Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account
blog.usejournal.com
blog.usejournal.com
To attract developers, these platforms make some promises. A "review" process for supposed violations of TOS causing cancellations is always among them. But to me these "reviews" always seem either completely faked or some version of a lowest-level employee simply restating that the algo has made its choice and they are powerless.
More incriminating is that every time a story starts to go viral, it seems a higher-up jumps in and instantly fixes it. (i.e. they can deliver a "real" review if they want to)
Since you paid them money (which they never refund) and they promised you an actual review if something goes wrong (which they never seem to actually deliver)...How is this any different than selling a counterfeit product? Isn't this legally actionable fraud?
That's why I think it's in the best interests of everyone to support alternatives like Librem, so that no single entity can make such kind of decisions.
Does it matter if it is? B2B lawsuits only get down to the actual law if the parties have a relatively equal amount of money. A small or medium business going after google _after google has shut off their revenue_ is not going to ever win
Yes, Google could likely not handle the legal costs if everyone went after them in court. Much like prosecutors in the US, what Google does is go hard on anyone who tries to defend themselves legally. At the point the calculus a small business has to make is if its worth it to try and get a remedy in court when Google will make sure to push back as hard as possible and likely destroy your business.
(Honest question. I would remember it if I'd heard about that happening, but I might very well not hear about it in the first place.)
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-google-bo...
Personally I think that a definition of "going hard" that encompasses the behavior of all actors in a space is absurd. But you're free to interpret those words how you wish.
The reality of it is that the legal team is a sunken cost to the company. They hire or retain lawyers for whatever's going to happen anyway.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-i-sued-go...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-google-bo...
Another advice: have 1 account per project, invariably of what their tos say.
I think the UK is like the US, and you have to represent yourself in small claims (to avoid wasting the court’s time). A county judge would probably find in the claimant’s favour in 2 seconds if you sent a solicitor…
Ultimately, in-house counsel at an org the size of Google is tasked with making the problem go away. It's easier to do that by burying the opposition in machine-generated paperwork than it is to convince people laterally far away in your org to comply. As a small business, you can't afford to pay for lawyers to deal with all the paperwork, so the bigger side (Google) always wins.
You can't bury a small claims court in paperwork - that's by design. And like others have suggested, if you write the letter in plain language, stating that they should at least look over your case again or it will be taken as bad will by the court, then the legal team might request that this information be provided by the engineering team - who will in turn say ok yeah, this is bollocks. Or they might not and he will lose. Either way, I would at least send a letter indicating such intention.
Even if they did, fraud is a high barrier, it sometimes producing "bad" results that are reversed for PR reasons isn't enough. Given the case here, "A human has looked at the account and has confirmed that the only developer that has ever used it has been banned, this matches the criteria for banning the account" would be a review. (If they really gave the app developers the credentials to the account, that alone might be a violation of the rules? But I don't know how the Play Store backend works in detail)
Businesses treating businesses badly aren't that easy to reign in.
I'd simply ask, can they very publicly offer a review process which is essentially a functionless placebo button or is that misleading enough to subject them to any liability at all?
Google may terminate this Agreement with You for any reason with thirty (30) days' prior written notice. In addition, Google may, at any time, immediately suspend or terminate this Agreement with You if: (a) You have breached any provision of this Agreement, any non-disclosure agreement or other agreement relating to Google Play or the Android platform; (b) Google is required to do so by law; (c) You cease to be an authorised developer, a developer in good standing, or are barred from using Android software; or (d) Google decides to no longer provide Google Play.
https://play.google.com/intl/ALL_uk/about/developer-distribu...
Google's customers include advertisers, and they include people paying them for hosting, and people paying them to buy apps, and people paying them to publish apps, people paying them for online services, people buying their hardware, etc.
Their revenue last year was 136 billions. Even if we charitable assume app developers spend 10 billions per annum in aggregate, that's only 10%. Ancillary revenue.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/google-s-...
I read it as saying $31 billion in revenue since Android was released, not in 2016 alone. That was more than 10 years ago.
And of that $31 billion, $22 billion is profit.
Finally, a lot of that revenue came from payments made to Google by handset operators, not app developer fees.
Network effects are causing more and more important things to both expand into great significance and to be dominated by a single company (or pair of gatekeepers, both of whom must be appeased, as in the phone platform.) Your business can be utterly wiped out with no realistic recourse by any of a thousand actions that could be taken at any time by the giant, like an elephant stepping on an ant.
I'm afraid that the only real recourse is to have certain anticompetitive regulations automatically kick in once a business rises above a certain percentage control of access to some market or medium that has become significant. They lose the ability to unilaterally ban, for example, except in narrow cases involving fraud or suspected criminal activity, which will eventually have to be proved to some official. If they fail to prove it, the official will order compensation without the banned party having to fight the giant's lawyers.
In what universe are companies like Google, Apple, ... classifiable as class II common carriers? On what grounds?
This of course can never be true for mom-and-pop. But hell yes it is true for Google.
'We the people / customers / market recognize that it's in our interests for your functions to be centralized (whether through functional necessity, efficiency, etc), however, in return for our granting you a monopoly we demand some say in how you run your affairs.'
The alternative should be, if Google isn't willing to accept that, then they deserve a lot harsher anti-competitive regulation. The GDPR would be the tip of the iceberg, and would continue into preventing their leveraging their size and customer knowledge into new related industries.
Meanwhile say GE could be very huge and produce 50% of lightbulbs but if they decided to be grossly unreasonable people could just stop buying lightbulbs from alternatives. Now if they had created their own bulb-socket standards and enforced them so that only they could produce bulbs that fit into the socket then there would definitely be an abuse of monopoly standard and ample grounds to argue "No you abused the patent and it will go into public domain now as part of the punishment.".
Something I learned the hard way when I first started out in business is to never make your business dependent on a single entity.
Whether it's a supplier, or a publisher, or a telco, or whatever. They are all single points of failure, and unless you're a huge business, one failure can be all that's needed to take you down, too.
Yes, Google Play is effectively the only way to publish an Android program. But it's also a single point of failure, which is why until there is no longer a mobile program duopoly, I don't invest in app companies.
Seems impossible. Assuming you're an internet business, how did you make your business not dependent upon your domain registrar?
If anyone reading this remembers that story, I would very much appreciate a link.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/24/zoho-pulled-offline-after-...
It wasn't an internet business, so I didn't have to deal with those kinds of perils.
But more to your point, I knew a guy who put one on .com, one on .info, one on a county tld. Advertising material rotated through the three. His logic was that it didn't really matter what address was advertised because people just hit a search engine for the brand name. I haven't spoken to him in years, so I don't know how it worked out.
This is a great idea, thanks for sharing
This is in contrast to the app store gatekeepers, where there are effectively two, each serving a non-overlapping chuck of market, and you can't shop around for better terms or an alternative.
Not an ideal situation if something happens with your registrar, of course, but at least there is some possible recourse. The risk of this leading to your business closing is significantly lower.
The biggest one lately comes down to marketplaces and payment processing. For example, if you are running a business selling a physical product, and you are banned from:
- Amazon
- PayPal
Your business is dead. It usually comes down to exposure and payment processing. Some businesses can gain exposure through a variety of channels. But most businesses get the majority of their customers through a small list of channels. That can be Facebook Ads, SEO, Forums, etc.
If you wake up one day and Google de-lists you from organic search, and the majority of your traffic was from SEO, you're dead. You can try refocusing and investing in other channels, but the majority of your potential new customers probably use one or two channels to find your service. So unless you are the only person offering said service, they'll just go to a competitor.
These companies like Amazon, Google, Paypal, Facebook, Apple have become gatekeepers. Try and do any type of e-commerce without using the above services. Good luck buddy!
Many businesses boil down to 1-3 of the above. Losing access to one can be all it takes to go from a highly successful company to a doomed company. And these services will ban you on ToS violations, without ever explaining what part of the ToS you violated. The implication from such a ban is that your business, your livelihood, your life's pursuit is instantly crippled or dead. The implication to them is nothing.
All internet business that needs Google search to get visits? 5% bing doesn't really cut it.
I mean it's easy to say and believe that you should avoid those single points of failure, but the real, practical landscape often includes many of them.
What you're bringing up is kind of obvious but also irrelevant.
I'd ask what businesses do they invest in and figure out if those businesses are really less risky. I would posit they are probably not. The risk of having amazon Google or apple being a single point of failure is abysmally small compared to all the other risks out there.
There are many practical single or narrow points of failure a bootstrapped startup or small business may encounter. The real risk to most starting out business is being seen as irrelevant - by the potential customers or search, whether app store or Google.
If a market or medium is too dangerous to enter because there is no realistic alternative to submitting to the 800-lb gorilla, the gorilla's ability to threaten rather than compete must be eliminated.
