Comment by jboydyhacker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jboydyhacker | Hacker News Reader

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I think folks are drastically missing the forest for the trees here. This is just one minor example of the INSANE process that is now the Chrome Approval Process. I've seen extensions go for many months getting random rejections with no reason given.

This forces developers to GUESS as to what is wrong. Want to try and develop according to a roadmap or timeline- forget about it. There is no "app store" approval process that conducts itself in this way.

Fact is Chrome is 80% of the market so Google doesn't worry about competition. If Google Chrome is broken- then the internet is broken. It harms new entrants trying to develop and innovation.

After the 2nd or 3rd rejection- have a HUMAN intervene. Explain what is wrong. Devs are more than happy to make the changes. But you can't do this "make you guess" bullshit.

DOJ and EU need to get involved. Someone at Google with their wits about them and revamp the whole process. It's a travesty against the developer community and should be fixed ASAP. Also from what I hear they need to start with new LEADERSHIP.

This year, my resolution was to start reducing my dependency on Google products. I installed Firefox and deleted Chrome. Then I downloaded a file size manager and remove all files I haven't open in past 5 years, deleting from GDrive. THe same with GDocs. All emails larger than 1Mb were checked if they needed to persist. I end up unsubscribing from the 100Gb service from Google, my inbox has 6Gb, I deleted the Picasa stuff (I was not using), and the GDrive was reduced to 3Gb (the limit is 15Gb altogether). I am quite happy with this. PS: I started considering doing this, despite being a Gmail user since 2006 because of their removal of clause "stop being evil" and the huge amount of tracking being done in Chrome, which frankly, annoyed me very much.

> I installed Firefox and deleted Chrome

You know that Firefox is Google right? Like, literally, Google is the main company paying Firefox's developers, and if they don't do what Google says, Google can just cut the funding, and they all end up unemployed, right ? Of course, to avoid a monopoly, Google would need to fund a different browser instead, but still, people have families to feed.

If you want to cut dependencies on Google, Firefox is not the answer, and neither is Tor or any other Firefox derived web-browser.

The money that Mozilla makes from Google comes primarily from setting Google as the default search engine in Firefox. You can see lots more details on this here (2016 numbers): https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2016/

I think stating that Google controls Firefox is vastly overstating the degree of influence.

Is it reasonable to assume that bing will be more than happy to become the default should google leave any space on the table?

Bing already pays for users, and once you give it time to build up a profile of you so it stops returning reptiles and vegetables when you're trying to search for Python libraries, it's equal in quality to Google. If having a high quality service literally give you things to use it doesn't break Google's stranglehold on search, what will?

I think the default for some time was DuckDuckGo, and that helped raise them out of complete obscurity, but it didn't reshape the internet landscape.

I'm pretty sure a lot of companies would pay a lot of money for that.

> Firefox is Google

Then we're doomed...

After 2nd to 3rd rejection if it will require a human to intervene Google will have to hire half the earthlings to deal with crappy spammers that will simply spam google store with their extensions.

The answer is not human interaction, the answer is automation tool to give more details as what was detected and didn't pass.

The answer is probably to stop using Chrome.

I use firefox, stopped using chrome last year. But my comment was about general usability. Chrome or something else, whoever is number 1 will get corrupted by power. It's human condition

> the answer is automation tool to give more details as what was detected and didn't pass

And then Google will have to hire half the earthlings to write all the special-case code into the automation tool...

why? current automation tool is a boolean exit. You either pass or not. Just expose *current tool logic.

No other hiring required for this

Interestingly, the very same Google is somewhat different in Google Play. Whenever your app is rejected, they will specify why. Sometimes it's evident that there was a human involved — I once received one of my listing screenshots, with the part needing change circled. The thing is, sometimes those rejections are bogus. Then good luck getting to any humans to fix it if you don't know anyone from developer relations.

Most of the time they don't specify why an app is rejected. My app update rejected before I had no idea why. I disputed the rejection which I didn't know what it was and update approved later. Google play store app review is the opposite of Apple's review process.

I appreciate the correct use of travesty. (and I agree with all of your points.)

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