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Comment by btown | Hacker News Reader

It is absolutely possible to do this without making people mad. The solution is simple: educated, intelligent customer service for developers. Heck, make them pay a developer subscription fee to make the customer service cost-neutral. Or make them pay a refundable deposit to escalate a situation for manual review by a trained developer, at the cost of a market salary for however long that developer would take to review the situation.

But this cuts into the gatekeepers' profit. Why have a cost-neutral program when you can not worry about having that program at all, and (in Apple's case) still charge people for access to the store and documentation?

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I think what Google and Apple should do is to add support for a "premium" upload feature. Leave the standard process as it is, but add a "premium tier". For a fee of 100 EUR, you get to upload an app, and you get a competent review from a real human within a certain time frame, with a list of all things that you must change to make it compliant.

The problem is that right now a spammer who creates hundreds of low effort apps gets the same service as someone who spent months or years on an app, only to get it banned over a minor issue.

I know that reviewing apps and quality control costs a lot of money for Google and Apple, and I'm ready to pay for it, as long as I get some peace of mind that they don't kick me for accidentally violating some policy with a feature that thousands of other apps have as well.

It already costs $100 to be able to upload an app to Apple's App Store - I feel like that sort of support should be included in that price.

$100/year to upload unlimited apps.

Also, iOS developers can reach people at Apple.

I meant 100€ per review.

> The solution is simple: educated, intelligent customer service for developers

In reality, even uneducated stupid customer service would be better than the current state of affairs. And it's not just play store developers - these youtube takedowns, etc, costly people real money.

These large platforms are markets in their own right, and should be seen as such. They are simply too big to be covered by existing laws.

I shouldn't have to pay for that customer service if Google or Apple's cut is 30% of app revenues.

I'm pretty sure that 99% of apps on the store make so little revenue that it's not worth it to pay someone competent to review them, especially with all the ad supported free apps. So a very low percentage of apps pay for the cost of running the app store.

A fixed filing fee would level that imbalance.

Developers pay $25 or so on sign up.

And after paying those $25 they are free to spam the review team with hundreds of submissions? Doesn't sound sustainable to me.

If App Stores charged a fee per submission, that would drastically cut down on spam submissions, and free up resources for those of us who actually put a lot of effort into our apps.

Once you set a fee I know apps will be updated less often, it'd be sad for open-source apps - which I'd say are the most useful of all apps on Google Play.

So a fee on initial submission... updates not charged. Will still put a crimp in the spam-app floods.

If you spend hundreds of hours working on something, paying a reasonable fee to publish it is not going to stop anyone.

Which barely covers a competent person sipping a coffee whilst glancing at the title of your app.

Realistically, if you spent 20 hours developing the app, you're already $3000 invested on this project. Another $100-$500 isn't THAT big of a deal when you look at it in those terms

You're assuming 20 hours is worth the same to everyone. When I was a college student, even $100 would have turned me off from publishing an app.

That’s why most edu addresses get huge breaks

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