All businesses have risks. At least these risks you know about beforehand (a <1% chance that your app developer has been shady in past and will get your account banned). This is actually a pretty small risk compared to the >99% chance that the app will sink like a stone in the sea of apps available, never to be seen again, along with every penny invested in it.
The app stores are swamped with apps. Every single one of those apps was some person's dream that they spent significant time/money/effort on - building an app and getting it on the store is not a trivial undertaking. The overwhelmingly vast majority of those apps will never make a cent for their creators.
From Google's perspective, one less app on their app store at this point is probably a good thing.
From the OP's perspective, unless they're seeing significant revenue from the iOS version, writing the whole thing off as a sunk cost and walking away is probably the best plan. Which is ridiculous, I know, but logically true.
Nobody is forcing you to use google products, and they are not a replacement for the real security in a business of loyal customers and employee's anyway. Why anyone ever consider investing in making apps for a phone given the way the market is today I will never understand.
Your second real recourse, if you can't get away from them and at that point this becomes a responsability, is to resist or fight them. In this case, getting some capital together and filing a class-action lawsuit. Another way to resist; make an app that roots the phone and poisions the data-brokers well by feeding them garbage information in a way that is impossible to effectively filter. Charge $5 a year, update the phone like antivirus updates it, have teams that work on popular vs unpopular apps, and before launching a campaign against a large app or investment firms, short the companies stock for added revenue. Invest in breaking the model of a closed ecosystem, which is required for all this spyware and for abusive EULA's to actually work right in the first place.
And when you do those sorts of things, you create a ruckus, and plenty of economic damage. That tends to draw the ire of law enforcement and government, and you will find that is the most effective way to demand new regulations. In politics, its only when you hit critical mass that change occurs.
And the final recourse, which is also a responsability that nobody likes to talk about. Their business addresses of them and their executive management can be found, and there are 17 guns per man women and child in the USA for a very good reason. You really have to fail as a society for violence to be justified and to be the only effective measure; arguably right now we're failing pretty hard if the fertility rates and life expectancy statistics are any measure. Google might not be responsable for that, but they are part of the symptom of a disease.
One could say the moment Google decided instant search was a requirement and began putting people in a bubble so effective that the only way to really survive was to decide free news is fake news. That at that moment violence became inevitable. I certainly hope it isn't.
But it is going to require people begin acting like grown-ups and taking some risks to avoid that. You'd do well to remember that.
Companies like to say they're providing a "platform"; maybe it's time for that to become a legally recognized concept.
The irony's that the mentioned notice was sent to the junk folder by Gmail. (I'm assuming Gmail from the screenshots)
Imagine if the gmail spam bin was eating important renewal notifications and business notices for a company that competes with google, would it still be anti-competitive for Google to make sure gmail's spam filter works right?
So if the message is "use Gmail or otherwise you can lose important messages from Google and then your business gets screwed" ... that's definitely an anti-trust issue.
That said, they should definitely fix this issue.
The issue isn't the ToS. It's fighting Google in court. If fraud is occuring, the ToS will not actually protect you.
You want to know what's keeping Jack Dorsey and Sundar Pichai up at night right now? They both recently openly lied to Congress and can be put in prison at any time for it. A powerful congressperson merely has to decide to act on it. Dorsey has begun walking back Twitter's aggressive deplatforming against the political rightwing because he's scared now, he knows they can get him on lying to Congress. They can get anyone on lying to Congress, all they have to do is get you to testify extensively, then you're fucked. It's why Google didn't want to send their CEO to testify.
The only way to deal with a corporation as powerful as Google is to get their executives in front of Congress or on record in front of federal agents and pin them to the wall. Once they've testified enough under oath, they're effectively in a permanent minefield. They have to be very careful with all related business practices after that.
That works when you have a hot political issue, like election tampering. I doubt it's possible to scare up enough attention for app store bans. The only recourse there is to pursue it in court and or hope some state AG will jump on board.
Sure, one possible lesson is not making your business dependent on such third parties. But if your business involves an app, you're pretty much stuck being dependent on Google and Apple. I mean, ask Facebook about that. And amusingly, Google re Apple ;)
The key lesson here, I think, is the importance of vetting any consultants, developers, etc that you use. In particular, the importance of vetting their reputations with Google and Apple.
And indeed, maybe it's best to isolate consultants, developers, etc from Google and Apple. They do work for you, and then you interact with Google and Apple. And you make sure that everything gets sanitized, in the process. That would protect businesses, consultants, and developers from each other regarding their reputations with Google and Apple.
For many years, I did work for attorneys. But I never submitted anything directly to any court, opposing counsel, or whatever. And I was careful to wipe my identity from any electronic files that would be submitted.
If a decision is appealed and reversed, would we hear about it? If the employee did a proper review and concluded that, yeah, it's legit, for reasons we would agree with, how would we know from only hearing the other side of the story?
This is why actual judicial systems are more transparent. Cases are tried mostly in public. Judges write justifications for their decisions. This allows us on the outside to review what they're doing and understand how it works.
But, the downside is that it's slow, expensive, and there is rarely any privacy.
As in the case of MS back in the day, it can seem like the law is just disinterested, but the law is merely unbelievably slow and equally inevitable. The day some prosecutors can make a career out of taking on Google, they will, and by then Google will be fully on the wrong side of public opinion.
That is pretty damned unambiguous, unless you found as in the case of MS... confusing. If you want to explain what you found “silly” I’m open to reading your perspective of course.
In an extreme example, lets say that a bureaucrat takes an action because they have an unreasonable personal dislike of something. A bureaucratic review of the situation will confirm that the person had authority to act as they did then close the case. The reasoning behind the decision may not be examined at all in the review.
A symptom of things getting bad is that reviews will never seem to achieve anything, because a bureaucracy won't take unauthorised action, so any action is by definition going to pass a review. Very frustrating to deal with that sort of system. This sort of thinking is so screwy that it makes sense for the reviewer to report directly to the original decision maker, because the reviewer isn't supposed to challenge the decision, they are supposed to make sure that the decision was made by the person they report to!
roenxi's law: "In any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy, all oversight degrades to tautology".
We did it therefore it was right otherwise we wouldn't have done it. Case closed.
What we see over and over with tech cases like this is 1) We can't tell you exactly how we figure stuff out because then you'd game it, 2) Things happen based on actions and associations you don't realize are important
This is effectively having somebody show up at your house at random times and punch you in the face.
But, we are told, it's all for the greater good. I don't doubt that the averages work out -- more good is done than evil. I do, however, doubt that such over-generalizing is so much for the greater good as it is for the bottom lines of the tech companies involved.
They are just selling you a low-quality product. You are free not to buy it.
it is not just google that makes promises or benefits from positive user experience, availability of options to end users and so on.
It wasn’t until a few times contacting them and DMing their support team on twitter that I was able to force an actual person to look at the obviously fraudulent transaction and fix it up instantly.
The algorithms suck, if I say someone took money from my account with an email and name that I’ve never seen before then you can’t just say nope not fraudulent!
I’ve also had reviewers push for internal change on my behalf when policy seems poorly applied.
One specific example I can give is I had a link to my website in a game made for kids. They asked me to put a parental lock on tapping the link (e.g “ask your parents to enter the code” type thing). That was a really good addition.
My oldest is going through apps almost entirely by jumping through ads which force you to install the next "free" game.
The reason Apple applied extra scrutiny to my app is because I checked the box indicating "Made for kids."
Any business that is profitable and employing many people but has single point of failure with Play Store can solve this problem by giving Google some money for a more detailed review with an option to submit additional evidence. Say company X gives Google $10K to do this extended review. If the party wins, Google returns the money and reinstates the account else Google keeps the money.
Secondly, a private arbitrage company which may be setup by all big players in the game that can further review the whole process and provide a neutral view of the whether the ban was warranted or not.
I have advocated with most of these large companies to come together and form an open Privacy Working Group which will advice all companies to adopt privacy standards and also help evolve those standards by a widespread industry participation. If we could do it for HTML, Javascript and Web Standards we can do it for Privacy as well. This will also pre-empt government's heavy handed approach to force these giants to adopt standards that might be completely arbitrary like GDPR.
If you don't mind burning fifty quid or so, you might find it satisfying to use the small claims process to issue for a sensible (not super-inflated) estimate of damages. The below is not legal advice, but is written from personal experience.
Try to leave a clear paper trail of your reasonableness: send a clear notice before action with a reasonable time limit for reply, offering to settle for the estimated damages or reinstatement of your account. After this time expires, you can file a claim online.
There are then three cases to consider:
1. Google settle immediately in response to your notice before action, either with damages or another action that satisfies you.
