Open letter from an Android developer to the Google Play team

I found out when I saw that competitors were copying my Store Listing Text word for word (ASO), and when I downloaded them, I noticed a peculiar bug their app had which was identical to mine. It was a programatic bug due to the way the function was implemented, seeing an identical bug that only fails on the same edge case is a big red flag, so I decompiled their app and saw that my work was copied.

I did send email to the developer at fault but did not get a reply or action.

I usually read that a few seconds were claimed here or there. ContentID probably identified the part correctly, but people want to argue fair use.

And then there are the stories where it turns out the sample used was not cleared, etc.

edit: spelling

- Sign up for a free developer account, and

- Are willing to re-install the app every week

The ability to sideload is more important than it's usage, both for your personal freedom and for keeping large companies in check.

I'm glad that they ended up releasing it, but to show that as an example of open source from Apple ... indeed shows that people have short memories ;-)

Also, having worked on an actual anti-ad-blocking platform I can tell you that Safari's content blockers are shit. They are the easiest to detect and circumvent and the reason for why many publishers still don't is because (1) they don't know it's possible, or (2) they are afraid of pissing visitors off, especially given growing GDPR concerns.

The most potent ad-blocker on the market is uBlock Origin. And Firefox on Android supports it, the only mobile browser that does. Soon to be the only desktop browser too, but that's another discussion.

Do you have any links so I can read further on this? I'd like to compare it to both Firefox's built-in tracking protection (and fingerprinting resistance) and the functionality provided by e.g. uBlock Origin.

My wife has been using the iphone 5s for years now, because the later models are too big for her to hold comfortably. It originally came out in 2013. It is still supported by Apple, and hers currently runs iOS 12.4, which came out last month. She is on her second 5s, because she dropped her first one in the lake trying to take a picture of our dog. I use it from time to time to help pull up music or navigation in the car and it runs just fine, it's a perfectly usable phone.

These days, you can get a "renewed" one for less than a hundred dollars, unlocked, straight from Amazon.

Android is the phone ecosystem where you actually need to spend a thousand dollars* on phone hardware, because all of the inexpensive android devices are cheaply made garbage that feel like they should come filled with candy. They are stuffed with manufacturer bloatware (if you're lucky, or malware if you're not), and are obsolete right out of the box. If you spend a hundred dollars on an android phone, I absolutely guarantee you that you will regret it.

I'm not exactly an apple partisan here, I work on android apps for a living, I've used android phones for years, I actually like the Android OS and I want it to thrive, but the current state of the overall android hardware and software ecosystem, outside of the very high end devices that most people frankly can't afford, is just dire.

*- I have a pixel 3 XL, I know a thing or two about spending a thousand dollars to get a usable android device.

Is that correct?

Not sure what the situation is over there, but in my country I've got a $5 prepaid plan with unlimited minutes, 10 GB monthly bandwidth and I can stop paying at any time.

So I hope you don't go around pretending that the $20 you're paying per month isn't for that phone ;-)

How is the 16gb storage holding up for her?

A $238 dollar smartphone is inaccessible to most people in India. A "well under $1000 dollar" iPhone much less so.

Dollar values don't really translate as well to other countries as much as we'd like. Translating the price to a month's wage can bring a lot of perspective.

> Xiaomi has now been India’s top smartphone seller for eight straight quarters. The Chinese electronics giant shipped 10.4 million handsets in the quarter that ended in June, commanding 28.3% of the market, research firm IDC reported Tuesday. Its closest rival, Samsung — which once held the top spot in India — shipped 9.3 million handsets in the nation during the same period, settling for a 25.3% market share.

We have two smartphone platforms that have basically full control over third party software. A company or individual that produces application layer software can hardly just come out with their own OS (and expect any amount of mass adoption). It's preposterous.

This goes even deeper than the issues with the Microsoft investigations of the 90s, but the only difference is a lack of monopoly-level marketshare. Which is hardly a sufficient excuse to permit this kind of behavior.

But they shouldn't. 99% of apps out there could just be a PWA, specially in the Android ecosystem that favours them.

Write your service as a web site, and have native apps for a better and more integrated user experience.

I see this as an extension of the way the web is supposed to degrade gracefully.

Unless you are a unicorn or a huckster writing mobile apps is no longer an attractive business.

We provide a hybrid app development platform for mobile and over the last nine years we've watched a steady exodus of developers from the app space.

The only folk who are still relatively unaffected are the business developers.

Exceptions apply (like having investors with enough clout to get Google's attention), but yes, that's exactly what a lot of us are saying.

Don't build apps (or at least don't make them central to your strategy).

As long as they have the monopoly, "developers start not to trust Google" will never be a problem as there is no other choice and Google sees no reason to change.

If Google were purely in a business of renting movies, it would have give you some customer service. But it isn't in that business, so it won't give you a damn.

EULA is not some magic shield against the actual court system, either.

The narrative is that they killed the business without a fair due process. Then they wouldn't listen to the "customer"'s complaint or questions for clarification. It is bad "customer" service.

It does - in Google Cloud. This reputation of automated customer service played a non-trivial part in the initial lukewarm response enterprise customers gave. The Eng teams at potential customers looked at the way Google treated their marketing teams and steered clear from Google's - sometimes superior - offerings.

It might, but that problem, if you think it's a problem, is not fixable by Google providing better service to developers, because better service to developers would prevent their current business model for apps from scaling, and without scaling it won't make them money.

> their culture will not allow them to succeed in these types of human interactions

Their culture might be the immediate cause, but I think the root cause is the economics of the business model they have chosen. The only way to fix that would be to choose a different business model, and the obvious alternate business model would be to sell their services like search, maps, gmail, play store, etc. directly to their users, making their users into customers. But I don't think that option is open to them at this point, and it might not be open to anyone without a huge disruption of the entire industry.

Yes, but that doesn't make developers their customers. It makes developers their business partners, and business partners in a hugely asymmetric relationship, since there are zillons of developers and would-be developers and only one of Google.

Basically, an individual developer is negligible to them because there are always more where that one came from. So they have no incentive to handle particular edge cases with particular developers; they just remove that developer and another one takes their place. Most developers don't throw edge cases at them, so this strategy works fine for them.

It might be more convenient for google to not say, but it's pretty disrespectful towards clients that choose their platform to make a living and might get caught as a false positive.

If the intent is clearly not malicious and no rules were broken, the reviewer should file a bug report to fix the virus scanner and reinstate the developer account. No further explanation required.

If rules were breached but it may have been done in good faith, issue a warning to the developer and explain in general terms how to fix the problem. Charge a review fee high enough to deter any abuse of the review system.