Google and Apple wanted to be in the role of gatekeeper, so they should be beholden to the apps on their platform. We had a web where developers were in control of their own deployment. Everything was decentralized and required responsibility and diligence.
Now the power is out of our hands and its unfair. It isn't our choice.
One might argue this is better for consumers, but I honestly don't think so. Technology could have fixed discoverability and provided sandboxing, networks could provide curation. And there would probably be better privacy in the world where Mozilla won instead of Google.
Edit: I am so happy that GDPR and CDPA have arrived to protect consumers. We need similar laws to protect startups, small businesses, and sole proprietors that rely on these platforms to treat us fairly. They owe us that after haven taken away the nice open web we once had. Maybe laws are how we get back the web we lost.
I think in fact a lot of people do want them to do this. Folks complain the Play store is full of malware and spam, and that there are data leaks and deceptive ads.
Then Google or Apple goes and removes them, and then folks are mad if that process has errors.
It seems like a business where you make everyone mad no matter what you do.
[edit: Just to be clear, I'm not a fan of the practice. But an awful lot of folks seem to think Apple and Google SHOULD wield editorial power, if only to stop outright malware. And of course, certain politicians want to make sure that the internet refuses to show content unflattering to people in power]
But this cuts into the gatekeepers' profit. Why have a cost-neutral program when you can not worry about having that program at all, and (in Apple's case) still charge people for access to the store and documentation?
I, the engineer, do not want them to do this. Before Google and Apple, I didn't have this problem. I didn't have to pay their tax or march to their beat.
You might argue that it's their platform and that's the cost for us to pay. But it wasn't always this way! These companies leveraged their advantages to steal eyeballs away from an open web and lock them in their own platform.
They could have spent money making the open web work better on mobile. Or designing a portable app framework and runtime for all devices. But we know why they didn't and what the outcome has been.
I want them to pay back the negative externalities they've leveraged onto us.
They have trouble with false positive and false negatives. This does not make me want to give them more power.
This doesn't even really make any sense either. You might argue its because they're huge, but the numbers don't add up. Google netted about $31 billion in 2018. It's hard to tell exactly how many apps are published on Google Play per year, but it seems to be in the ballpark of 200,000 [1]. Let's hire some low wage employees to spend just 1 hour per app which is generally enough time to determine if an app is at all legitimate. That's obviously 200,000 man hours. Creating these jobs in the USA could be done for about $10/hour, or $2 million, or a minuscule fraction of 1% of their their annual net income. Problem solved, happy customers, happy developers, jobs created.
But Google gonna Google. Though even here if they really wanted to Google, they could even hire these guys in e.g. India or wherever and pay a fraction of even that fraction of what they'd have to pay if they created these jobs in the US. But I'm certain they've Googled that the $ cost of pissed off customers and developers is less than the $ cost of providing a decent solution.
The one confounding issue here might be that the 200k is lowballing the number of apps. After all that's only the apps that are published, not the ones that are refused publication. But all of the above holds true even if you push it up to 2,000,000 apps trying to publish per year. Perhaps the more salient point is that Google also charges $25 before you can even try to publish an app. Why not direct that money to a human being and actually have a half decent review process? That same human being might even be able to answer complex questions like, "Hey, I don't even have any ads in my app. Why was my app removed for deceptive ads?" in a timely fashion.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/266210/number-of-availab...
The sheer number of people who got infected with mal- and adware is disturbing and they demanded and believed that their provider or the device OEM is to be held responsible.
That’s not my evaluation of the situation, but the entry barrier for the web and its possibilities is very low, while the damage which can be done is pretty critical sometimes.
I personally don’t see any “everyone is pleased” solution, it’s a bit frustrating that the more tech-savvy folk is getting punished for straight out ignorance of the vast majority.
Maybe you can spent some of your gazillion dollars to hire humans instead of relying on automated half-measures
Google hasn't taken away anything. There is still a web and you're free to deploy what you want there on your terms.
(Edits to correct Google's autocorrect errors.)
Mostly it's just tweaking our existing monopoly laws to be a bit less blind.
You CAN sue them, but for what is unclear. "Wielding too much power" isn't a crime.
And even if you could find a legitimate reason, you are unlikely to win. I would assume Google Play's Terms of Service has several clauses, including indemnity, arbitration, and agreement that Google can remove your app at anytime for any reason.
Any of those should be sufficient to have the suit summarily dimissed.
I do think there is a case here against apple because they do gatekeep what the user has access to, but people love to fine Google way more than they do apple, even tough apple is infinitely more anticompetitive and anticonsumer IMO.