2. You file and Google fail to turn up at the resulting hearing. You will get default judgement and should be able to add your court fee to the judgement against them given your offer in the notice before action.
3. You file, Google oppose and send representation. Assume they win with probability 1. You are down a court fee and your time to turn up and sit round the table. They've been forced to engage properly with you and the judge to ensure they take your complaint seriously, and you've had as good chance as you'll get to argue that their behaviour and/or terms are unreasonable. Their costs will be substantial and the rules do not allow them to recover them from a non-vexatious claimant...
Do the rules allow them to bring the question of whether the claimant is non-vexatious to litigation?
Nobody has even tried anything like that in any of my claims, it's deliberately a very high bar, but as far as I know, it'd be a decision you'd ask the judge to make at the end, in the same way you ask for your court fee when the respondent refused your offer to settle in the notice-before-action.
Someone claiming their livelihood was impinged on by termination of their accounts by Google, given said termination actually occurred and not in the context of a criminal enterprise won’t meet that standard. Not a chance. Now if you made dozens of accounts and sued over each one, or were a spammer, drug dealer, etc... that would probably annoy a judge.
I would not assign that probability at all. The small claims system is actually designed to be fair! Going in all lawyered up is more likely to raise eyebrows and could be counter productive. The whole point is a quick and easy process with the minimum of fuss. You present your argument and they present theirs and a general test of reasonableness is applied. More Judge {Rinder|Judy} and less Rumpole of the Bailey.
I spoke with a lawyer about this and looks like it won't work at all. From what I understand Google doesn't have any obligation to serve his app on the play store. Unless you can prove that they are a monopoly, but to do that it's very hard and you need a lot of investigation.
The suspension was for "suspicious billing activity", tried appealing twice with the correct billing address, and was told the suspension is final (some automated email) both times.
They won't take my calls because the account is suspended, which leaves me not being able to advertise on the #1 service to do so.
It's completely unacceptable, especially for a business in their position. One tiny mistake leads you to a lifetime of suspension to a service vital to almost any business.
He is still banned today
Of course, Google could do the same to ANY of us who end up depending on them. The only real solution is whatever makes you not significantly reliant on Google.
Probably not enough to matter, if you are only looking at the UK.
Back when our anti-monopoly legislation was first introduced, that wasn't the case - monopolies were busted just as well because they did something anti-competitive, even if that was presented as benefiting their customers (and even if it really did, short term).
Everyone has the right to revoke consent at any time.
Additionally, why do you believe Google is a monopoly, and in which line of business?
the best way out of this is to educate users and start getting them to use other search products. we need more diversity of choice.
- Having friends inside google does not help (I suppose at some level they can, but L5/L6 engineers aren't enough)
- Creating a new account with a different credit card does not help. Subsequent accounts they can link back to you will also be banned
- I haven't found a solution yet, except for keeping all of my new projects outside of google (no google analytics, no google search console (which obviously still allows your site to be indexed) no gsuite. That way if I never need google advertising, a co founder can pick it up and google has no way to trace the company back to me.
Why, so Google can pull the rug out from under me at the least opportune moment?
But I agree, too risky. Just stay away from Google. Cons outweigh the pros, for me personally. The only thing I used it for was sheets, docs and gmail. LibreOffice is more than adequate for me, and far better than the Google alternatives.
This is how google has always operated, and it's one of the reasons why their near monopoly on advertising is horrible for everyone.
It was 10 years ago, and I have tried to make an appeal about it but always with the same response.
I was just exploring Google Places API to see if I could integrate it with a side project. The signup process claimed that it only needed a credit card to "prove that you're a financially capable human," which makes sense (and it also said that it would not charge your account until you gave it express permission), so I happily agreed. Despite this claim, Google apparently requires an active, chargeable card at all times, from account inception until you die. Failure to do so will result in terminating your account.
Whatever, let them terminate the account. Google's public favor is in a tailspin, and I can get the data I need from FourSquare at a fraction of the cost.
https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/article29/item-detail.cfm?item...
I'm not sure if it'll help for the author of the article, as Google's decision is clear, just their logic in unfair, and I assume they are talking about a business, not a personal, account.
This really is where Google might be too big...
Since Google is such a force, and they don't have time to support or help people/companies lost in the algorithms, maybe competition is the only thing that can solve this because most companies are too small/medium for them to care.
Lots of these systems are probably well intentioned and risk averse by default, but in the end have too much influence on the market as a single point of failure.
Highly concentrated systems with single points of failure that fail on a large scale are bad, but even worse is highly concentrated systems that randomly get in an error loop but too small to correct, only here it is small/medium companies stuck in that algorithm purgatory vortex.
One sometimes needs a lawyer to deal with the complexity of government laws. It seems like soon there will be a small thriving job market for "googlawyers" -- people who will earn they bread and butter by getting through the Google's bureaucracy.
PS. Jokes aside, it's a sad state of things.
The OP doesn't seem to know for certain what code is in their app. Is it possible that the outsourced developers they're using could have introduced dangerous code, and have a track record of doing so before? Nowhere in the post does it suggest that the author has contacted them to find out why their account is banned, which seems a little odd given how frustrated they have become with Google for banning them.
At the very least it doesn't seem that Google has thought of a better way to handle the scenario where an honest client relies upon a firm that has within it one bad actor, which seems kind of short-sighted given the heavy-handed nature of their policy - ban and delete someone else's work..
In an ideal world, code review of the app would reveal whether or not there's anything fishy going on. It doesn't seem like anyone has done this - not the OP, or Google. OP thinks their developers must be OK, and Google thinks (based on some past evidence) that they're not. This doesn't strike me as totally unreasonable on Google's part.
But really we should move away from these app stores.
take a huge cut
Exactly. It seems there should be some certain legal "level of expectation" that they will act in good faith for 30% (I'm guessing- I don't use them).
But really we should move away from these app stores
Yep. Which is why I have to guess at the 30%.
I find this whole story very disturbing. I understand Google's need to protect their ecosystem from malicious code, and the desire to ban developers who try to do harm (although I suspect that the real bad actors find work-arounds for the bans), but I can't help thinking that this isn't the way a good (morally) company would behave.
I guess it points to way more developers out there than Google needs in order to have a vibrant ecosystem, so if they burn through some percentage it isn't worth their time. It makes me think of fishermen who fished ruthlessly and perhaps wastefully when the ocean harvest was plentiful. Years later, however, those fishermen face some dire times, with perhaps more ahead, because the harvest is more modest and future harvests are threatened.
That maybe have changed in the last 10 years but I don't think it has. The help on it says
> The remaining 30% goes to the distribution partner and operating fees.
In other words Google is not getting 30%
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
> But really we should move away from these app stores.
Agreed
no they don't; this is not a trial.
It seems to be the issue to me as well.
The analogy given in the article is wrong. It has nothing to do with incriminating you for your neighbors crimes.
I do realize it sucks for Mark but if the reason is indeed that these devs are suspended, the suspension of his app is perfectly understandable.
I had an account representative from google at some point. As soon as I was banned, all my calls were routed to voicemail automatically.
Knowing all these, I wouldn't touch their iOS app with a ten-foot-pole.
Which, to be fair, is by design. The article admits straight up that it's an attempt to get publicity and embarrass Google into reinstating the account. Giving a complete and forthright accounting cuts against that goal, they want to seem as sympathetic and innocent as possible.
And, to be fair, the iPhone set around here is eating it up. Pitchforks are sharpened, torches are lit and the march to the castle is underway.
As to the truth? We really have no idea. I think your theory sounds most plausible -- they hired someone scammy to write the app and Google happened to bring the banhammer down on them while this app was being launched.
With how Google makes the appeal/review process opaque, they might not even know themselves.
Transparency is a major issue here, you cannot even defend yourself because you don't even have access to the "exhibits" or any other kind of details.
And I seriously question if their cloud offerings have actual product designers attached.
One great example:
If you are using Google CloudSQL, you are one command away from losing everything:
> gcloud sql instances delete prod-instance-name
When you delete a CloudSQL instance, it also deletes the back-ups associated with that instance along with it. So if you accidentally delete your production database: Your backups? Poof. Gone.
It says this in the fine print of the on-demand backups documentation: https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/mysql/backup-recovery/back...
> They persist until you delete them or until their instance is deleted.
There is also no way to mark a CloudSQL instance as "protected" so one bad CLI command can lose you your production database and all backups.
In order to get an actual backup workflow that will not affect production traffic, you have to script your own database dumps.
For me, Google CloudSQL does not do enough to protect my production data from accidental deletion. I would argue it is unclear how your production backups are being handled. I would argue their product treats your production data and backups irresponsibly.
Sounds like one of those developers was previously banned for violating ToS and Google suspects the author is the same person with a new account trying to evade the ban. Instead of sharing login details, the correct thing to do is add a user and give them permission to upload. Not let them pretend to be you.
