't Argue" society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue

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.

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 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.

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.

> 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.

Update: It looks like they didn't actually include all the information available to them, there's another level of escalation, apparently only accessible after public attention https://twitter.com/GooglePlayDev/status/1166999937156100096

-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)

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.

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.

...of which Google effectively controls the standard because they have a majority of browser usage.

hah, good joke.

Please explain how you've come to this conclusion, because I can't follow your logic.

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.

"We do nothing with your data. This agreement can change at any time without notice."

So... They change it to "do anything they want", do the obnoxious thing, and then change it back.

What we need is teeth in the forms of law with regards to privacy. The GDPR is a good avenue.

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.

Happens to most companies beyond a certain size.

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.

But maybe our use cases are the outliers, and the new search is what works for most people.

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.

(In case others didn't know either.)

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.

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.

My understanding is that at first the number of apps where the violation is unclear was so low that it was not worth it.

IIRC Google has announced that they are going to provide more info in the future on what the issues are.

however

the link in the article is pretty clear : https://play.google.com/about/privacy-security-deception/dec...

(even though it does not mention which part of the app exactly violates these rules)

And I disagree on the fact that the TOS are unreadable : https://play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy/#!?mo...

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.

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?

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.

If 50% of talent left it would be a disaster.

Certainly SW luminaries wouldn't. But the pay is good.