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Comment by tylermenezes | Hacker News Reader

Guidebook, a 70+ person company, also appears to have just had their account banned as of yesterday morning.

It's an app that tells you what's happening at conventions. Hard to see the bad faith there, but I bet the conventions they've signed contracts with this week will be very unhappy.

The co-founder has taken to tweeting at his network to try to find a contact. Crazy to think a rogue algorithm might put 70 people out of work if he can't find someone quickly enough.

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It's the danger of building your entire business on someone else's platform.

Now Android is a bit more open than Apple's App store since on can install third party apps outside Google Play, but I personally always got an answer from Apple, even if it took 3/4 weeks, every-time there was an issue with a deployed application.

Google? Unless you know somebody there or you are a big shot it's impossible to contact them, and they don't want to talk to you anyway. And one can only go so far with Twitter shaming...

Good luck to the OP, because he's going to wait a long time for an answer...

Yeah, it's about control. I tend to prefer approaches where I control the underlying platform. Unfortunately that's not always practical. Certainly not if you're marketing mobile apps to a large audience.

> It's the danger of building your entire business on someone else's platform.

This is so often repeated but by this logic noone should write mobile apps.

It's pretty ludicrous that this is an accepted notion. App stores are anticompetitve practices at their finest. (Especially Apple's situation, where they're competing with offerings from companies like Amazon, and slapping them with 30% cuts that price them out.)

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.

Maybe they ought to be regulated as public utilities.

With mandated dispute resolution.

Mobile apps can be a value-add rather than the core of the business.

> but by this logic noone should write mobile apps

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

Been arguing this forever. Jobs was actually correct. He just pivoted because he figured out that an App Store could make him billions and control end-to-end the economy and the device, which is always what he's wanted.

Web apps are the way to go. Not mobile apps in a store.

Maybe, but Apple's PWA support is still not great.

The technology is largely irrelevant here. If you wrote your app as PWA and then got banned from the Google App store you'd still be losing access to that market and ecosystem, and the mechanism for delivering an app to users. That's the real problem here.

PWAs offer something similar but not really the same, especially if you're charging for the app itself or doing IAPs.

It's by the exact same logic that scientists still publish papers through Elsevier. We, all of us, enable these monopolists.

No buts. EXACTLY this.

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.

I'm not entirely sure why anyone thinks downvoting observations from reality will change their outcomes but hey… this is slashdot^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H HN I guess.

Indeed.

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).

I'd say that's incomplete logic. Nobody should write exclusively mobile apps.

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.

Yep, but it's also the danger of building a business on algorithms. If developers start not to trust Google anymore then Google is going to lose quite a bit of its edge. Algorithms shouldn't have the last word about people. They can advise but not judge and people accepting wrong advices from algorithms should not get their bonuses.

You are right, unfortunately in the current case, their algorithms have determined many developer's careers and will continue to do so.

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.

Jesus, what the hell, why would google take them down? I've used the app a few times, it's a great idea and works fairly well. Definitely better than 99% of apps on the play store.

Such an app could be easily done as a mobile web site.

Can you link to your claim?

Guidebook app is down: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.guidebook....

Tweet from Guidebook (they removed the official statement): https://twitter.com/guidebook/status/1162764546487939072

Tweet from co-founder: https://twitter.com/pklada/status/1162815530874445824

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