The situation sucks but Google's action seems reasonable? Like they can't just let people create new accounts to evade bans.
I understand Google doesn't want to give bad actors information that could help them avoid the counter-measures, but the side effects on people who are innocent or make minor errors are too severe. They could make the whole process lengthy, and require proper, detailed authentication to make sure it's different persons & companies each time - that adds enough cost to deter bad actors from using the "appeals" process, but it would save honest people from the frustration.
I'm not on Google's side, look at my post history, but there are always two sides to a story.
So far 99% of the people I have seen complaining about their account being suspended were unwilling to read the ToS, even less to try to comply with them.
I am pretty sure that the review process does mistakes as well, but as always bad actors spoil everything for everybody.
FWIW, I had 2 apps removed from the play store earlier this month. They were all based on the same codebase (different flavors) and were banned for using a forbidden permission (after asking it to the user of course).
I was super surprised since when I coded the feature using that permission, it was legal to use it. The rules have changed since then and I had pushed an update to remove the use of that permission (to be honest it was not that necessary, it just made the UX a bit smoother in one case).
BUT I did not realize that for these 2 apps, I had retained apks in the play store for lower api levels with the faulty code :///
(I use an upload script to gain some time .. multiple apks take a long time to upload for each update otherwise; so I don't see the play store console often)
Still; I was clearly in the wrong.
I just removed the faulty retained apps and was again in the play store a couple of hours later.
So... a sane human being? Someone who can't afford to spend literally hours reading legalese and trying to figure out what it means?
Sure, a ToS is different, and there's basically an implicit contract when you buy a service, but that doesn't mean that the ToS is all powerful. It can be still unfair practice. (Some jurisdictions have that too.)
Now of course courts can't really force G to do business with you, but as others mentioned they can be sued for damages.
That plus business can certainly not terminate your business relationship for any reason they like.
Many people are in this exact situation. That is why they are upset.
was it related to SMS?
In retrospect it was a mistake even when it was in the ToS. It needs way too much precautions : warn the user and explain what we do, have them accept the permission, handle the case where some phones need 'phone state' (because no way we ask that one, too frightening and powerful).
If you are not a SMS app, just open the default one (if there is one) with a pre-filled message.
It seems like the opposite of reasonable to me. You hit the nail on the head for _why_ this happened but this person now has _zero_ recourse for correcting their mistake.
Yes, they screwed up. They shouldn't have let them do it through their account. But now, because they screwed up, you're fine with the action that they can literally never be on the Google Play store ever again? The largest mobile store with the largest share of phones and you can't be on the store because of this?
Absolutely unacceptable.
question: is Google really that good at detecting the relationship between an account they banned, and some other new account created under a different name with someone else's credit card?
i mean couldn't this small business get another credit card under a different name and then create a totally new developer account under a different name -- and keep that all totally isolated from the previously banned account?
is that just not practically possible? if it worked at least initially -- what would they have to lose?
I then attempted to login to my ‘Google Developer Account’ for
the first time. Previous to this our app developers were the
only ones to access our account to upload and update our app for us
Google definitely needs to up their game here. Lifetime bans that are completely irrevocable are a completely unacceptable system for the #2 or #1 app distribution platform in the world. Such a ban should be a last resort after many, many transgressions and a result of extensive manual review, not handed out on an automatic basis. Nonetheless, developers need to do their part and also read and take serious the ToS of the developer agreements too.
It contains hard rules regulating what you can do with your app, not just with respect to Google, but also with your consumers.
They paid them to make the app though, they could put literally anything in there and even with them sending them builds that they uploaded themselves it would have been just as easy to be nefarious so this justification is thin at best.
Are there shared accounts in the google app scene or is giving your credentials to the developer the only way to give them access?
Unless Google found something concrete, this speculation doesn't matter at all, shared account or not. A lot of software/websites/services are developed and managed on behalf of other businesses/people, with those people just trusting the developers/admins with no way to verify anything really.
In this case, I would imagine the Google Developer Account would presumably give them access to some level of information about the customers of their application.
Surely not, but that's what happens if you manage millions of apps and developers with minimum human labour. But even if they would increase human labour ... I guess it is really hard to look into all the cases, because what do you do with (smart) malicious actors, trying to circumvent bans?
That's a can of worms Google would not want opened.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
How do you deal with the digital mafia? RICO act.
The problem is that they don't. :(
And in such a log, every action taken by an employee should be marked with an employee number, even if it is a number that only means something inside the company; and every action taken by an algorithm should be marked with an identifier for that program.
It would be a lot easier for everyone involved to understand what the hell is going on if you could see entries like:
- <YYYY-MM-DD> algorithm XYZ flagged account due to suspicious activity [link] - <YYYY-MM-DD> employee 123456 verified accuracy of terms violation [link] - <YYYY-MM-DD> algorithm ABC notified account owner via E-mail of violation [link] - <YYYY-MM-DD> algorithm ABC auto-banned account
Instead, it seems for a lot of tech companies the communication amounts to ONE E-mail basically listing all the lazy non-effort they went to before ruining everything for you with no recourse.
But there is zero value sharing this with "customers". If you shared this and it said "Algorithm/Employee #12345678 linked this account with previously banned account" where does that get you? It doesn't get you any further - all it gets you is another thing to argue about, but they've already made their decision and you agreed to their TOS about how they can cancel your account at any time, so you've gained nothing really: Google still don't want to do business with you, sorry.
It sucks, but automating sharing reasons for flagged actions will be self-defeating.
Ultimately it needs to be reviewed by a person at the company who is equipped to judge the situation with more intelligence and discretion to determine if it's really fraud or not.
Compliance is the goal, no? How's it self-defeating if you ban non-compliant behavior and only way around it is to basically get more compliant with the rules?
How will you get compliance if you don't share details with clueless violators, so they can avoid the mistakes in the future? That seems self-defeating, because this gets rid of clueless, but potentially valuable developers.
> It sucks, but automating sharing reasons for illegal actions will be self-defeating.
Yes I changed your text from corporate "illegal" to government "illegal". We wouldn't let THAT fly in a court of law. We have rules on that, like the 4th and 5th amendment. Right to have the charges read before them; right to face their accuser; right to a fair trial; right to be secure in their houses/papers/effects
So what are the charges? "We will not tell you what you did."
Who's the accuser who said I did the thing? "It cannot be in the courtroom. It is an algorithm.
Secure in your effects? You waived them (unilaterally) in dealing with a monopoly. Too bad, soo sad.
Fair trial? SURELY YOU JEST!
While i think relying on google (or a single platform) is dangerous, these platforms really need to address these issues. While their isn’t much competition, they are really eroding developer trust. Developers may decide to build for an entirely different platform or work on a different idea that is outside mobile. This ultimately hurts app stores and this these platforms.
Short term a small amount of discontent doesnt matter, but it could reach a tipping point.
Good, app stores need to die.
Do you have an alternative trust mechanism that can’t be subverted via, for example, algorithmic voting?
And yet almost weekly I read a new story about malicious apps being found in app stores. Like this one posted today:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl...
Personally I trust things from app stores about as much as I trust random things from the web.
I know you mentioned disabling javascript, but browsers are also a really good example of this. Browsers run your code in a sandbox, and the rendering engine itself is sandboxed in case of bugs. As a result, you can pretty much visit any random website and know that it won't compromise your system - as far as I know, there haven't been any widespread attacks using browser vulnerabilities since sandoxing was introduced (except maybe Internet Explorer, which doesn't really count). The worst that can happen is that a browser tab starts using too many resources or doing something annoying (like autoplaying a video), and you can just close the tab and make it go away.
Wow - no, we do not have the ability to ascertain the overall trustworthiness of a dev, certainly not better than Google or Apple.
Reviews can be faked, and 'how long their app has existed' is not a very good measure of anything. Their T&C's on 'protections' don't mean anything if they are not already trustworthy.
So unfortunately, this is one of the valuable things that AppStores can provide.
* A bunch of reviews from users, very few of which sound fake: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/overcast/id888422857
* Articles about the app from well-known websites: https://9to5mac.com/2018/04/29/overcast-versus-apple-podcast...
* A wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overcast_(app)
* Information about the developer: https://marco.org/about
You could fake all of this, but it would be really difficult and expensive, and probably wouldn't work in the long-term.