You could argue that they take advantage of the desire of app developers to access their market, but that's not "anticompetitive". It's unfair, but life wasn't meant to be fair.
Of course you can. This is America and anybody can sue anybody for anything (with few exceptions).
Winning the suit is another matter. Unless you have smoking-gun evidence of discrimination or some such, I'd say the case would be DOA.
Of course, the costs of the suit would likely be prohibitive as well. I don't think that many lawyers would take a case like this on contingency. Maybe pro bono.
1. I create a business that operates inside a marketplace that you own. 2. We have an agreement that says you will allow me to operate as long as I don't violate your terms of service. 3. I am kicked out of the marketplace but did not violate the TOS.
If there was a line in the agreement that the either party could terminate the agreement at anytime for any reason, I guess the TOS doesn't really matter. But is that what exists right now in these app stores?
In that world Mozilla wouldn't sell your data to Pocket or Stranger Things or whoever knows a bizdev at Mozilla?
No single entity, except the laws of course ;)
The DMCA outsourced due process for copyright infringement.
SOSTA did it for illegal advertising (really, for policing morals, in general, but even the title of the bill agrees it was outsourcing sex trafficking law enforcement to private entities).
The CLOUD act did it for illegal domestic searches and also foreign espionage.
Caveat emptor — the big internet companies that lobbied so hard for these bills (or built businesses on them) got some short term platform lock-in, but they also guaranteed that their business models would be morally reprehensible moving forward.
We’re starting to see the fall out with Facebook, but they are not the only bad actor in this space.
No, it didn't. What it did was protect online service providers from liability for either hosting or removing allegedly infringing content if they took certain action when notified of potential problems from either side (to the extent the results seem asymmetrical, it's because the pre-existing legal risk was asymmetrical.)
> SOSTA did it for illegal advertising
SESTA/FOSTA was kind of the opposite of DMCA; instead of creating a safe harbor that protected firms from existential risks that were starting to drive them out of hosting user content, it creates new holes on an existing safe harbor and drove providers out of carrying broad categories of user content around the area legally targetted.
If that had never come to be and it was decentralized instead, no one would be lamenting that corporations weren't in charge.
For example, few people think it would have been good if a corporation had beat out the WWW.
On a side note, it's important to appreciate where companies didn't win and not take it for granted: online encyclopedia, email, many programming languages, anything where an open-source solution won.
It's my garden, my choice. You are still allowed to publish your app on the web.
Yeah, because laws protecting inefficient business are great for society and consumers.
No business "deserves" protection. Consumers do, but not business.
I'm fine paying the AWS tax. It's a generic utility more or less and I can just as easily use Azure or Google (assuming you're not baked into certain offerings, but that's out of scope and honestly is a choice.)
If you want on Android there's no choice. You play by Google's rules and pay their tax.
People get up in arms when ISPs try to pull this (net neutrality). This is the same pattern. Phones, OSes, etc. should be "dumb" pipes. (The analogy isn't elegant here, but you get it.)
Phone OSes and app stores are a duopoly, Google and Apple are the only games in town, what the US needs to do is look at its antitrust and pro competition laws, figure out if they make sense for the information age and then apply them.
This might be happening in the very early stages now, when Trump appointed Rohit Chopra as an FTC Commissioner last year one of Chopra's first moves was to hire Lina Khan, an antitrust academic who is critical of the FAANG companies and has clashed with Google very publicly. I can only think of one reason the FTC would hire Khan, to find reasons for going after the tech giants.
> Good luck man. I had an app removed because someone did a review of it and their review had screenshots of my app and Google banned the app for copyright infringement siting them as the source. No appeal, one strike, never got through to a human.
If true that’s laughablly insane.
I don't like these platforms...
A theory- the app itself had infringing material, and the person who reported/banned it found that material via the review.
Maybe there should be a fee for a support request and if the Google rep finds that Google's automated system messed up they report the problem internally and refund the fee to the app developer.
But i really cannot understand why something like this doesn't already exist. Imagine how many false DMCA conflicts could be avoided if both parties had to place a $5 deposit to get a human ruling. And the $5 of the losing party should easily be enough to compensate the arbitrators work for most conflicts. Building such a mechanical turk like small claims online arbitration service seems easy and no matter how hard I try, I cannot come up with any reason youtube wouldn't want to use such a service. So why does it not exist already?
App stores manage to be simultaneously more restrictive than a repository and less trustworthy than downloading executables through a web browser.
But mainly I think it's that repositories are invariably built from source. Everything in a distro repository is open source software, guranteed to have been built from source from scratch. F-Droid does this, and its repositories are as clean as any Linux distro's as far as I can tell.
