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Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

> Instead of only banning broken apps that crashed, wouldn’t install, or run properly, the company said it would begin banning apps that demonstrated “limited functionality and content.” That included static apps without app-specific features, such as text-only apps or PDF-file apps. It also included apps that provided little content, like those that only offered a single wallpaper. Additionally, Google banned apps that were designed to do nothing or have no function, which may have been tests or other abandoned developer efforts.

Sounds like it was a purge of zero value apps. Why was Google allowing these legions of unusable and/or garbage apps in their store in the first place? Someone padding their numbers?

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Because we want people to be able to create trash apps and publish them.

Just like we want people to create trash blogs and trash websites so they can learn or just express themselves.

Having 3rd world devs making more todo apps is not optimal but they should be able to do that and publish them.

Preventing all of that also prevents good small time community apps because suddenly you have to pay money and can’t just do nice app for local communities.

> Because we want people to be able to create trash apps and publish them.

That's a moot point, though, since you don't need Google's app store to publish apps. You can just send whatever random APK you throw together to your friend, post them on your web site, etc. There's no reason to turn the Play Store into a dumpster.

If anything the fact that you can sideload on Android and install alternative stores means the Play Store should be at least as selective as Apple's store, if not more so, since failure to meet that store's standards doesn't mean the app can't be distributed elsewhere.

You need to if you want people to be able to discover your application or receive updates automatically (or with a single click) instead of having to reimplement the wheel with an update checker in your application, as well as logic to limit what countries/markets and devices you serve.

Especially when you consider the hassle for the average user of going into Chrome, downloading your APK, accepting the big scary messages that "the application comes from an untrusted source" and "sideloading applications can be dangerous" and then installing it. People barely even like going into Google Play to download stuff.

Other app stores can also automatically update.

If your app is so low effort that even the off brand app stores don't want to host it, I'm going to guess that you're probably also not overly concerned about sending your users automatic updates anyway.

> People barely even like going into Google Play to download stuff.

This might have something to do with the lack of curation, though. Hence, losing a bunch of apps is actually beneficial to the ecosystem. As that snippet was pointing out, lots of these apps were just basic wrappers for text/pdf, which is is what the web and/or built-in media viewer apps are for.

You do understand most people won’t sideload an app.

Friction compared to clicking install from app/play store is orders of magnitude higher for sideloading especially for non tech people.

"Trash apps" and "more todo apps" isn't what this rule is preventing. It's preventing "apps" that are essentially just a viewer for a built in static text, PDF or image file. Which can and should be replaced by a text, PDF or image file, or a web site.

Not at all - it is preventing people not having a company from uploading their apps.

If you setup a company you still will be able to publish crap apps, it might not be profitable as it was before due to bureaucracy overhead - but the same for people who want to make useful apps but don’t want burden of setting up company.

Meh... That website might not be available in offline mode. I may want 5 PDFs in an app because it's still easier to find the app than it is to search through 'files' on a device that wasn't designed for managing files.

Well PlayStation, Nintendo, etc don't just let anyone publish anything. I see no reason to force them to lower their standards for trash shovelware. As long as you can still sideload apps, it's their store and they can set their own standards.

PlayStation, Nintendo, Steam etc. are competitors where you can say they are really competitors.

Play store from Google is basically only store for all Android devices out there and no relevant competition.

Where do you set the bar for "good enough" app? It makes sense to allow shitty apps and let the reputation grow somehow.

One could assume that the previous priority was "grow the app catalog through the use of a permissive listing model," and it's changed to "improve the quality of the app catalog by being more selective about who and what is allowed to be listed."

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