It's true that for a brand-new app from an unknown developer, it's difficult to say what their intentions are, but Google and Apple don't really have any more information to go off of than you do regarding that - at best, they likely have the developer's contact information, but you can probably find that yourself as well. Additionally, the nice thing about sandboxing and permissions is that you don't really have to trust the developer in order to run an app. For example, the other day I was looking for a protractor app that would give me measurements in tenths of a degree, and I found this app [1]. Aside from a few reviews (which, as you said, could easily be fake), I know absolutely nothing about this developer - for all I know, they could be trying to steal all my data. But because iOS sandboxes everthing, they won't actually be able to access any of my data or do anything bad unless I approve it, and if I don't like the app, I can press one button and get rid of it. As a result, I can feel comfortable installing the app anyway, even if I don't trust the developer.
Apple requires people to provide a business number among other things, and they have substantial ability to 'dig in' to a developers background.
Users have zero interest in this, and nobody has time to do some big investigation into some company for the sake of some app.
The whole point of the app stores are to filter through the crap for us and give us some idea of what's good and what's not.
I don't know why this business got banned. I assume it's due to the outsourced dev they used. I doubt they're technically competent and reviewed the app themselves, so who knows what kind of bullshit the dev stuffed in their or their other apps.
One other thing is that, at least in Apple app store, the review process catches use of private APIs which are in theory harmless but are not considered stable and could cause the application to crash if a minor update changes the way they work.
Excessive resource usage is already pretty easy to avoid - iOS will limit resource usage when an app is in the background, and show you which apps are using a lot of battery power so you can uninstall them. I would imagine Apple could expand this more by showing an unobtrustive notification somewhere with a message like "____ is reducing your battery life, would you like to stop it?"
Regarding private API's, if Apple's position is that third-party apps are not allowed to use them, they should just stop exposing these APIs to other apps completely.
Solving privacy issues is tricker, at least in the short term, although I think this should eventually be handled by government regulation. Assuming we can get fair and well-written regulation (which, to be fair, is a big if!), we could have clearly-documented rules that apply equally to all market participants, and aren't quite as clearly biased based on commercial incentives (although there would still be an indirect effect due to lobbying).
While non-malicious, jailbreakme.com seems to come back once every few years or so.
More so than the repositories that various linux distros use? I honestly think that something like apt for android would be a much better solution - too bad, it will never happen because it would mess with google's monopoly.
But it still comes down to discoverability and trust - you need to know about and trust these alternatives, and you need to change a setting on your device to "allow untrusted sources".
Google Play Protect, for instance, works just fine on sideloaded apps or apps downloaded from other stores.
The distribution and marketing channel don't need to be the same as the trust mechanism. There's a whole anti-malware industry out there that can do the latter, and could easily do as good a job as Google currently do.
How did the rest of us ever live through the 80s and 90s when we had to purchase software from physical stores based on reviews in magazines and word-of-mouth...
More seriously, the PC software industry works well without app stores, download sites usually check for malware to some extent and successful publishers earn trust by not screwing over their users.
Last week, much of Google and Facebook were brought to a halt after Apple revoked their enterprise certificates. While the circumstances justified Apple's actions in this case, the fact remains that even Google and Facebook are largely reliant on another large company. If Apple completely banned all Facebook apps from the app store tomorrow... well, Facebook would probably survive, but it would be a serious blow.
I don't see how you can not be reliant on Apple/Google.
This is the very definition of a monopoly, isn't it? If the government was working properly, it would be ready to break up these companies, as well in other areas of oligopoly such as oil and banking.
> thESE companIES
If it's possible to implement the app as a PWA sure, but then discoverability becomes an issue.
Sadly, App Stores are a natural monopoly and everyone expect them to be fair but they clearly can't.
That said, I’ll offer an alternative history...
The author hired developers who have previously uploaded malicious code to the Play store, or actively tried to circumvent restrictions on it. That developer uploaded an app, Google banned their account and all accounts that they have been contributors to.
This is a reasonable action for Google to take. It’s not like the Play store account had a long history of playing by the rules, with 1 developer being added right at the end and behaving badly. This is an account that is essentially fully tainted.
When appealed, the reviewer looked at these facts, and upheld the closure, as I believe would have been the right action.
In terms of getting further information, I would guess that Google are vague for 2 reasons: to provide more information may open them up to being sued more easily (rather like how most companies won’t say why someone was fired, or give performance information in referrals), and secondly in Google’s mind this developer is malicious, so they don’t want to provide any information that could be used to further circumvent the ban.
Now, this does put the developer who has been essentially scammed but is acting honestly in a tough position. My advice to them would be to push hard on the developer advocate and marketing side of things. Ideally they’d have done this from well before release and had a good working relationship with someone on the inside throughout the process. People say Google are bad at support, but this does happen, Google can be great at developer engagement, as can Apple, etc. I’d frame it in terms of getting a new account set up, guaranteeing that the account will not be delegated to any external entities, and probably pushing hard on the fact that the app is out and doing well on iOS. I’d push for building a relationship and being open with communication, as these are exactly what the hypothetical bad actor that Google believes in would avoid. It might take some time and perseverance, but I reckon that might be enough.
> I do like that you're trying to be sympathetic to Google.
I'm only offering up an alternative hypothesis. I have very mixed feelings about Google products and services like many people, but I have seen them be responsive and useful particularly through developer evangelism channels.
My "story" was intended to be a hypothetical. I don't know if that's what happened, but to me it sounds like a possible option.
To be honest, I also think you could be more constructive in your tone and present your arguments in a better way. You have a useful opinion to add, but the way you do so is inflammatory.
Er, that's against the TOS. They will immediately ban that account, and any account they ever make.
It would be evidence of you trying to avoid the TOS.
I'd frame it in terms of "how can I get a new account set up". Yes they have automated systems to prevent that, but I believe that a) the company is "innocent", b) Google want more good citizens on their platform, and taking these two together I think they should be able to find a way to make it work.
I also have another friend who has been banned for life by Google for the Play Store as well by association. Google refused to reconsider on appeal, and offers no recourse for him, a professor who teaches Android dev.
Google's lesson is clear here - don't use their services if you can help it because you expose tremendous liability due to Google's unwillingness to take any.
It feels like the money keeps rolling in through ad revenues, and then spent on developing projects like Inbox, Reader, and 5 chat apps, all of which get discontinued.
Is Google (the company & team) turning into a Dilbert Comic?
That's not a rigorous scientific statement, but it's fairly consistent with my own experience dealing with Google as a startup. Unless you have a back channel via an employee you know, it's next to impossible to get any non-automated, human judgement on your situation.
The part I don't get is... where in Google leadership does this issue get lost on the company's priorities? Of all of the rational explanations I can come up with, it feels like someone looks at the data and either says "nah we don't lose much money from this" or "nah it's not a real problem". Is that actually true?
Could it be something to do with company culture? Something like "if we solve a hard problem by assigning a human to it then we have admitted failure as a technology company". It's a lofty goal but it comes at the cost of betraying the trust of partners/customers when things break, and they seem to break often. Someone in management really ought to be weighing those two things side by side (assuming the cultural thing I mentioned even exists).
And if you don't, than your monopoly should be broken by the government. And Apple's high end garden barely scratches Google's monopoly.
What happens if Google provides support is their average revenue per employee drops from $1.3m to an even million per year or whatever and their profit margins remain immense and that $100b+ in the bank keeps on growing. But it is certainly more expensive than an auto-emailer faking support.
I think that, when you are the gatekeepers to some people's livelihoods, there's some amount of ethical responsibility to exercise judgement. If you can automate judgement, then great, but if you can't, you should probably implement it with humans.
People complain about how they can't talk to a human being about their one specific issue. These companies are not mom and pop stores dealing with a handful of suppliers, just sitting there waiting for their phone to ring - they're huge businesses operating in hundreds of countries 24/7/365 handling probably millions of interactions with "customers"/suppliers every year with all sorts of different processes and policies in different jurisdictions.
On Hacker news we hear about someone falling through the cracks in the system every couple of weeks, but we don't hear about all of the bad actors/viruses/malware getting blocked/removed from the app stores or cloud vendors everyday
There are people out there whose strategy is "throw enough shit and something will stick" who are trying their hardest to publish their malware as much as possible every single day and it's (IMHO) frankly something of a success/miracle that we've not seen any more major abuses of the app stores and cloud platforms.
People on HN complain bitterly about the potential for ad networks to distribute malware, but then get mad when FAANGs ban accounts that are linked to bad actors. Sure it is sad that some people are innocently caught in the crossfire but what are the FAANGs to do? Damned if they do, damned if they don't?
2. I had two GMail accounts closed on me for no obvious reason. Both were eventually reopened, but one several years later because I got enough media attention to get their attention.
3. I know one company that lost all their mails because their paid App Engine account was closed on them. I know another company which lost its biggest customer when the CEO's personal Gmail account was suddenly closed. And I know two other people who has lost access to all the stuff on Drive.
Considering that each problem is a real disaster for the person experiencing it, and that you don't hear about such stories with Microsoft, Apple or even Amazon.
