Remember this the next time you don't get that job at Google. Somehow the most selective and elite of tech institutions can't bother to do customer service.
Managers, theoretically from the top down, are deciding how to allocate resources (as in, almost no live customer service people), what automated policies to put in, etc.
I think there's a fundamental problem with any company that refuses to provide some human contact for problem resolution (with customers, partners, vendors, etc.)
Also, after 20+ years in business, google engineers are still highly respected and sought after by every company for their tech expertise. If google didn't hire the best, that luster would have faded a long time ago.
Google has always been great at tech and poor at customer service. Though that seems to be a industry wide problem, rather than a google specific one.
certainly not sought after by my company, and i hate to speak for others, but i can name at least a handful of others where having any of the FANGs will usually get your resume circular filed. :x
At the scale they operate been one developer amongst tens of thousands on it's own isn't a good metric.
I'm not at all surprised that an organization that prides itself on elite engineering above all else falls down hard in other areas and doesn't even recognize how much of a problem it is. (Though, to be fair, Google Express, IME, has had superlative customer service, so it's not that Google can't do customer service.)
They author of this post didn't take his app and make it Apple exclusive. He removed the feature that was flagged and re-uploaded it. How much money did Google lose on that ("I'm going to buy an iPhone to protest this!")? $0. So again, spending $0 on support seems about right.
If it were an app that mattered, I'm sure they'd find someone to reply. But the app doesn't matter, at least at the scale Google cares about.