Developer fury as Google makes Android apps vanish | Hacker News Reader

Developer fury as Google makes Android apps vanish

theregister.co.uk

21 pointsdodo539 comments

The anger on the Android forums is partly financial – one developer said downloads had been cut 80 per cent since the change – and partly irritation at Google's arrogance: the company hasn't bothered to respond.

It's this exactly that makes me wary of depending on Google for anything other than GMail. If you have any kind of problem with them you're thrown into this Kafka-esque maze of automated support that often can't do anything for you and leaves you no way to escalate an issue.

I'm with you there.

However, building a mostly automated support system for array of diverse services is something we (the present-day civilization) have little experience with. This painful experiment /may/ end up accumulating enough experience to make cheap, mostly-automatic support possible in a few years. As opposed to current practice of throwing countless callcenter `drones' (people forced to adhere to ready-made scripts) onto the problem.

Should the experience gathered become public knowledge, the need for tech-support personnel would be drastically lowered. In practice significantly lowering barriers for start-ups to serving large userbases.

I think there will always need to be some kind of escape hatch at the top that connects you to a real person. The complete lack of such with Google's services is vexing.

While I understand the anger here and do think Google have done a lot wrong, a lot of people complaining are making the assumption that apps that have been downloaded a lot should rank more highly. Does that necessarily hold?

To me it seems a little self-reinforcing - whoever is at the top is more likely to be downloaded, which keeps them at the top.

Certainly on the Android market, whoever was at the top of search results before was no good indication of quality either, so the search has gone from useless to useless. From a user-perspective we haven't lost much! And of course, if you make ANY change to rankings, the people that go down will of course be upset.

I thought the largest issue was searching for an App by it's name and not getting it at the top of the search results for that term. It makes it very hard to just find and download an App if you already know what you want.

I think this is the difference between Google and Apple.

Google optimizes search algorithms constantly, apparently not thinking of the real-world repercussions of rank changes.

Apple has over a decade of experience with iTunes. Rankings on iTunes are equivalent to or even supplant the Billboard Top #100. When they moved into apps, they brought their ranking system over as well. Apple has only very carefully made adjustments to app rankings. Especially keyword based rankings. The secret of making money in the App Store is in dominating the ranking for a common keyword search. Pretty icons go a long way towards that. And a well-designed app even more (number of ratings, average rating). The Power Law distribution applies.

I have no idea why Google is tweaking or breaking their core ranking algorithms. In the Apple App Store, a high ranking is something you earn through marketing and having a product that Apple wants to have in its store.

Seems like Google is notoriously non-responsive to user complaints. Perhaps it would make sense to turn some of the billions to that, as well.

Edit: this is a serious suggestion. I'm a Google fan, for sure, but I think the notoriety exists.

Does anyone have a short list of apps affected? I somehow doubt that Google shoveled any truly good and useful apps down the 50th page.

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