The fact is, that even though you only hear the horror stories, there shouldn't be so many of them that you here them all over. I am just one person, and I trust Google as much as I trust the Chinese government.
I'm making sure all of my resources are spent on AWS and Microsoft services. Never again for Google.
And thankfully, physicians prefer iPhones over Android by a large margin.
My Google account was entered as a recovery email address by someone else. Most likely because it was a single letter removed from an abbreviation of their real legal name. I got an email informing me of that fact and instantly disavowed any association with the link right there in the email.
What should happen but a year later but Google letting me know that "your Google account [other email] was deleted due to a violation of our Terms of Service that was left unresolved.".
I tried to contact Google, I tried to disavow the account again, no reply and a dead page. My account isn't dead, but I seem to be irreversibly linked (the hypothetical Google term would be 'avowed' I guess, given that the opposite 'disavowal' was in the URI to reverse the process) to a ToS violation severe enough to warrant account deletion through no fault of my own. Simply because a random person signing up for a new account on the other side of the world typoed i instead of u.
For all I know my reputation with Google is so bad that a single click on the wrong YouTube video or a new algorithm with marginally different scoring running on my account will delete it all. I have zero certainty through no fault of my own.
Edit: Could hypothetically be a great way of shutting up political dissidents (and their YouTube accounts) or anyone you don't like. List their email as a recovery address on ten new accounts, get ToS violations on all of them before they get a chance to disavow them (do it while they're likely sleeping maybe) and you're done.
The author of the story said he doesn’t know what the third party may or may not have done and Google didn’t provide an explanation. And I never said my account was shut down.
IANAL. You might be able to invoke some legal means to limit your losses. The associated-account story wasn’t an act of God. You might argue the developers should have known better. I’d suggest buying an hour of a lawyer’s time to see what can be done.
He asks for an app, but lets the offshore "developers" do everything including store deployments. He could take the codes, and take care of the accounts. Heck, he could even study a few hours to understand what's going on the app before submitting.
He just depended on some random company he found on a freelancer website, dumped all the money, then got punished because he let those people take 100% of control.
Good luck with lawyers.
If you willingly lend the keys to your truck to someone else, and he or she commits a crime while using the vehicle, it might get impounded.
Know the people whom you work with, or just do the work yourself.
You may be stuck paying court costs to defend your property and get it back. Which is why we have tons of ridiculous court cases like: "Bag full of hundred dollar bills V. US Government."
On the other hand, I get great deals at police auctions and never lend out my keys.
You have no constitutional right to have a Google account. And you probably agreed to forced arbitration in the Google TOS and likely even agreed that Google can terminate your account for any reason, at any time, without cause.
Good example: https://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform/reforming-poli...
Son commits crime using father's car and car is seized using civil forfeiture. The car has already been returned and the ACLU is fighting the police department in federal court:
https://www.tba.org/sites/default/files/cain.complaint.pdf
Not saying civil forfeiture doesn't need to be reigned in, it does, but there is a legal apparatus for getting your stuff back. I admit it gets trickier on things that cannot be traced easily, like cash, but I'm mostly responding to the OPs example of an innocent persons car being used in a crime by someone else.
Another good example below where the owner of the vehicle committed a crime in the car they owned and the state tried to seize the vehicle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbs_v._Indiana
So, I admit the legal system moves slow, but there is clearly a strong legal case for fighting these unlawful seizures.
You are then jailed, without being informed who the incriminating hire was.
It sounds a lot like he gave his credentials to his dev team which is a major violation of the ToS of the play store.
But hey, looks like reading these is too hard, better to just whine afterwards.
Forget procedures, guidelines, terms of service. Individual Google employees can and do destroy businesses, with impunity, and with no accountability.
It’s always difficult to distinguish incompetence from malice. But Google is the worst of all possible universes: both incompetent and malicious - and completely uncaring about that fact.
a) Maybe it's just the nature of social media, but I think we're seeing a massive uptick in issues like this being brought to Hacker News and their ilk. Not just Developer Accounts, but DMCA fraud and Adwords account issues as well.
b) An incumbent like Google can be built entirely on automated algorithms for all they do (I think this is one of their core precepts), but at some point (like now) this breaks down. This sets the stage for a rapidly building snowball of first small/minor litigation (e.g. Small Claims) and then catches fire until much larger litigation starts happening.
c) As evidenced over and over in tech / large corporate history, often issues like this (that snowball), open up opportunities for new upstart players who come up with effective solutions to these problems, to displace the incumbents. (Cracks in the corporate armor.) As such, it wouldn't surprise me to see upstarts using this as an opportunity to chip away at Google's market share.
d) Small claims court can be a very effective way to get matters resolved, and I've found them to very much not be biased towards any party and to consider the merits of the case. With that said, there are some restrictions - including the amount of judgment, and the kinds of judgment that can be issued. One of the most interesting aspects here is that: "Unless a judge grants permission, Attorneys and paralegals are excluded from appearing or participating with the plaintiff or defendant in a small claims suit." This makes it really interesting when the defendant is a company like Google (or really any large entity).
e) I attribute some percentage of success to building a good cadre of attorneys who work for me, or with me. As much as I cringe when I think back to some of the invoices, it is my humble opinion that they've been worth every dollar paid out for their services, especially in cases just such as these.
Best of luck resolving your issue.
We really need an open mobile platform, "Personal Mobile" like what "Personal Computer" used to be, even if only by an accident.
We're not there yet, but fixing things like this is the future of the decentralization technology being built today.
Ultimately, I gave up trying to get the verdict overturned. Instead, I used my personal gmail account and created another developer account. I re-published my app and it has been in the play store for the last three years.
If I ever release another Android app, I'll probably self release and skip the Play store.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19092039
A $50 payment to the ombudsman, refundable if the ombudsman decides in the customers favor, would discourage the obmudsman being overused.
Lots of companies need an ombudsman because they provide no way out when the normal processes let customers down.
It's like a backstop for customer satisfaction. A internal "court of appeal" to help customers out.
Kind of like having "a friend in the business", but available to any customer who needs it.
They have authority, more or less, to "get shit done".
It's just a VP of Support.
Now, if there were a few people chosen from among the users, and they could talk to management. That'd be something. (See EVE online's SMC - a council of players.)
The difference after your change, is now you lose $50 and STILL have to post to twitter to try and get your problem solved.
What do you suggest we do?
Also, why do you need an android version at first? Author says the app is useless without it but I don't understand why
This ban is lifetime unfortunately and you or related accounts are not allowed on Google ever.
There's a historical reading list for law students at http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/library/2013/06/27/AMK...:
> Understanding Freedom's Heritage: How to Keep and Defend Liberty. This list, prepared for young people by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, includes some acknowledged classics and some idiosyncratic choices.
Examples: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-i-sued-go... https://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-google-bo...
I understand people want to get rich by releasing apps and other stuff, but if you depend on other people to do this, you will fail miserably. There is a very small percentage of apps being successful with this method.
Do marketing or something else. Do not depend on random companies (especially offshore) for the entire project. The OP had the idea, not the solution. It is really not surprising to see these type of issues. What if the developers disappear next month and you have a major bug? You can't fix it and will fail. It is their code and your company on the line.
Find local real developers, work with them, or learn to do it yourself. Do not work with offshore especially $5 an hour. I understand google did something harsh, but this is the owners fault, not googles. Use your own credentials, do the most important things such as deployment and source control. You gave the master key to offshore people and get shocked when things go sideways. When will people learn?
I imagine he has a contract with the devs so he can get the app in some form (hopefully access to source too) and publish it himself. Of course, publishing to mobile phone stores can be difficult for non technical people, but if that is the case he can request "over the shoulder" assistance with screen sharing so he ends up being the one logging in and doing the actions.
In the iTunesConnect portal, you can assign roles to various parties, including roles that have permissions to publish apps, without having to give the admin's account credentials.
I don't remember if the Play Store has similar features.
I never read the TOS or EULA, either.
Google just does it as a process.
/dev/null/goog
I'm also in the process of moving away from my gmail for this reason, specially with Inbox going away now.
For individuals and other companies, it is easy enough to place an abstraction layer around using Google Services: have your own domain temporarily or perhaps permanently attached to a G Suite account. Be systematic about creating Google Takeaway data dumps and saving them yourself. When using GCP, write your own or use standard library wrappers around GCP APIs.
Then you get the advantages of using Google, protected against low probability of occurrence problems.
I also like to use Amazon and Microsoft services and I take similar precautions.
I forsee the EU eventually fining Google (nice revenue stream with fines recently) and they have to do what Microsoft had to do with the IE Browser and offer the users a choice which lists the alternatives and allow the user to chose and change as they wish.
