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Comment by obrajesse | Hacker News Reader

Original author of K-9 here (but not an active dev).

Also the person who added that text to the description...probably about 5 years ago.

My only real complaint is that Google pulled the app with zero notice. It feels abusive to pull apps from the Play store for a non-malicious violation of the terms (that may well predate those terms) like this.

Even a 48 hour notice of "we will remove your app if you don't change the description" would have been pretty reasonable.

The solution is straightforward and the team is already on top of a resubmission with an updated description. This is absolutely not a hill I want to die on.

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I've had my app removed with zero notice, and it was due to an Oxford comma in the short description. No notice or warning of any kind. It was also a description untouched for several years.

It's difficult to describe the stress of having to deal with what is presumably an indiscriminate algorithm, potential heuristic, or some new quota.

Ok. This is a story I've gotta hear. What was the sentence in question?

"Eats, shoots, and leaves"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_%26_Leaves#Title

Does the policy disallow Oxford commas?

As far as I understand it, the policy disallows listings in the short description, and the algorithm wrongly categorized the sentence as a listing because of the Oxford comma.

Isn't an Oxford comma, by definition, part of a list of items?

I'd guess our machine overlords didn't like it

Incredible, so now a punctuation mistake warrents deletion.....

The Oxford Comma isn’t a “mistake.” It’s the preferred style for many people, and it’s both correct (assuming it’s used consistently in a doc) and common. It’s difficult for me to understand Google or any other entity to enforce an arbitrary set of grammar style policies on third parties except when the product is a journal, magazine, or something to that effect.

They don't want lists in the description. Things that look like this, and this, and this, plus this, this, and this, would trip the sensor.

It's dumb, but it is what it is.

Thanks for K-9. It’s the only decent phone mail app I’ve ever used. Good luck with all this.

After using it for a long time, when I upgraded my phone and since K-9 is not supported on Android 10, I found FairEmail which I'd say is even better than K-9.

Play Developer Support just DMed me on Twitter to tell me that they'd accepted the resubmitted app without the problematic description.

Too bad you had to take this to social media because support is deaf.

Yeah google play store search is absolutely trash now. If I have to find an app, I google it.

Wow, such irony.

Thanks for giving us K-9, I use it daily (hourly really) and absolutely love it!

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