(This is why Moxie's claim that F-Droid is somehow less secure than Google Play because it signs its own .apks is weapons-grade baloneyum. On Google Play, that .apk could have anything in it. On F-Droid, that signature is a guarantee that that app has been downloaded and built from public sources, just like any Linux distribution. If F-Droid allowed developers to sign their own apps, then F-Droid couldn't build the apps, unless every app supported reproducible builds.)
https://staging.f-droid.org/en/docs/Reproducible_Builds/
https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidserver/commit/8568805866dadb...
> App stores manage to be simultaneously more restrictive than a repository and less trustworthy than downloading executables through a web browser.
Downloading executable through a web browser is something entirely different than Linux repos. Not sure I agree it's less trustworthy than Google Play and especially Apple App store, comparing to Windows download side. If it is, it's mostly down to the the monetary incentives.
Android should allow other "app stores", just like you can have different browsers, you should also be able to have different "app stores". Just like there is not just one "store" in the physical world. Then there could be niche stores that focus on some category, or quality.
There are also OEM-specific stores (Amazon, Chinese manufacturers) and some focusing on countries where Google Play is unavailable like https://cafebazaar.ir/?l=en for Iran or, again, various Chinese stores.
Edit: the situation is a lot like that of browsers, actually. There are many alternatives, but most people are only aware of the one they're using.
IIRC there was some issue where they would disallow usage of their app store if you used any other app store on any of your devices, for which they got fined in the EU (eg. you can't sell a device with Google AppStore and a device with f-droid or something).
i just wanted to share what worked for me, and assumed there are other ways to network with people. i don't live or ever visited SV. I do see how this is a low feasibility path
> I couldn't believe it was that easy
You're kiding, right? :)
Yes, it looks like this is one of the few ways one can make the appeals work. Awful solution though.
My ads-free really simple React Native app was removed from the play store for “deceptive ads”
I don't care too much as this was just a way to learn React Native for me, but it's still really weird
To be honest every interaction I have with Google products nowadays are bad:
- This app kicked from the Play store
- A bug with the new Adsense Auto-ads where you couldn't disable the giant ads that were added on your content without removing completely Google Adsense script, which I did
I'm now moving away from anything Google
I'd imagine one could download the app, report it for whatever (eg ads), wait for the automated system to remove it, then upload your own version (with ads, and what ever else).
Or if not decompiled, perhaps you got spearphished for access to your apps code, or it was acquired some other way.
Similar things probably happen as far as malicious reporting for sales platforms (like Amazon). If you 'steal' the product I imagine Amazon would even handover the original sellers good product reviews too.
And to protonmail for emails
Right, I get that you may need the money - but if your livelihood depends on money earned from making this world a worser place perhaps it is time to gut check and determine what really is your purpose and best use of time; maybe (easy) money is not all it's cut out to be in that context.
The reality is that we're here and it's now and everyone already owns a smartphone and you can enrich people's world with an app that helps them find love, participate in community, develop a hobby, find a new podcast, expand their mind, discover their creativity, track their ambitions, and more.
There's a lot of crap, too, but there's no sense throwing the baby out with the bathwater and then sitting around hoping things change. There's a world you can engage right now, and it's indifferent to your ideals.
Where do I get some of this easy money exactly?
Couldn't access it. Found Web Archive link[0].
Mistaken identity for an app with the same name (it seems). More specifically, it seems like someone at Google was looking to disable the app, yours was the first to return in their search, so that must've been it. You'd think there'd be correlatable identifiers to specifically prevent this?
[0] - https://web.archive.org/web/20190325230133/https://www.purpl...
Have a company that takes care of building, uploading and distributing apps from developers to the app store, and fixing all the distribution issues (via Google/Apple contacts in cofee shops in SV, that could push for resolution of issues internally).
And developers would work with this comapny, and would not need to care about Google/Apple at all.
Why do we need to see all these "Google did this to us" articles on HN? This should be a solvable problem, via some intermediary that would have more options/human contacts/power wrt Google, than a single developers.
Did you get reinstated once removed?
Now moderation seems to be automateable but could a bot do customer service?
If you click it, it will probably point to the play store to install it like any other ad.
Change the copy to "install more of my apps" and they will allow it.
Yes since they employed lots of manual labor, many false positive have hit me as well. And it's very frustrating.
But this is just another empty "Lets hate on Google". Following the guidelines this IS a deceptive ad.
Simple reply them in the policy form and they'll get back to you why within 2 days.