Which would be nice, and will eventually happen. Though these things will take...time. Though I wonder if Microsoft will have an android app store by then, the poetic irony of history will sing come the possibility of Google having to offer users of Android an option to select which store they wish to use instead of the Google default, with Microsoft as an option. Browser selection parallels are abound here.
More like you handed over keys to your car to a neighbor and the next morning there's blood on the bumper and the cops are knocking on your door. You do bear some responsibility but since it's Google's store it's their rules and the analogy kinda breaks down because Google cuts off access in order to mitigate the impact of a Sybil attack.
It also serves as a very unfortunate reminder of a couple of things:
1. Just how incredibly important it is for us to be able to use the platforms of the future as we see fit. We look at app stores and think well, this is good, right, applications are vetted and you can be sure that everything you install from one is fine. Except malicious applications still get through (see e.g. https://threatpost.com/google-play-removes-22-malicious-ligh... - not a singular incident), it's applications that could be a threat to Google's position or its business don't.
If users could download and install applications as they wish, as it was the norm twenty years ago, having a developer account removed wouldn't be much of a problem. Curating and reviewing applications may be a good way to keep malicious ones away from non-technical users, but who we trust to do the reviewing is equally important, and Google is about as shady as it gets.
2. Google's abysmal support (which is not limited to this particular case!) is no coincidence: small developers are too small to count, and, as applications became commoditized and got cheaper and cheaper, there are too many of them for the loss of one to be important in any way. Sure, Google's PR may insist they value every developer but their actions speak for themselves. Customer support, for any branch of their business, is so bad it makes PayPal look helpful by comparison.
3. Ultimately, that the standards of every company are the standards that its users hold it to. It speaks for itself that Google's "appeal" process (if one can call it that way) is so incredibly useless that the only way to actually appeal it is to produce enough rage that -- out of fear of bad PR, not because that's how you work with customers! -- someone will actually look at this.
I hope this gets sorted out real soon -- and that we all think twice about which platforms we support through our work. Both Google and Apple are what they are because mobile developers publish their applications there and not somewhere else -- both of them would be nothing were it not for the app developers' work, as seen in, say, Windows Phone. Granted, Android and iPhone are where the most users are, so it's where the big money is -- I'm sure no one writes Android apps because they're evil (ok, some people do; but not everyone). But most companies in this space could afford to invest in more free platforms, like the Librem 5, which would work in their own benefit, even if not right now.
Edit: oh yeah, one more thing.
I've seen Google trying to wiggle out of situations like these by saying that well, this was outsourced, so maybe the guys this was outsourced to did some shady stuff, it's definitely not Google's fault, they have no control over that.
Yeah, well, the outsourcing industry is older than Google is, and it's also responsible for virtually 90% of the applications on the Play Store (how else do you think applications end up costing 99 cents?). If a company can't come up with a review process that can accommodate the software outsourcing industry, in 2019, that's beyond laughable.
I think instead of relying on these giant monopolies we should built open platforms on decentralized technopolies.
I run a consulting company myself. When we develop mobile apps for our customers we usually recommend them to assign one of their employees to manage App/Play store accounts and publish new versions. The company responsibilities under online store TOS are not necessarily covered by the development agreement they signed with us and if they want to ensure the compliance they should do it themselves.
If they are half as serious about this as usual opensource community they would have built a reasonable alternative to it. It's a disgrace that Android, something paraded as opensource, has taken away the very things it promises to give the community: choice and liberty.
Do you hear Linux community whining about Redhat or IBM?
That isn't to say this isn't an unethical and jerk policy of Google's. It's just that you knew they, and most other centralized companies with rent models are incentived by profit to behave this way.
So many people are slapping their hands down a burner and then acting shocked when they get burnt.
Try to depend as little as possible on 3rd parties. Use free software that runs on your machine instead of proprietary services that depend on a server, store your data on your own physical hard drives instead of anyone else's cloud. Sure, concessions can be made when its too impractical to do your own thing, but have in mind that {Google | Apple | Amazon | Facebook} doesn't care about you.
That's governed by their consortium (And if Google fusses at that, create a fork of Android and make a ProvidersDroid OS)?
A consortium of consumer oriented connectivity and device providers (that are also competing with each other) -- have to be able to stand up to this MonsterG, that's waging a war on small-sized-businesses and individuals.
That kind of shit happens all the time.
Don’t forget that there are other markets for apks such as it is. Play revenue is dismal compared to Apple App Store anyway.
I had my Adsense account terminated a few years ago and since then I can’t do anything commercial on Google’s platform. My appeal wasn’t heard and I wasn’t given any info on what happened. I expect a competitor did something.
I can’t make YouTube video and add ads, and I can’t add ads to any new website businesses I may want to put online.
It has been that way from the start and probably will be that way forever. Stories like this go back ages.
I don't imagine there is much "discoverability" there anyhow.
Fortunately, I knew more than one person who worked there and begged them to ask around. Eventually, we were told something to the effect of, Google outsources management of the store. Once an actual Google employee got their eyes on it, we were reinstated.
This post is not disputing Google's right, some would say duty, to counter fraud. It's simply stating that this shouldn't result in irreversible damage to good faith actors.
I am inclined to agree.
Google has similar problems with automated, AI powered systems at Adsense, Adwords, Youtube, GCP etc, and the constant abuse and total lack of communication they've put their customers through has had many of them abandoning these platforms.
Meanwhile, their poor treatment of customers keep reinforcing the notion that Google simply cannot offer the level of customer service people need to run their businesses, and that's one problem they can't code or AI themselves out of.
There should be some limits as to what you can and cannot put into TOS.
Regulatory capture
I guarantee if you got such a law passed, Google, Apple, and Microsoft will be the ones actually writing the law, and running whatever organization is supposed to enforce it.
And I guarantee they will make it extremely hard to comply with simply to drive up costs to competitors.
It won't actually do anything useful, or there will be one good aspect left in as a fig leaf. It will, effectively, be a very expensive to comply with pile of empty words.
Then maybe we should start educating users in the other direction. There wasn't this problem before app stores and walled gardens became common.
It seems that we had long since solved the 'problem' of software distribution before Apple and Google decided to correct it.
And no, my roughly used and crazily effective PC system is not riddled with malware and viruses despite the claims of walled garden purveyors that insist this is inevitable.
OP if you need help let me know. As long as you have the source code it should be simple.
They may have a decompiler somethign thingy and block the new account too, as associated with another account that terminated LOL :)
It's very common now and I think these experiences are kind of a 'coming of age' for newer users.
I told him no and ended the relationship. Guy needs to read the terms he’s agreeing to.
YouTube contributors, Android developers, etc.
Unless we have collective action these companies will simply not care about us.
Plague to them. That monopoly should have never been created.
I know some web developers that have to login to client's Google accounts... For example, using Gmail to download/send mail via their hosting account. Convenience to have it all in one place but some clients who are small business owners don't really want to or know how to deal with things like setting up their email putting in the IMAP and POP details.
Then if you make apps for example, if the company isn't a tech startup you'd be the one uploading the app too. Say they are a small restaurant chain and you wrote them an app.
Also there's local seo companies where companies will manage small businesses Google Business page listings for them too.
There was a story posted about an entire company that got their GSuite banned, and employee's personal accounts unrelated to work got deleted too. https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8kvias/tifu_by_gettin...
I like many other people use Google services daily, and a fan of some of their products. However support seems like a blackhole from many other stories online, other's that made it to HN too.
Not sure I'd want to use them for anything business related (Domains, Hosting, Internet, Phone, etc), other than publishing to the Play Store if I ever made an app since you are kinda forced to if you want a popular app that's cross platform. I forget the post but a few days ago people on HN was talking about Google's Cloud offerings and recommended not using any cloud specific APIs. I haven't really been following Google's cloud offerings but I know AWS offers a lot of APIs for databases, etc - but the idea is to use tools and programs that can run on any cloud so it's easy to switch if you wanted or needed too without being locked in. Good general advice no matter who the provider is though.
Google Fi interests me but I remember on the top page of HN someone had a billing problem, and not sure if that was solved. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18886804
Google Fi is supposed to be really useful for people who travel internationally for example, with iPhone support recently added but visual voicemail, etc isn't supported yet... If they add visual voicemail in the future I'd be more interested in switching but support is a concern for me.
Also YouTube other people talk about, don't have that as your only income stream is one of the points. However if you are popular enough I've heard you get like some sort of account manager assigned to you, so maybe they get higher priority for support issues.
I think we have these "OMG (Google|Youtube|Adsense|Paypal|eBay) terminated my account and it's a disaster!" - once a week at least.
Of course the problem is that this is a very skewed ecosystem/market. Very harsh rules, everyone is incentivized to play as dirty as they can get away with to maximize profit, because it's just a matter of time before the platform owner tries to get their hands on that particular app/idea/service/niche. (Or someone else, or even just a free alternative.)
