Hacker News Reader

Comment by g_p | Hacker News Reader

One of the biggest issues with Google play store review is they won't actually tell developers which rule they're breaking, as you point out.

This is so incredibly developer-hostile that the fact developers keep using the play store pretty much helps make the case they're acting in an anticompetitive manner.

It certainly is interesting to note Google removed the title "Non-competition" from clause 4.5 of their developer agreement some time ago. It's still in the archived version on archive.org though, from back when it was called the Android market... Removing the title but leaving the clause intact doesn't mask the anti-competitive behaviour!

View on HN

This is really shoddy behaviour. Is it just laziness on their part or is there a benefit to them to keep developers guessing?

There are definitely some benefits. If people are trying to sneak stuff past you if benefits you to not explain what you found or how you found it when you reject things. If someone submits an app containing shady things X, Y and Z and you just respond "no dice", now they have to either remove all of the shady things they were doing, or try to guess which one(s) were detected. They can proceed by trail and error, but in the process they will reveal a lot of their secrets because Google can compare the diffs of the submitted apps to learn about other shady things that the developers think might have triggered the rejection.

this seems like the non-cynical answer. thanks. don't know why i'm being downvoted for a reasonable question, but there you go.

It helps them to enforce rules arbitrarily depending of their current strategy and how important of a developer you are.

Just a WAG but I think it allows them to maintain total control over the playing field. They get to choose which apps best suit their interests in their market and apply the rules inconsistently to apps that somehow don't align with their interests.

I absolutely agree that from a developer point of view, this is awful, but just to play devil's advocate here, the reasoning generally given for these is that bad actors tend to tweak their apps to bypass rules a lot faster and efficiently if you always tell them exactly what to fix to get unbanned. I agree developers shouldn't be treated like this, but it still is true that malicious apps are a real problem and bad actors continually try to break things and minmax ways to get around the rules.

As users and developer, that's a side that we don't really get to see, so it's hard to judge how justified these techniques are. What alternative solution do you propose that would help developers without at the same time making bad actors lives easier.

This is basically the "security through obscurity" argument that has been so heavily criticised and largely shown to be false. If they (and apple etc.) Open sourced their approval algorithm and allowed pull requests people with an interest in having a high quality app store could try and poke holes in it and make it more robust. I know there are humans in the mix making judgements, but those judgements are largely of the "does the app meet this tick box criteria" type.

So due to few bad actors everyone should suffer ? One would hope collective punishment is a thing of the past...

Its crappy but I don't see how a crappy review process is anti-competitive or how improving this aspect would make the situation less monopolistic.

The argument is that the review process gets away with being crappy due to the monopoly position, not that it is leading to the monopoly. It’s a symptom, not a cause.

Also it’s possible that specific clauses in the guidelines are anti-competitive. Fir example a guideline that simply disallows any app that competes with one of Google’s Apps might be seen this way.

So those are coherent arguments I think, I just don’t agree with them. The Play Store is a google product, with features developed and maintained by a Google. Other stores exist that compete with it, with features developed by other companies. The reason customers went with Google Play is simply because it had momentum and scale, and customers don’t want multiple stores. They want one store with one set of rules where all the Apps are, that will be on their next phone. Customers benefit from a one stop shop.

If someone wanted to develop a better store, with libraries better than ‘play services’, what stops them? If you want to inter operate with and use the services of the Play Store, you need to make a deal with a google, and the terms of that deal are standardised by Google. There’s nothing obviously illegal or a abusive about any of that, as long as the contractual relationships are fairly administered under the law.

>The reason customers went with Google Play is simply because it had momentum and scale, and customers don’t want multiple stores.

The reason customers went with the default is mostly because it's the default. Given the choice, we'd see a lot more competition.

>If someone wanted to develop a better store, with libraries better than ‘play services’, what stops them?

The anti-competitive google behavior where they forbid you to sell any android phone with Google Play if you sell any android phone without it? IIRC there was a lawsuit/fine in EU a few years back regarding this.

Yes Google was found in violation of Antitrust regulations and corrected that behaviour. I'm not here to sing Google's praises, but that issue has been resolved.

Google only gets to decide what the default store is on Google's own phones. Samsung's phones come by default with their own store for example.

Customers only want choice if it gives them value and benefits. Choice without value is confusion and drudgery. A one stop shop that has everything at reasonable prices and vets out the rubbish is, by itself, a good thing for customers. Of course there is scope for abuse, the EU ruling is an example of that, but to me I don't see anything wrong with the basic approach. These are their products, I don't see that anyone else has much of a right to dictate how they design them.

That's not what they said. They said that the fact people keep using the play store despite all of the shitty practices by Google (e.g. the review process) should be proof enough that Google engaged in anticompetitive behavior, otherwise people would go to a competitor.

Which is debatable but not as absurd as you make it out to be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com