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Comment by StanAngeloff | Hacker News Reader

We were banned from the Play Store for violation of their Impersonation policy in mid July after publishing an update. We just got reinstated last week. During the course of the lengthy appeal I had an unshakable feeling I was up against The System™. I still believe I was communicating with a bot and not an actual human being — I refuse to accept a rational human being will behave the way Bob from Google did.

It's such a stark contrast to developing a web app which you can _freely_ publish. When did thing go so horribly wrong?

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>When did thing go so horribly wrong?

When every company and their dog decided their content needs an app. Instead of using the nicely standardized thing called http and web browsers.

That moved us from http straight to corporate technical fiefdoms with no control.

I’ve been building apps for Windows for over a decade (we used to call them programs or software) and this isn’t exactly a problem there. The problem is strong centralized App Store control, not native app development.

>I’ve been building apps for Windows for over a decade and this isn’t exactly a problem there.

You 300% completely miss my point. Apps ARE the problem. Especially in the "for Windows" context. Now I need to install 30 different apps to access 20 different sites, and another 40 different apps on my other device that's in a different app eco system.

...versus standardized http and browsers. The entire app eco system in their specific walled incompatible gardens is top to bottom is toxic.

And that's not me pulling a stallman. Every fuckin website and company on every device wants me to install their own app. It's tedious AF at best

Maybe the tyranny of the fiefdoms will drive us back towards HTTPS.

Certainly I've heard the question "why don't we do an iOS app and an Android app?" in respect of conference schedules. Usually after people saw the Google IO schedule app.

My response was, now we have HTTP push notifications, we can do everything we need on a website. Most people just want the now-and-next information. And as a bonus, hook an old PC up to a TV and we've got now-and-next on a conveniently located display (the lobby, main conference hall, etc). Not to mention the ease of maintenance.

Instead of using the nicely standardized thing called http and web browsers.

...of which Google effectively controls the standard because they have a majority of browser usage.

And will continue to do so because anyone who wants to create a new browser will be locked out of supporting EME by Google as we've already seen happen a couple times. Then once they get rid of the address bar and URLs, the only way to find anything on the web will be through a search which Google happens to also dominate in.

For decades, developers distributed actual non-web software without having to deal with technical fiefdoms. Proposing the web is an alternative just masks a political/social problem as a technical one.

> nicely standardized thing called http and web browsers

hah, good joke.

Artistic license. http is less of a circus than a couple million apps anyway.

When my app update was rejected, I had the exact same feeling. This can't be a human being, I am talking to a bot. At some point I just gave up, which is still hurting a bit. What did you do to talk to an actual human?

I'm not sure what did it at the end — I literally called the guy a cyborg and asked for someone else to review the appeal. I also filled in all sorts of appeals/forms, even for unrelated things and some even multiple times. I still don't know what did it for us.

It's such a stark contrast to developing a web app which you can _freely_ publish.

The difference isn't between webapp and native, it's between publishing on Google's services and doing it elsewhere. Hosting binaries on GitHub or even your own site remains viable, and perhaps we should encourage more users to leave the walled garden this way.

I think a lot of their problems stem from outsourcing most of their customer service to poorly trained and poorly compensated contractors. Plus there seems like there's a firewall between actual Googlers who could make changes and communications from outside customers/devs/etc, and they're so insulated from the outside that they don't know the situation on the ground.

I think a contributing problem is the inadequate features of mobile browsers. It's harder to get to the pages you want to - harder to set multiple pages to launch on start; manage open windows; quickly navigate to apps you use without typing. Sure you can do the latter two things, but it's not nearly as easy as it is on desktop.

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