And similarly, since platforms sell convenience, lifestyle (in case of Apple) as a service, and exactly because of this they want their users dumb, they sacrifice app developers and apps the moment it would cost them some user convenience. (Of course this paradoxically keeps users in the dark with regards to real security and real convenience of computing, but keeps users very motivated to learn whatever the platform owner think should be the new "convenient" way to do things.)
https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-google-out-of-my-life-it-screwed-u...
I thought you can’t use “app” in an app name?
WhatsApp seems like a fairly strong counter-argument
We've heard this story hundreds of times — Google Play's aggressive banning, automated responses that stonewall progress, and general inability to get things fixed even when people get involved — so there's nothing about it that isn't believable. But I have a feeling that some or all of this may not have actually happened to this particular developer account.
The first thing I checked was the history on the app itself. AppBrain shows that the app was originally released almost exactly 1 year ago, and in the 11 months it was available, it had still only reached the 100-500 install count. Apple's App Store doesn't show download numbers, but the listing has zero reviews, which is a fairly good indicator that download numbers are virtually non-existent. https://www.appbrain.com/app/com.hoopapp https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/hoopapployalty/id1287914039
I also then looked into their website, curious if this might still be newsworthy. https://www.hoopapp.co.uk/
It's a proprietary digital loyalty card that requires that businesses pay a subscription fee and either rent or buy hardware from HoopApp, and customers will need the apps on their phones. On a personal note, I think the business idea was bad and doomed to fail, but who am I to judge...
This is when I started to consider the app may not have been delisted by Google, but could have actually been done intentionally by the HoopApp people. After all, the download numbers were abysmal, and the only way a business like this can succeed is if there are a ton of customers interested in using it, which would be incentive for businesses to pay a fee for it.
Their post makes a point to say that they had put some effort into hyping up the product prior to its launch, which was supposedly about to happen, so I looked at their social accounts. https://www.facebook.com/HoopLoyalty/ https://twitter.com/hoopapployalty
Both have posts from 12 months ago that say the app already launched, and some from only a few months earlier that claim the app was just about to launch. To me, this doesn't really line up with the timeline they presented in their post, even taking into account the claims about server troubles. I don't think server troubles should take nearly a year to resolve. Regardless, both apps have been publicly accessible for a year.
https://twitter.com/HoopAppLoyalty/status/928166469136814080 https://twitter.com/JNights2/status/967074426272575488 https://twitter.com/HoopAppLoyalty/status/967723452957208576
https://www.facebook.com/HoopLoyalty/posts/880998315392883?_... https://www.facebook.com/HoopLoyalty/photos/a.80383775977560... https://www.facebook.com/HoopLoyalty/photos/a.80383775977560... https://www.facebook.com/HoopLoyalty/photos/a.80383775977560... https://www.facebook.com/HoopLoyalty/photos/a.80383775977560... https://www.facebook.com/HoopLoyalty/photos/a.80383775977560...
Both accounts have been mostly silent for the better part of the last year, only popping up with a few generic reposts, some stuff about a video, plus a post on each account when they were anticipating an award. Evidently they won a local business award 8 months ago for a service that hadn't officially launched yet?
https://twitter.com/HoopAppLoyalty/status/100990469131517542... https://www.facebook.com/HoopLoyalty/photos/a.80383775977560...
There's still room to dig, but once all of these pieces come together, it looks a lot like they're trying to stir up a mob to get attention for a business that had basically failed. It's not hard to pretend to be a victim of Google's famously bad management of developer accounts, there are screenshots and identical stories all over HN and reddit, all of which are easy to copy and modify.
I'm skeptical of story elements like an investment of only £25,000 (about $33,000 US). The way it's described, it sounds like this is for both the Android and iOS apps, plus server development, and an interface for the business owners. To say that's on the low side would be an understatement. Are there investors, and why aren't they doing something about this? They've supposedly sunk time and effort into promoting the service and making videos, but most of that happened over a year ago over a couple months, then abruptly slowed to very rare posts. This doesn't sound ambitious enough for a startup.
One other thing I noticed is that the HoopApp social accounts don't even point to this post, and the site still links to the Google Play listing even though it has been down for a month. You'd think they would have at least added a note to explain the app would be returning shortly. I'm not going to speculate on this or try to track down details, but I did briefly ponder the possibility that the post wasn't even written by somebody with a connection to the company.
Regardless, the tl;dr is that this whole thing smells a bit like a publicity stunt based on an all too familiar story. Raising the pitchforks for hundreds of other legitimate developers is more than justified, but I think this particular story should be scrutinized quite a bit more before it becomes the poster child for a call to action.
While making a living off of it you are only incentivized to defend android and what it COULD be.
Being an android app developer is basically scamming entrepreneurs, especially North American ones as their ideas dont typically leverage any good or monetization related ideas that apply to North American Android users and they are completely tied to Google services.
All while developing for a venture on the Asian continent just wont pay you, the developer, as much.
Good thing developing for yourself is free.
The moral is never invest money in a platform where an algorithm can terminate you.
The same applies to payment processors. Always have more than one for your online business.
I'm not.
Tl;dr: Cut ties with the app developer, create a fresh google play dev account and deploy your app.
I do agree that Google’s customer support is sorely lacking. If they’re collecting 30% of every purchase, they need to hire real people to deal with these issues. That’s a big chunk of change to collect and not provide any service against.
Edit: While it’s tempting to play the victim, business in the real world also works this way. Businesses can end up tainted by association with sketchy parties or other businesses that act poorly. A good chunk of business is word of mouth and trusting the other party. No one wants to do business with someone untrustworthy.
Google seem to be clear that any new accounts will be banned too.
My main problem in getting away from Google is: who will protect my email/phone accounts as well as Google does with GMail and Google Voice? Sadly, those are the main means of authentication for my multiple financial accounts (for most banks phone and emails are the only 2FA methods available).
I am not worried about the privacy issues, I'm mostly worried about Google deciding to terminate my account for some reason, like in this case. I'm also not worried about getting locked out due to losing my 2FA secrets, since I backup them in multiple places.
The obvious solution would be: buy my own domain and then connect it to another email provider or G Suite, right? However, now I have a point of failure that is my domain registrar and my DNS provider, and I'm sure that even the ones that offer strong security (e.g. Gandi with U2F) are more prone to getting successfully hacked than @gmail.com, from both a technical point of view (e.g. attackers violating their systems and change the DNS records for my domain) and social engineering point of view (e.g. crafted support requests pretending to be me and begging to reset my 2FA).
I’m not sure it works that way, incentives are always balanced by the practical effort required to achieve the goal, and the effort of breaking google is massive compared to the effort of violating a DNS registrar.
Also, the author should make sure to publish their app on non-Google App Stores and remind users that they still have a choice.
And for those questioning on why the author is upset if they're still on the iOS store: Android is about 85% of the global market, and about 2/3rds of the US devices.
iOS is this weird dying phone OS that Apple is keeping alive even though there really aren't that many users.
But they can make them really difficult to find.
> iOS is this weird dying phone OS that Apple is keeping alive even though there really aren't that many users.
lol. There are more than a billion iOS users worldwide…
Doing that would be a leg cannon.
I don't think it should be given the priority developers give it, but 15% globally and 30% in the US are a lot of people.
They're also far more eager to spend than Android users.
If your business model is dependent on someone else's service/store/website/slients then YOU DONT HAVE A BUSINESS you have AT BEST a franchise.
And then it might get resolved well...
a) all businesses are dependent on others
b) even an individual is dependent on others
It’s usually smart to have a backup plan, but sometimes the backup plan can only be: deal with it when-if it arises.
If one of the people you chose to associate your account with was previously a bad actor or involved with one, there's no reason to give you the benefit of the doubt because you have at least demonstrated bad judgement. For years people have been playing a game of whack-a-mole where when one account gets terminated they pop up with another. Since your entire business apparently depended on the app stores (a bad idea to begin with) being in good standing with them is therefore vital and it was incumbent on you to vet the people you were in business with. (i.e. sure, be in business with them if you choose. But if you decide to associate your single point of failure business account with them and they fail to disclose that they were associated with something shady in the past, your beef is with them not the app store)
May you get what you desire.
I admit that I was judging the story by the details that weren't included as I found the omission of them as the most relevant. Perhaps the flagging of the account in question was in fact wrongly done but it seems incumbent on the author of the article to make that case which they did not, in my opinion.
Here's the thing that really annoys me about this whole topic: I'm not a fan of the direction the app stores have gone (either as a user or a developer.) I'd much rather be reading and participating in discussions about what's going to disrupt them.
What is it about an app store-based business that is supposed to make them immune from these realities?